“Milk is a good source of several nutrients that support growth – including protein, calcium, zinc, vitamin A, and vitamin D. There’s also some evidence that drinking milk may help increase your levels of IGF-1 – a hormone that helps determine how tall you’ll be,” says Kim Yawitz, R.D., a registered dietitian and gym owner in St. Louis. “In theory, drinking milk during adolescence could help you come closer to your genetic height potential.”

We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but drinking more milk won’t help you grow taller as an adult. We explain below.

Can drinking milk make you taller?

You already know that drinking milk can help you build strong bones and muscles.

That’s because cow’s milk—yes, not almond milk or oat milk or soy milk—is naturally high in calcium, a nutrient that promotes bone density, and protein, which contributes to muscle growth. (One cup of milk contains 293 milligrams of calcium and about 8 grams of protein, for reference.)

But can milk actually make you taller?

It’s a statement that you might have heard when you were young and has maybe stuck with your through you adult years. Heck, maybe you even tell your own kids the same thing: “Drink milk and you’ll grow up tall and strong.”

Your parents didn’t just make this up out of nowhere. Scientists have actually studied this hypothesis. And dietitians do hear similar questions from their clients.

But just how strong is the link between drinking milk and height? We turned to Kelly Jones M.S., R.D., C.S.S.D. for her wisdom.

“There are actually several published studies showing that, in children, drinking milk is associated with very small increases in height,” says Jones.

It is important to recognise, however, that these studies are showing a correlation and not a cause and effect relationship. And that just because a few research reports have found a positive association doesn’t mean that there’s proof milk can make you taller.

And, honestly, the research is mixed.

One 2018 study followed a group of participants from birth, through 17 years, and discovered that height increased by 0.39 centimetres per self-reported additional 8 ounces of milk consumed daily. Jones: “However, the authors also noted that the population was mostly of moderate income and reasonably well educated, which can mean results would not be similar in populations with worse access to food or knowledge of appropriate eating patterns.”

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The post Can milk make you taller? Here’s what the science says appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

I got out of bed and, on autopilot, went through my normal morning routine. I left my flat and went to a local cafe run by a Brazilian woman named Tatiana, where my order is always the same: a large toasted bread roll, filled with chicken and mayonnaise. As I sat there reading the newspapers, the food was placed in front of me, and I looked at it. I felt like I was looking at a block of wood. I took a bite. It tasted fine. Normal.

I took three or four more bites, and I felt full. I left almost all of it on the plate. As I hurried out, Tatiana called after me, ‘Are you sick?’

I went to my office and wrote for three hours. Normally, by noon, I would have a snack, something small and sugary, and then at about 1 p.m. I would go down the street to a local Turkish cafe for lunch. It got to 2 p.m. and I wasn’t hungry. Again, my sense of routine kicked in, and again, I went to the cafe and asked for my standard order, a large Mediterranean lamb with rice and bread. I managed to eat a third of it. It seemed to me for the first time to be incredibly salty, like I was drinking seawater.

I wrote some more, and at 7 p.m. I left my office to go and meet a friend in Camden Market, one of my favourite parts of London. We walked between the stalls, staring at food from every part of the world. Normally, I could stuff my face from three different stalls, but that night, I had no hunger. I couldn’t even manage a few mouthfuls. I went home, feeling exhausted, and went to sleep at the unprecedentedly early time of 9 p.m.

As that first week passed, it felt like the shutters had come down on my appetite, and now only tiny peeks of light could get through. I was about 80 per cent less hungry than I normally am. The sense of mild nausea kept stirring and passing.

When I got on the bus or in a car, I felt a kind of exaggerated travel sickness. Whenever I ate, I became full startlingly fast. The best way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine that you have just eaten a full Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, and then somebody popped up and offered you a whole new meal to get started on. 

Some people say Ozempic makes them find food disgusting. To me, it made food, beyond small quantities, feel unfeasible.

On the fifth night, a friend came by to watch a movie, and we flicked through Uber Eats. The app suggested all my usual haunts. I realised I couldn’t eat any of this food now. Instead, she got a kebab, and I had a bowl of vegetable soup. On the sixth day, I took my godsons out, and they wanted to go into McDonald’s. When they got Happy Meals and I got nothing at all, one of them said suspiciously: ‘Who are you and what have you done with Johann Hari?’

I wanted to understand what was happening to my body.

I figured that the best people to educate me were the scientists who made the key discoveries that led to the development of Ozempic and other new weight-loss drugs. So I began to track many of them down and interview them, along with many other key scientists working in the field. Almost all of them have received funding from the pharmaceutical companies that now profit from these drugs, and we should bear that in mind as we hear what they say. They taught me that these extraordinary effects were coming from manipulating a tiny hormone named GLP-1 that exists in my gut and my brain, and in yours.

Author of ‘Magic Pill’ Johann Hari.

Throughout my first six months on Ozempic, my friend Danielle was pregnant, and as her pregnancy developed, she would say it was like we were on opposite trajectories. While her belly swelled, mine was shrivelling. I lost a stone and a half.

On the BMI chart, I went from obese (marked in a bright red) to the middle of overweight (yellow), and as the months passed and I lost another stone, I got to the upper end of a healthy weight (depicted in a soothing green). My body fat percentage fell from 32 per cent to 22 per cent. It was the fastest and most dramatic weight loss of my life.

I felt lighter and quicker on my feet, and that boosted my confidence enough that I started to strut a little. People began to notice. ‘Wow, you’re losing weight,’ acquaintances said when they saw me in the street. One of my godsons said: ‘Hey, Johann, I didn’t know you had a neck!’ In the third month, my neighbour’s hot gardener hit on me and asked for my phone number.

I realised it was exactly what I had wanted, and I was thrilled (especially about the gardener). I had told myself going in that I was concerned primarily about my health – but I now saw that a desire to look better had been a big driver for me all along. I felt genuinely grateful as I interviewed the scientists who’d developed this drug. While they told me about their discoveries, I could literally feel the effects playing out by placing my hand on my stomach. 

When I was talking with one of the scientists who’d worked on GLP-1 in a cafe in London and listening to her explain the drug’s potentially revolutionary effects, I watched people walking past us on the busy street. Most of them had not heard about Ozempic or other weight-loss drugs yet. Many of them were overweight or obese, and I thought: You don’t know what’s about to happen. You don’t know how this could be about to help you change

But I was surprised to notice that, at the same time, I also felt disconcerted and out of sorts a lot of the time. I wasn’t feeling an urge to recommend Ozempic to other people. In fact, I felt pensive, and tense. I didn’t understand it. I’d got what I wanted – a boost to my health, and a boost to my self esteem.

So why did I still feel so ambivalent about it? At first, I thought it was because of the side effects, which were surprisingly persistent. My nausea, which had been gentle at first, would suddenly surge at random moments and leave me feeling like I was on a boat in the middle of a storm. With Ozempic or Wegovy, everyone starts by taking a dose of 0.25mg a week, then after a month they go up to 0.5mg, and then a month later to a full 1mg. (Some people go to even higher doses after that.)

Every time I increased my dose, I felt significantly worse for at least a week. One evening I found myself dry-heaving next to a pot plant in Zurich airport while a Swiss woman, who clearly thought I was drunk, gave me dirty looks. This sickness was intermittent, and most of the time, I didn’t feel it at all, but when it came, it was horrible. It occurred alongside other strange effects. 

Sometimes I would lie awake at night and find myself uncontrollably burping. At its worst, I was belching up bile and thought I was going to throw up. I also became constipated.

The grimmest side effects for me lay elsewhere. For many people, when they take these drugs, their resting heart rate increases. I would sit reading a book, or lie in bed, and feel my heart racing. My mind often interpreted this as anxiety and would start racing to match my elevated heartbeat. I had to cut back on caffeine to counteract this effect, and even that didn’t totally solve the problem – invariably, whenever I increased my dose, I felt anxious for at least a week, and even after that, I felt like I could more easily become anxious than before.

In addition, in the first week after increasing my dose, around late afternoon or early evening, I would persistently feel lightheaded and a little dizzy. I discussed this with my doctor and he said that this often happens when your calorie consumption drops significantly – your body isn’t getting its usual fuel source, so it’s confused, and the tank seems to be empty. Even after I got used to it, this feeling never entirely went away.

For between 5 and 10 per cent of people who take these drugs, the side effects are so extreme that they conclude it’s not worth continuing. I spoke with a woman in Vermont named Sunny Naughton, who is four foot ten, and when she hit 190 pounds (13.6 stone), she realised her weight was spiralling out of control. So in 2018, she sought out – in desperation – Saxenda, an early GLP-1 agonist drug that had to be injected daily. In the first two months, she lost more than thirty pounds, but, she told me, ‘I was sick all the time. Stomach cramps. Vomiting.’ She found herself burping uncontrollably, with ‘weird flavours’, and ‘there’s a metallic taste in your mouth all the time’.

At work, she would end up rolling on the floor beneath her desk with stomach cramps so crippling that her colleague would have to drive her home. ‘It just felt like someone was digging in and twisting your insides really tightly,’ she said. 

It was so unlike anything she had experienced before that she felt ‘an alien had gone into my stomach and was doing something in my body … It felt like there was something living in my stomach that was tearing everything up and getting rid of whatever was in there, and then draining my body of energy.’ For eight months, Sunny made herself endure it because the weight loss was so dramatic.

But ‘it was the worst physical illness that I ever felt … From one to ten, it was fifty. It was just awful. And everyone around me was like, “Should you keep doing this?” 

One day, she accidentally injected herself with a double dose. ‘I was supposed to teach a class two days later, and I was so sick, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was sweating. I was nauseous. I got myself into the bathtub. I was almost incoherent. I called my mother and said,

“I might have to go to the ER.” This medicine made me so sick.”

Not long afterwards, she told herself ‘I need to live a natural life’ and threw away her remaining pens. She rapidly put most of the weight back on, as does almost everyone who comes off these drugs, but the alien also seemed to leave her body. Yet I didn’t feel that my ambivalence could be fully explained by the side effects I was experiencing. Something more was going on, though it took me time to figure out what it was. Every time I upped my dose, the side effects got worse, but then they mostly eased off – so I felt confident that if I powered through them, they would, over time, diminish to little or nothing. 

So why didn’t I feel as happy as I should? Why – in addition to moments of glee – did I feel moments of deep worry about what I was doing? Why was I looking a gift horse – effortless weight loss, the dream of humans down the ages – in the mouth? I began to see the answer when I decided to go right back to where this story, for me, began. I asked: Why did I get fat in the first place? And more importantly, why did we – as a culture – get so much fatter, in a very short period of time?

I learned that we can’t understand these drugs unless we first take a moment to understand the forces that made so many of us need them in the first place. It was only when I studied this question that some of the mysteries around these drugs began to be resolved.

This is an extract from Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury, out now: $34.99

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The post Writer Johann Hari’s wild Ozempic journey appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Despite being overweight, insulin-dependent, and struggling with sleep apnea, Nugent decided to take back control of his life. But this story is not just about Nugent’s remarkable weight-loss journey, it’s about empowering anyone who want to re-write their health narrative. It’s about squashing the stereotypes and misconceptions around weight loss and acknowledging that with a determined mindset and the proper support, anybody can achieve their health goals.

Nugent’s wake-up call

Nugent’s weight-loss journey was sparked in 2015 when he was sitting around a campsite with friends. As Nugent recalls, he spent much his two-week holiday glued to a camp chair, drinking, eating and sleeping. But a sly comment from family and friends, telling him that he wouldn’t be around the following year if he didn’t make a change, saw Nugent begin to think about his long-term health for the first time. The blunt realisation of just how unhealthy he had become hit Nugent hard. And the alarming facts were already right in front of him—snoring, sleep apnea, and insulin dependency due to type 2 diabetes.

“What made these comments so frightening was that these were camping friends, people I had known for a long time, even the kids agreed who were at the age of 12 or 13,” Nugent tells Men’s Health. “They said you’re not gonna be here next year, you’re not gonna make it.” 

Nugent’s job as a truckie is already a race against the clock, leaving him little choice but to rely on fast food dinners and service station snacks. His health had to take a back seat to his ticking work schedule. 

After experimenting with various diets, Nugent was inspired by a fellow work colleague who returned to work after Christmas with a slim new look. He was trying the 1:1 Diet by Cambridge Weight Plan—a diet low in calories that features meal replacement bars, smoothies, shakes, and soups as your new go-to diet items. 

The journey begins

In February 2016, the single father of four decided to start his weight loss journey. Tipping the scales at 168 kg, Nugent’s journey was guided by his diet consultant, Tamara, who committed him to the same 1:1 Diet plan that had helped his work colleague drop the weight.

“I did everything right, says Nugent. “I drank two litres of water a day, I ate salads, I stayed away from alcohol and ate lean meat and fresh veggies. I also chose to eat smaller meals.” 

Immediately, Nugent’s diet shake-up saw him strip away 8.9 kg within the first month. 

With his energy levels rising thanks to correct food choices and dieting, Nugent decided to throw regular exercising into the weight loss mix. 

“Stepping it up with that little bit of exercise was the game changer,” he says. “I was obsessed because I was seeing the results. You don’t have to exercise if you’re too busy, but I chose to start exercising to go further in my progress. At the end of the day, it’s a mental thing. You have to be 110 per cent focused on it, and if you want it bad enough, which I did, you will see results. I had to want to do it.”

Smashing his weight-loss goals

Paul’s dieting kicked off a slew of weight-loss achievements. At the end of 21 weeks, Nugent had lost 40 kg. After 8.5 months, he’d lost a total of 59.6 kg. After 12 months, Nugent’s new lease on healthy living had seen him lose a mammoth 70 kilos, tipping the scales at his double-digit goal of 98 kg. 

Nugent credits his success to his family, friends, and consultant, Tamara, who became his mentor, counsellor and, more importantly, his friend throughout the journey. 

Nugent believes anyone can achieve their weight-loss goals with the right mindset and support, advising people to take control of their lives and focus on how badly they want to change. 

Nugent’s advice to men wanting to lose weight

The average Australian bloke’s ‘She’ll be right’ attitude to their health needs to change, Nugent says. 

“I’ve told blokes about this program and they tell me they love food and alcohol too much,” he says. “But it’s not about that. It’s about how much you love your kids, your grandkids, your wife, how much you love your life.”

Today, Nugent not only looks impressive, but he feels fantastic. Equipped with a drive to live, his story is one that resonates across the country. It’s easy to get discouraged when trying to lose weight, but Nugent’s journey reminds us that success is always possible.

“It’s an amazing feeling, and I still feel great eight years later, still mentally focused on it and conscientious about it. I don’t want to go back to it again.”

The phrase “life is too short” is a cliché. Nevertheless, in this case, Nugent’s awe-inspiring weight-loss journey emphasises the significance of this oft-repeated phrase. Indeed, it’s now impossible to ignore.

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The post The life saving transformation of truckie Paul Nugent appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.