March-May is the golden season of growth and height every year, and it is also the peak period of sales of promotional products. The well-known maternal and child public number "One-hour dad" recently issued a document "Can lysine be added to grow taller? Improve your intelligence? ",questioning the efficacy of lysine children’s nutritional supplements such as" promoting growth and development "and" helping children grow taller "is exaggerated.
Beijing Morning Post reporter learned through an interview that lysine is an essential amino acid for human body, and its lack will indeed affect growth and development. However, its main source is protein-rich foods such as meat and beans. In cities with generally high living standards, you can get enough lysine through three meals a day in your daily diet without additional supplements. Excessive lysine intake will not achieve the purpose of "promoting height".
"Omnipotent" Lysine-like Growth Factor
The Beijing Morning Post reporter searched for "lysine auxin" on the e-commerce platform, and the most common one was a brand of Australian lysine auxin. As mentioned on the product introduction page, lysine has many promoting effects on growth and development, including regulating metabolic balance, stimulating pepsin and gastric acid secretion, and ensuring appetite; Increase the absorption of calcium; Stimulate pituitary gland to increase growth hormone secretion; Prevent the bones from closing in advance; Adolescent supplement can stimulate growth hormone and so on. Some merchants also mentioned in their propaganda that lysine has the functions of enhancing intelligence, improving memory, improving immunity and reducing triglyceride level, which makes it a versatile player in the field of nutritional supplements.
The descriptions of these lysine products all contain that "lysine is one of the essential basic amino acids for the human body, which cannot be synthesized by the human body itself and can only be ingested through diet. However, according to Chinese’s eating habits, the usual intake of protein mainly comes from cereals, and the lysine in cereals is less, so the ordinary diet cannot supplement enough lysine ",which implies that lysine must be supplemented by exogenous sources to meet the growth and development needs of children.
"One-hour dad" questioned in the article: "Humans can’t synthesize lysine by themselves. What does this have to do with supplementing or not? People can’t synthesize oxygen, so do you have to buy a few bottles of oxygen to suck at once? "
"The grain is short of lysine, so people need to buy supplements" is also called "divine logic" by the author of "One-hour Dad". "The premise of this divine logic is that people only eat grains", without taking lysine contained in fish, meat, eggs, milk and beans into account.
The propaganda of "promoting height" by supplementing lysine is suspected of exaggeration.
Fish, eggs, milk beans and other daily foods can meet the demand for lysine.
Ruan Guangfeng, director of the Science and Technology Department of Kexin Food and Nutrition Information Exchange Center, told the Beijing Morning Post reporter that lysine is an essential amino acid for the human body, and the human body cannot synthesize it by itself, and it can only be obtained through food. As an essential amino acid, lysine plays an important role in human health. If it is lacking, symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, nausea, dizziness and loss of appetite may occur. If the deficiency is serious, it may lead to growth retardation, emaciation, poor appetite, anemia, mental development, slow response and other problems.
"From a nutritional point of view, lysine has an effect on growth and development. However, there is not enough evidence that lysine can promote growth and height. " Ruan Guangfeng pointed out that the role of lysine can only be said to ensure the normal speed of growth and development, and it is exaggerated to say that it promotes growth and height.
As for the source of this nutrient, Ruan Guangfeng said that lysine is not difficult to obtain from daily diet. Many foods contain it, especially meat and beans. "In fact, an egg or a glass of milk or half a bean or half a meat a day can meet the needs of children for lysine, which is actually very easy to achieve, so there is basically no need to worry too much about the lack of lysine."
There is a general lack of lysine in cereals. If the diet is mostly cereals, it will be easy to lack lysine if there is a lack of animal food. This kind of people are more common in vegans or poor areas.
Ruan Guangfeng said that in order to explain that lysine supplementation is effective for children’s height growth, some growth factors selected an experimental result of Nanjing Maternal and Child Health Hospital in 1980. "But that was nearly 40 years ago, when China’s economic level was backward, many families didn’t have enough to eat, let alone meat, eggs and milk." This experiment has no reference in today’s marked improvement of living standards.
In the interview, Ruan Guangfeng also stressed that, in fact, lysine is not an auxin, but a raw material of hormones (including enzymes), which can participate in the synthesis of many hormones, and growth hormone is only one of the hormones in which lysine participates in the synthesis. In fact, equating lysine with auxin means that merchants use information asymmetry to select and properly process information that is conducive to publicity.
70% genes of height determine disease, weakness and uneven nutrition, which affect acquired height.
Nutrition is only a part of the factors that make children grow to 1.8 meters or 1.6 meters in the future. Chen Ke, a senior child care physician at Beijing New Century Children’s Hospital, said that 70% of height depends on congenital genes, and the other 30% is influenced by acquired factors. Parents with normal height, if their children are short, must first rule out the cause of the disease. These common diseases include growth hormone deficiency, thyroxine deficiency and other chronic diseases. Only by removing the cause of the disease can the later height intervention be carried out.
Chen Ke introduced that for normal children, growing taller is a continuous but uneven process. People have been growing from birth to adulthood, but there will be several growth peaks. The first peak is at the age of 0-1. During this period, babies can grow 25 cm on average, and some even grow 30 cm. This growth rate will not reappear at any age in the future. After that, the height growth began to decrease, usually 10-12 cm at the age of 1-2, 8-10 cm at the age of 2-3, and 5-7 cm annually after the age of 4, which lasted until adolescence. After entering adolescence, it will enter the second growth peak, and the average annual height can be increased by 8-10 cm.
The height gap often appears at the age of 0-1. "In which year the work was not done well, falling 2-3 cm was a loss to the children. If it is lacking more in the critical year of growth, it will be more difficult to make up for it. "
Chen Ke emphasized that there are many factors that "hold back" children’s growth. For example, some children are born with weak constitution and go to the hospital repeatedly. Some children will get sick four or five times a winter. Influenza, pneumonia and rotavirus attack in turn, and the intestinal function is destroyed, which will definitely affect the absorption and utilization rate of food. In addition, the internal friction caused by illness is too heavy, and the growth of height and weight of such children will be affected.
Followed by nutritional intake. Chen Ke said that lysine is an essential amino acid for human growth and development, and its sources are mainly animal food and beans, with less content in cereal. Whether extra lysine is needed depends on the overall diet of the child. Parents often plan their children’s diet according to their eating habits, and some children raised by the elderly are prone to insufficient meat intake. In order to prevent "three highs" or control weight, the elderly will deliberately increase the proportion of coarse grains, vegetables and fruits in food and reduce the intake of meat. If children eat according to the old people’s recipes, there will be no extra calories and protein to meet the needs of height and weight growth. For such children, we can consider supplementing some extra nutrients, but it is not a long-term solution to "supplement" alone. It is still necessary to fundamentally improve the diet structure and mode, which is the most critical.
For some vegetarian products that promote children’s height to grow particularly fast in the short term after taking them, Chen Ke told parents to be alert to whether they contain some special ingredients (such as pharmaceutical ingredients other than general nutrients) so as not to interfere with children’s normal bone age. Too fast growth of height in a short period of time may be accompanied by premature maturity of bone age. When the growth rate of bone age is greater than that of height, it will lead to early bone closure and shortened growth period, which will lead to the decrease of adult height.
Five elements of height:
Effective sun exposure, exercise, sleep,
Anti-obesity and happiness
Chen Ke said that if you want to help your child grow taller, it is not advisable to blindly add nutrition to your child or take health care products. Although insufficient nutrition will affect children’s height, excessive nutrition intake will lead to obesity. Many studies at home and abroad have found that obese children’s bone age growth will be relatively early compared with normal children, which will affect their final height.
Encouraging children to participate in outdoor sports can not only prevent obesity, but also increase sunlight stimulation and promote the synthesis of growth hormone in the body. Try to increase the area of skin exposed to the sun, increase the effective sun exposure, and exercise for 1-2 hours is appropriate. Exercise is the best choice with long-term persistence, simple operation and less site requirements, such as running, skipping, kicking and some stretching exercises. It is best to exercise every day for 30-40 minutes at a time, so that children can feel slightly tired.
Helping children develop regular routines and sleep habits and improving sleep quality can also have a positive effect on height growth. Chen Ke said that the secretion of growth hormone has a circadian rhythm. Generally, there will be a small peak from 12 midnight to 1 am, and this peak will only appear when the child is asleep. It is recommended to go to bed before 10 o’clock every night. There is no need to overemphasize the length of sleep, because each child’s sleep needs are different, and the quality of sleep is more critical, as long as the child feels comfortable and has a good mental state after waking up.
Children’s mood is also a factor that affects their growth, but it often doesn’t get the attention parents deserve. Chen Ke said that children’s happiness comes from their parents’ care. Children who have a good attachment to their parents are usually more sunny and happier. Children who are happy all day have a better immune system and a more stable hormone level. For adolescent children, schoolwork and interpersonal pressure are the inducement of negative emotions. Children’s time and energy are occupied by various cram schools and tutoring classes, so they don’t have much time to do what they like and exercise, and their mood is often depressed. These hidden pressures will also affect their growth. (Reporter Kong Yaoyao)