What Causes Early Puberty in Girls?

Greetings, ATS!

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Anyway, to the topic of this thread. Discovery News is asking a rather important question: Why are girls entering puberty at younger and younger ages?

Teaching school, I can tell you that girls are starting menstruation in third grade....when I was young (i'm almost 38) the norm was sixth-eighth grade.

While most are stunned by the news that a 9-year-old girl who had been raped gave birth in Mexico, doctors have known for years that the average age of puberty is declining. A landmark 1997 study in the journal Pediatrics prompted a redefinition of early onset puberty, from 8 to 7 among Caucasian girls and 7 to 6 among African-American girls for early breast development.

So the obvious question....why is this happening?

If you read the article, you'll read an explanation of sorts....that protein levels are to blame. But what is causing the change in protein levels? The long and short of it is....the scientists aren't exactly sure. They list lots of factors and possible conditions that might contribute to early puberty.

However, the article ends with the following sentence:

Possible environmental factors include obesity, diet, and exposure to a variety of synthetic chemicals.

I have a feeling that last statement really says it all.....synthetic chemicals. Perhaps all those chemicals to encourage growth in cows is affecting our girls?

The hormones in meat and dairy.

Estrogenic foods like Soy milk.

Besides that they put soy in almost all processed foods.

A little fermented soy is fine. The boatloads of soy in processed foods and soy milk is not.

I also wonder if the tons of birth control pills flushed and contaminating the sater supply has an effect. That also would explain why mens sperm count is down the past generation.

www.aolnews.com...

Check out the part on soy.

No thread?

ETA, I've read certain plastics in bottles and food containers can cause this, also fluoride. But this is a conspiracey site........

Ahh see ya!
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Originally posted by Wifibrains
No thread?

ETA, I've read certain plastics in bottles and food containers can cause this, also fluoride. But this is a conspiracey site........

I hit the enter button too soon.

Premature postulation.

reply to post by smyleegrl


Some research indicates the abundance of food or calorie intake causes early puberty. Now, from what I can see back in the day food was harder to come by. You had to hunt and make gardens. Make provisions to be able to survive winter. If you didn't have much food and had a low caloric intake through out most of the year your body noticed and you would go into puberty at a later date as to be strong enough to be able to fend for yourself. But today, with all the fatty, processed foods we have, caloric intake is much, much higher than what it was let's say 500 years ago. So, a girls body reads this as an abundance of food which would be enough to take care of a child. So it goes into puberty. We have to remember we are animals after all. We just have more complex brains.

reply to post by smyleegrl


Aww! I hate it when that happens

Television.


That's right, television.

It's not just girls. I'm male and I hit puberty when I was nine lol. I'm pretty sure that isn't considered normal

reply to post by smyleegrl


I got a 8 yrs old with hairy armpits, it doesn't bother her, she quite proud of it lol, but if our cows and lamb, chicken, GMO vegetables are being given growth hormones and genetically modified to "grow quicker" and we are what we eat, then it makes sense I spose.

This is why the big fuss against Monsanto ect. But they won't listen, corperate greed rules this world.

reply to post by Wifibrains


There's also hormones in womens shampoos and beauty products. There's soooo much crap in what we buy today no wonder we have all those health issues we didn't have 50 years ago.

Here is a Cornell study on the subject:

Early puberty in girls has been found to be associated with a higher risk for breast cancer. Height, weight, diet, exercise, and family history have all been found to influence age of puberty (see BCERF Fact Sheet #08, Childhood Life Events and the Risk of Breast Cancer). Steroid hormones in food were suspected to cause early puberty in girls in some reports. However, exposure to higher than natural levels of steroid hormones through hormone-treated meat or poultry has never been documented. Large epidemiological studies have not been done to see whether or not early puberty in developing girls is associated with having eaten growth hormone-treated foods.

A concern about an increase in cases of girls reaching puberty or menarche early (at age eight or younger) in Puerto Rico, led to an investigation in the early 1980s by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Samples of meat and chicken from Puerto Rico were tested for steroid hormone residues. One laboratory found a chicken sample from a local market to have higher than normal level of estrogen. Also, residues of zeranol were reported in the blood of some of the girls who had reached puberty early. However, these results could not be verified by other laboratories. Following CDC's investigation, USDA tested 150 to 200 beef, poultry and milk samples from Puerto Rico in 1985, and found no residues of DES, zeranol or estrogen in these samples.

In another study in Italy, steroid hormone residues in beef and poultry in school meals were suspected as the cause of breast enlargement in very young girls and boys. However, the suspect beef and poultry samples were not available to test for the presence of hormones. Without proof that exposure to higher levels of steroid hormones occurred through food, it is not possible to conclude or not eating hormone-treated meat or poultry caused the breast enlargement in these cases.

Source

I also remember reading about a blind study that was done where one group of girls was given free range meat, and organic vegetables, while another was given hormone treated meat and non organic vegetables. If I remember right the one thing that was obvious at the end of the study was the noticeable difference in breast size between the two groups. I will see if I can find that study and post it.

ETA*

Here is an interesting article, but it doesn't really elaborate on cause just points out the increase.

Bra Sizes Up Three Sizes In Just Two Years, According To Study

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I also remember reading about a blind study that was done where one group of girls was given free range meat, and organic vegetables, while another was given hormone treated meat and non organic vegetables. If I remember right the one thing that was obvious at the end of the study was the noticeable difference in breast size between the two groups. I will see if I can find that study and post it.

reply to post by SpaDe_


I believe it.

We've got girls in second grade wearing bras, and not because they're stuffing 'em with kleenex, either.

No one really knows. I had it happen to me. I was the first girl in the entire school to wear a "real" (as opposed to training) bra and I was in third grade. I was the first girl in the school to start their period EVER and I was in 5th grade. And I was the tallest student for a few months, then other girls caught up to me. I was 5 feet, 4 inches tall, when I was 9.
I am still that tall. I remember reading about early puberty later in life and that is one of the hallmarks. As a grown woman, it's on the cusp of being petite.
I also developed larger than normal breasts; even at my thinnest, I was a loose size 12 pants and an XXL top, wearing a size 38GG bra.
I had a perfectly normal period and pregnancy, but almost died trying to actually give birth. I could only have one child because of it. I asked the specialist if there might be a link, and he was thoughtful, but said he had never heard of any research in that area.
Why? Because I am 52 in a few months. So all this was 40+ years ago, well before all the hormones and other stuff people are worried about today.
So probably it is a medical condition, unique to the individual.
If it was food-bourne, there would be more people involved, including boys developing with female characteristics.
Or perhaps it was something that nobody really gave any thought to. If you think back 100 years and more, it was common for much younger girls to marry and bear children. Was their development considered early? No, it was considered normal. People we would call "little girls" routinely marry and bear children all over the world today. Is their development questioned? No, it is considered normal
The culture has changed with the times; I think that medical issues are looked at with current cultural values, instead of on a human scale.

IMO its the hormones in meats now, products with chems, and our water. A kid here for her science project in HS did a while display on birth control pills causing our water to be contaminated with estrogens and progesterones.

My personal experience is that I was a very late bloomer and didnt really have any breasts to speak of until later.. where they ballooned into a D nearly overnight. I cried when the C bras got too small as I couldnt wear the cute little bikinis and tops anymore! LOL! The thing is that Im almost 50 now and I weigh a whopping 125 LBS with... so my breast size isnt from being fat. Throughout my childhood we ate very good food that was nowhere as contaminated as it is now and I grew up on well water. I recall the anomaly was the girl in Jr High with huge breasts. Now its common in elementary.

A little biased but decent info from Scientific American. It was high n my town.. and I believe our antiquated last priority to repair or maintain water plant is the culprit for it being so much higher:
www.scientificamerican.com...

One of the common culprits is estrogen, much of which is inadvertently released into sewers through the urine of women taking birth control. Studies have shown that estrogen can wreak reproductive havoc on some fish, which spawn infertile offspring sporting a mixture of male and female parts. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that human breast cancer cells grew twice as fast when exposed to estrogen taken from catfish caught near untreated sewage overflows. “There is the potential for an increased risk for those people who are prone to estrogenic cancer,” said Conrad Volz, lead researcher on the study.

Hormones in meats, milk products, geneticly modified grains and vegetables....Yeop...We are morphing in to something new with all this crap !! Good thing growth hormones are illegal in Canadian farming !!!

As already stated above, it is growth hormones and chemicals that mimic them in the food supply. There is anecdotal proof of a sort.

The condition is known medically as precocious puberty and can affect boys as well as girls. It is more noticeable in girls and more predominant since the hormones involved act more on girls than on boys.

Also note that there are similar hormone mimicking chemicals in many plastics and other products that come into direct contact with our food and drink that can leech out into the food or drink.

There was a problem in Africa a few decades back where girls as young as 2 were entering puberty. It turned out that the cause was the growth hormones used to fatten up cattle quicker and make milk cows produce more. They use the same things in our beef and dairy cattle here in the U S A, but they are supposed to stop using them a definite amount of time before the cattle are shipped off to the slaughter house. They have also been outright banned in some places in dairy cattle.

In Africa they were not stopping the use of the hormones at all before slaughter time and they were using more than they were supposed to.

The problem with a hormone is that there is no inactive level. large amounts have large effects and small amounts have small effects. But any amount will speed up the onset of puberty in direct proportion to the amount in the diet.

Large amounts will show up as a wave of early onset puberty but small amounts may only be detectable through statistical studies.
[sarcasm]
And I have to add, we all know just how diligent our beef industry is to obey all the rules all the time don't we. [/sarcasm]

All of these things, I think. But I also wonder about a diet high in sugar/carbs. With so many women developing PCOS, there is obviously an endocrine/ insulin sensitivity issue. These women (such as myself) respond much better to diets very low in sugar in carbohydrates, it seems to level out some of the issues of PCOS. To me, it stands to reason that all of those empty carbs and sugar would affect young girl's hormones as well.

I also wonder about gestational diabetes, and the long term effects on babies born to women with diabetes.