Driving home from work yesterday, we were mesmerized by a story we heard on NPR's All Things Considered. Given our preoccupation with what's in, on, and around our food, we were sucked in at the beginning when we heard that a new study shows that young girls are maturing at a faster rate than ever—and what's in the industrial food supply could have something to do with it.
The study, released by a journal called Pediatrics, links the early rate at which young
girls are reaching puberty to several factors, including early obesity and environmental factors.
Here's what especially struck us from the story, which comes from NPR's transcript:WILSON: Scientists don't know what triggers the early onset of puberty. Chemicals in the environment, the increasingly inactive life of children, and the growing epidemic of obesity among U.S. children are considered culprits. Study author Dr. Frank Biro says a change in lifestyle wouldn't hurt.
Dr. BIRO: I think that we could all stand living a little greener. That would probably be a healthier approach to life. So I think that we could try to eat more of the fruits and vegetables, eating together as a family.
That's right: we could all stand living a little greener. We were floored by the implications of the study, of course, but even more so by the seemingly simple answer to putting our children back on a more natural path: eat more fruits and vegetables, organic if possible, and be sure to steer clear of dairy and meats treated with hormones. And get outside and exercise.
It doesn't take a magic pill or an expensive shot; instead, it takes a shift in lifestyle—one that involves living a little greener.
The report gave us pause and certainly made us ever more aware of the importance of scrutinizing everything we put into our bodies. We're pretty fastidious about this, but wonder how others deal with high-fructose corn syrup, corn-fed beef, and poultry that's been treated with antibodies. We encourage friends to watch their intake of chemicals, too, and have seen a few friends change their habits to incorporate organics.
What about you? Do news reports like these encourage you to examine your lifestyle and make changes? And do you encourage people around you to do the same?
Read plenty more at NPR on their site and the Shots health blog.
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• Green Guide's Beef Label Decoder
• Raw Milk: What's the Hold Up?
• Agave Nectar: Helpful or Harmful?
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I started puberty quite early--around age 9--and I've long suspected that my animal product, processed food-rich diet had a lot to do with that. Since adopting a vegetarian, and now vegan, lifestyle, I've lost quite a bit of weight since then and have much easier "monthly transitions".
I have also noticed a difference, with a vegetarian and now vegan diet. I grew up on processed foods and it was not until I went vegetarian that my "monthly transitions" (as ladyofrohan7 mentioned) became bearable.
I would also add that taking hormones in the form of birth control also had adverse affects on me. Only once I stopped taking the pill and switched to a non-hormonal birth control have I felt really good. Getting the non-hormonal birth control took a bit of fighting but I am glad I stood my ground.
To be fair, scientists cannot point the finger at any one particular reason why girls are entering puberty faster. However, I suspect that hormones in food have little to do with it. My reason for thinking this is that girls in European countries where hormones are banned from farm animals are experiencing the same symptoms (i.e. early puberty). The one commonality between those girls and the ones in the US: higher percentages of body fat.
It turns out that puberty is highly dependent on body composition and won't set in until the girl has enough stored body fat to be able to support a pregnancy. This is the main reason why gymnasts usually don't have their first period until much later in their lives (sometimes into their 20's). Since they have a very low body fat percentage, their bodies can't support a pregnancy.
Here is a good reference from the National Institutes of Health (though they only speak of the US): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18245513
I adopted a lifestyle free of industrial processed foods in order to treat my endometriosis 10 years ago. I grew up on convenience food, and found that synthetic hormones made it worse. Diet and exercise have certainly helped me. I adhere to a plant-based omnivorous diet. I know the folks who tend and raise just about everything I eat in the summer months, and plan on continuing this lifestyle with my future kids.
I have friends who are parent's scoff when I say that my kids aren't going to be allowed to bring ingest highly processed food. They say, "you'll see..." We know that at least two generations of women in my family have dealt with this, so the stakes are too high to "see."
I, like the posters above me, have been a vegetarian, for 13 years. I'm so glad I stopped eating meat when I did, because I feel like I've avoided a lot of long term problems. However, I didn't start feeling "well" until adopting an organic lifestyle. It makes a huge difference in how one feels and your future health.
I had a friend who lived in South Korea and he said the kids from N. Korea were huge and way bigger than the native children from S. Korea. The difference was that South Korea gets a lot of their meats imported from the US! Interesting huh!
The added hormones do have something to do with it, just as the antibiotics given to animals has now made the same medicines ineffective when it comes to fighting off bacteria in humans. I developed early and my mom learned about hormones added to chickens to produce larger breast meat. Before farmers added hormones and antibiotics to foods, you didn't hear about girls reaching puberty before their teen years! We gave up meats back in the late 80's and I haven't looked back with regret.
I didn't have a "high percentage of body fat" as a child when I started "developing early." My boyfriend's niece is quite slender and athletic, and she's already started at 9. So no, Dembell, I don't buy that crock!
Pardon my rant. We need to make changes in our diets and these symptoms are signs for us to wake up. Our FDA needs a complete overhaul and we need to support small farmers who provide healthy and clean food that nurtures our bodies and our loved ones.
I wonder if it's all the drugs in the water supply. My husband just told me they're finding breast development in Chinese girl *babies*. This topic freaks me out no end.
Thank you for posting this! Hormones are one of my special interests, and I'm glad you're helping to spread much-needed awareness of how our food greatly impacts this.
Here's an article from the Harvard School of Public Health about hormones in milk, and how they're wrecking havoc on our endocrine systems: link
I'd be interested in seeing the evidence that European girls are experiencing the same early-onset puberty, and that they have comparable body weights.
From where I sit (in Europe), I fail to see the same rates and degrees of childhood obesity here as in the U.S., although there do appear to be a large number of overweight teenage girls (and participation in organized sports by girls seems to be very low).
Personally, I suspect that the problem is probably food-related -- not just because of the use of hormones in food production, but because the composition of our food has changed, and the changes promote excess weight, which in turn, lead to higher rates of early puberty.
For example, decades of government policy supporting corn and soy crops has lead to our diets being larded with corn and soy products at every urn. Corn and soy are high in omega-6, and animals fed a high omega 6 diet gain weight rapidly. The meat they produce is also high in omega 6 fats, which has a similar effect on their human consumers (in case you are wondering, prior to the popularization of cotton, animals were fed flax as a biproduct of the linen industry, along with native grasses, both high in omega-3 fats, which is how land-locked populations managed to have diets with adequate omega-3 levels).
Soy has been touted as a healthy food, based on casual assumptions about Asian diets, but research increasingly shows it to be toxic when unfermented, and a phyto-estrogen (and hence to be consumed with care). Don't forget -- animals are being stuffed with corn and soy too (the challenge is to find a use for all those government-supported crops!), leading to extensive use of antibiotics (corn and soy are not a cow's natural food, and it does a real number on their digestive tract and overall health), as well as meat with higher estrogen levels even without the use of bovine growth hormone (the hormone used to stimulate milk production in cows).
And while bovine growth hormone is banned in Canada (thanks to 3 courageous federal civil servants who paid a high price for going against Monsanto and the government executive -- it is a fascinating tale), U.S. meat and dairy products are not, so thanks to that enormous loophole and extensive free trade, Canadians are consuming it anyway...
All in all, we are now beginning to pay the price for the agricultural practices pioneered by business school grads; our embrace of cheap food will extract a heavy toll from our society.