March 30, 2012 New York Times article about the emerging problem of "precocious puberty" among girls--and I don't mean 10, but 6. Of course, the environmentalists want to imagine that this is because of BPA (a component of plastics which can mimick estrogen) and other pollutants, but as the article points out, some of what we may be seeing is related to higher levels of body fat, starting the puberty clock early.
I remember back in the 1970s reading an article in Scientific American that mentioned that Los Angeles city schools had records of menarche (first period) for students back to the 1920s, and there had been a three year decline in the average over a fifty year period--from 16 to 13. I wonder how much of that change was improved nutrition, and how much was the changing demographics of Los Angeles schools. As the article points out, blacks start earlier than whites, and while not enough to explain the entire difference in that half century, that might explain some of it.
What makes this worrisome is that children who are physically maturing far sooner than they are emotionally and psychologically maturing--and a society which increasingly has a hard time with the concept of "too young."
I read somewhere that significant amounts of estrogen are entering the water supply via the urine of women who are on the pill.
ReplyDeleteThis affects all species - even male fish are found to have smaller boy parts due to the influence of the hormone in the environment.
technically, what is entering the water supply is not estrogen, it is estriadol which is altered chemically to make it very difficult for the body to break down which is what makes it at least 10 times more effective than estrogen (which would not even survive the stomach acids intact.), as a result it is excreted intact, but that also makes it difficult for it to break down in the environment as well. anything that can survive the stomach AND the liver, can last in the environment for a very long time.
ReplyDeleteFat cells also produce estrogen as well. so it is likely that there are multiple causes at work here.
I've heard stories (from a guy who did ministry to street-children in Rio de Janeiro) of girls who were fully developed at 12.
ReplyDeleteThese were children who had never known a building they could call home, and had likely been discarded by mom because they had mastered the art of begging/borrowing/stealing enough food to live on the streets.
(As an aside, how did such children keep track of their age? I don't know...)
If stress/drugs/family-trouble has some linkage to such trends, it would show up strongly among such street children.
What other factors are common between Rio street children and the children in this study?