A new study available from the journal Pediatrics (subscription required) shows that girls are entering puberty at steadily younger ages. WebMD explains:
The researchers assessed the onset of puberty by a standard measurement of breast development.
They compared the findings to a 1997 study of age of puberty. They found the following in a study involving girls between the ages of 6 and 8:
- 10.4% of white girls in the current study had breast development, compared to 5% in the 1997 study.
- 23.4% of African-American girls had breast development, compared to 15.4% in the 1997 study.
The early onset of puberty is found to be correlated with both race and body-mass index (BMI). But what’s causing girls to enter puberty sooner?
The researchers also collected urine and blood specimens from the girls to look at levels of compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, Biro says, to see what role these environmental exposures might play in early puberty.
”It appears that some of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals are interacting with body composition and this may be the reason some girls are going into puberty earlier and others later,” Biro tells WebMD. “That would have to be speculation,” he says of the interaction idea. “But we do know BMI is doing it.”
…Endocrine-disrupting compounds or EDCs are found in a host of consumer products, ranging from personal care products such as antibacterial soaps to furniture and anti-stain fabrics.
Yes, the same chemicals that saturate our environments are causing developmental changes in humans. Or perhaps it’s caused a combination of these chemicals and their interaction with a few extra pounds (reflected in the BMI). These are the types of unpredictable and unprecedented changes that the proliferation of untested, unregulated chemicals (and chemicals disguised as foodstuffs) throughout our lives can cause. These are the sorts of dangers that the President’s Cancer Panel warned of earlier this year.  As a reminder, here are the recommendations of the President’s Cancer Panel:
- Protecting children by choosing foods, house and garden products, toys, medicines and medical tests that will minimize exposure to toxic substances.
- Filtering tap water, and storing water in stainless steel, glass or other containers to avoid exposure to BPA and other plastic components that some studies have linked to health problems.
- Buying produce grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, or washing it thoroughly to remove them.
- Buying meat free of antibiotics and added hormones, and avoiding processed, charred and well-done meat.
And the recommendations from this new study?
Until more is known about what drives earlier puberty in girls, Biro suggests families try ”living greener, trying to minimize exposure to chemicals in the environment, and part of that might be using safer personal care products.”
Are you seeing the common pattern? If not, here are a couple of other items to consider:
- Better and prettier living through chemicals? Chemicals which have been banned in Europe, yet are still widely used in the U.S.
- Cancer cells “slurp up” fructose, preferring it to glucose. Dr. Anthony Heaney concluded that “efforts to reduce refined fructose intake … may disrupt cancer growth.”
- Similarly, high-fructose corn syrup has now been linked to scarring of the liver.
“Our findings suggest that we may need to go back to healthier diets that are more holistic,” Abdelmalek said. “High fructose corn syrup, which is predominately in soft-drinks and processed foods, may not be as benign as we previously thought.”
The consumption of fructose has increased exponentially since the early 1970s, and with this rise, an increase in obesity and complications of obesity have been observed, Abdelmalek said.
- Almost half of the samples of high-fructose corn syrup tested in a recent study were found to contain measurable levels of mercury, a known neurotoxin.
- Princeton University researchers have shown that high-fructose corn syrup promotes substantially more weight-gain than sugar.
But not all the news is bad. Researchers are also finding benefits that accrue when following a more traditional type of diet like the one recommended by the researchers above:
- Milk from grass-fed cows is more healthy, even when full-fat.
Grass-fed beef. Image via Wikipedia. - A new study from Penn State shows that eggs from free-range chickens provide higher levels of beneficial nutrients, including Omega-3 fatty acids.
I suppose I had better stop writing now, I’d hate to be accused of being “orthorexic“, or obsessed with healthy eating. Ursula Philpot, chair of the British Dietetic Association’s mental health group, explains:
“Other eating disorders focus on quantity of food but orthorexics can be overweight or look normal. They are solely concerned with the quality of the food they put in their bodies, refining and restricting their diets according to their personal understanding of which foods are truly ‘pure’.”
Then again, I guess maybe I should accept the label. Apparently, with the release of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, virtually everyone has some sort of mental disorder:
The journal’s [Journal of Mental Health] editor, Professor Til Wykes of King’s College London, fears that, “most of these changes {to the manual} imply a more inclusive system of diagnoses where the pool of normality shrinks to a mere puddle.”
If normal behaviour is increasingly being categorised as mental illness then that creates a burden on individuals, families and on society as a whole.
As well as an emotional and social toll, there are financial implications.
It follows that money has to be set aside to care for the mentally ill and clinicians and carers have to be trained to deal with their ‘illness’.
In the end, it’s all about the money.
Brynn: You are so right, that in the U.S. it is all about the money. I've been posting about modest ways of making one's life more free of chemicals, e.g., the make your own shampoo post. I know that doing any one of these things in isolation will not create a clean environment. If many of us get together and make our own clean shampoo, soap, dishwasher detergent, ban BPA, get rid of growth hormones in milk and otherwise get rid of dozens of unneeded chemicals, however, we could make a significant reduction in the potentially toxic chemical stew in which our daughters live.
I've read about (and also know about) some young girls who have started having periods WAY too young. It makes me concerned that their health is endangered. We are certainly in untested ground. This should be much more important that Tiger's affair and Toy Story III, but it just isn't getting traction in the mainstream media. And why would we expect otherwise? Why would we expect that a big newspaper would harpoon a company that advertises in the paper? And why would we expect Congress to take dramatic early steps, in light of your posts and the many other pithy posts to which you've linked?
Resaerch done in Oregon a few years ago that looked at an increase in the occurance of "gay" rams, which were sexually attracted to other rams instead of ewes, but did not bond with the rams in the same manner as with ewes.
The research project was heavily critised in the conservative media as an example of government waste in research funding, but is a very important concern in the sheep and wool industries, which rely on animal breeding to replenish the herds.
One outcome of the research indicated that high levels of estrogen and phyto estrogen from soy based livestock feeds that are used to promote wool production in the females has also been causing prenatal developmental changes in the sheep brains, causing the males to develop a female hypothalmus (I gather from the articles that there is an observable difference between male and female brain structures in sheep).
This is just the tip of an iceberg.
The age of maturity directly impacts the emotional and intellectual development as well.
Niklaus-
Excellent point, and you reminded me of several other items I forgot to include in the original post.
Absolutely– even if there weren't health repercussions involved with the early onset of puberty (there are), can we really expect a 7 or 8 year old girl to have the maturity to deal with puberty? Can we expect their friends and classmates to be sensitive to these changes?
Also, the type of developmental changes you discuss with the rams is not an isolated instance. Stories like this one have been popping up more frequently, discussing the mystery of feminization of various species (usually fish or amphibians).
The scientists here are unsure whether to blame this feminization on synthetic estrogens (perhaps leftover from the wastewater treatment process), the chemical BPA (which was ubiquitous in the plastic-making process until the dangers became too great to ignore), or perhaps natural or man-made steroids which had found their way into the river, perhaps due to the prevalence of feedlots in the area (and the tendency to give nearly all animals in feedlots antibiotics and steroids as a preventative measure, rather than therapeutically).
Far more frightening, scientists are beginning to warn that male humans are at risk also.
If you don't think it's a big deal that your daughter enters puberty early, will you think it's a big deal when your son begins to grow breasts?
How about if your infant begins to grow breasts?
Brynn: You beat me to the issue involving Chinese infants growing breasts.
Here's another health issue: The number of periods a woman has over her lifetime slightly increases her risk for breast cancer.
"Women who have had more menstrual cycles because they started menstruating at an early age (before age 12) and/or went through menopause at a later age (after age 55) have a slightly higher risk of breast cancer. This may be related to a higher lifetime exposure to the hormones estrogen and progesterone."
http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/BreastCancer/Detaile…
If a girl starts having periods in her early childhood, this apparently increases her risk of breast cancer.
Erich: First! 😛 🙂
I wonder if they control for exposure to other estrogens, like the synthetic estrogenic compounds mentioned in my comment above? It would seem to me that if "higher lifetime exposure to the hormones estrogen and progesterone" that cause the increased cancer risk, then it's not the early menstruation, per se, that causes it, but the estrogenic compounds.
Back in 2008, it was reported that most municipal water systems contained trace amounts of prescription drugs. The drugs as well as household chemicals get into the water when outdated medicines are disposed of by flushing them or even leach out from landfills. This implies the concentration increases as you move further downstream in a given watershed.
Water treatement facilities are not able to remove the drugs from the water, and neither are the waste water treatment facilities.
Brynn: My point was that if the synthetic compounds in the environment are triggering early puberty, then the average female would have more periods than otherwise (over her lifetime), increasing her risk of breast cancer later in life. In short, I'm suggesting that early puberty (caused by the chemical stew in which our daughters live) might already be a known risk for breast cancer.