Eggs and growing taller

In which I justify my breakfast.

Two things that are true:

1. Eggs are expensive. Well, relative to what they cost a year ago.

2. The taller you are, the easier life is. Except maybe when you're flying economy.

With those two caveats, let's check out a study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis that arrived at an intriguing result, and that could get a lot of parents thinking.

Also, short people.

Quick background: Study after after study shows that people who are taller make more money, are more attractive to others, and report higher levels of happiness than shorter people.

In fact, short height is also the only remaining physical attribute that it’s considered okay to mock in modern society.

Don't believe me? Here's some anecdotal evidence from a few years back:

As much as many people want to be taller, however, the more severe challenge is for children whose growth is stunted—especially in developing nations, where poor nutrition and hygiene cause an estimated 145 million children under age 5 to have underdeveloped height.

So, researchers began studying whether efficient nutritional strategies could help reduce the number of children suffering from stunted growth. They theorized that getting very young children to eat eggs might have an impact, and it turns out they were right.

Over a roughly 10 month period, researchers embarked on a campaign in Cotopaxi Province, Ecuador to get the mothers of 83 infants (aged just six to nine months) to supplement their diet with one egg per day.

The results: Children who were on the egg diet experienced “reduced prevalence of stunting by 47 percent,” compared to a similarly sized control group. The study, entitled, “Eggs in Complementary Feeding and Growth,” was first published in the journal Pediatrics.

“We were surprised by just how effective this intervention proved to be,” said Lora Iannotti, an associate professor at the university and lead author of the study.

So, what’s the impact for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the United States and other Western countries, where stunting is less common?

(About 90 percent of the world’s stunted children live in developing Third World countries.)

The biggest impact on any child’s ultimate health comes from his or her genetics, although nutrition is a secondary factor.

Other studies have found a direct correlation between the number of calories that people eat during childhood and their ultimate height, and also that exercise during youth can lead to greater height as an adult.

In this study, it wasn’t so much the fact that the food involved consisted of eggs that resulted in increased height; it makes sense that eating any low-calorie, high-protein food might have had a positive impact.

(Eggs were chosen for this study largely because they were “affordable and easily accessible,” as Iannotti put it, at least at the time.)

Still, studies like these provide a tantalizing glimpse. Given the difficulty in studying children’s eating habits over a longer period of time (and associating those habits with their ultimate height), this might be about as close as we’re going to get to being able to track exactly what kind of diet impacts height.

Even if nobody is suggesting that a change in diet like this could turn a boy who was otherwise destined to be five-foot-five-inches into an NBA player, or turn a five-foot-two-inch woman into a six-foot supermodel, even a small difference in height could have outsized effects down the road.

One study suggested that people earn almost an extra $800 per year on average for each additional vertical inch.

By the way, is today's entire column a reverse-engineered attempt to justify my habit of eating eggs for breakfast most days, even as the price continues to go up?

I'll never tell.

---

---

7 other things worth knowing today

• Let's start with this one: Meta asked an arbitrator to stop a former employee turned whistleblower at Facebook, Sarah Wynn-Williams, from selling or promoting a surprise tell-all memoir she wrote called Careless People. The book went on sale earlier this week, is now #81 on Amazon, and the New York Times has already reviewed it. What’s funny for me is that if Meta hadn’t tried to stop the book, I probably never would have heard of it. But here we are, and I'm reading it now. (Engaget, Amazon, NY Times)

• President Trump will invite Volodymyr Zelensky back to the White House after Ukraine agreed to a proposed ceasefire with Russia. Trump said he expects to speak to Russian leader Vladimir Putin later this week and he hopes Moscow will agree to the terms. (The Telegraph)

• Greenlanders voted to rebuff President Trump’s bid to control their icebound, mineral-rich island and to restore calm after a tumultuous few weeks dominated by the U.S. leader’s covetous comments. Voters on the island, population 57,000, gave first place to Demokraatit, a center-right pro-business party that has never held power but is strongly opposed to an American takeover of the self-governing territory. (The Wall Street Journal)

• The U.S. will require Canadians visiting for more than 30 days to register with authorities, the federal register showed Wednesday, toughening rules as trade tensions soar. It will likely impact the estimated 900,000 Canadians -- known colloquially as “snowbirds” -- who spend winters in warmer southern U.S. states such as Florida, Texas and Southern Carolina. (CTV News)

• A missing woman, Brieonna Cassell, 41, was found and rescued Tuesday after surviving six days in her crashed car in Indiana. A truck driver who finally spotted the wreck in a ditch off a rural county road hiked down with his supervisor, who happened to be the chief of the volunteer fire department in a neighboring town. "I said, 'Oh my God ... Your family's been looking for you… it's been all over social media ... I can't believe you've been here this long.'" (CBS News)

• A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment. Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents. NBC News is withholding the name of the mother and the rest of the family members, since they were deported to an area in Mexico that is known for kidnapping U.S. citizens. (NBC News)

• Inside Larry Page's secret bet to 3D-print the future of air travel. (Business Insider, backup)

---

Thanks for reading. Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!