Precocious Puberty Panic

catseye said:
I'd have thought that environmental factors would have made early-onset puberty become far more widespread. Nutritional factors would tend to peg it back to those who were less physically active. As has been noted already, puberty is still later in onset in those who have a very active lifestyle (gymnasts and sporting kids) and those who restrict their dietary intake (ballet dancers, models, etc).

I'd have thought contraceptives in the water and pollution etc would have got those groups too.
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Maybe not if their body fat is low enough....And possibly the standards have got higher for sports people in terms of lowering their body fat in comparison with, say, the 1950s....

Some female runners look like they could be suffering from an eating disorder - and some possibly are.

Plus many of the sporty people/dancers etc might be on the pill.....

I am sure when I took the pill it sorted out my irregular/short cycles and reduced the bleeding too. And it never seemed to go back to how it was before I took the pill when I came off it either. I suspect it might have also had an effect on my bodyweight/shape but I have no way to prove that.

The development/availability of the pill to women was good for a number of reasons, but the long term effects were not fully understood until a large number of women had been on it.....And there have been different forms of pill too, developed to try to mitigate against bad side effects etc.....

Maybe the effects of the environmental pollution are subtle at first and take time/generations to show in a more obvious way in the human population?
 
Earthly oddity said:
Maybe not if their body fat is low enough....And possibly the standards have got higher for sports people in terms of lowering their body fat in comparison with, say, the 1950s....

Some female runners look like they could be suffering from an eating disorder - and some possibly are.

Plus many of the sporty people/dancers etc might be on the pill.....

I am sure when I took the pill it sorted out my irregular/short cycles and reduced the bleeding too. And it never seemed to go back to how it was before I took the pill when I came off it either. I suspect it might have also had an effect on my bodyweight/shape but I have no way to prove that.

The development/availability of the pill to women was good for a number of reasons, but the long term effects were not fully understood until a large number of women had been on it.....And there have been different forms of pill too, developed to try to mitigate against bad side effects etc.....

Maybe the effects of the environmental pollution are subtle at first and take time/generations to show in a more obvious way in the human population?
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But my point was that they won't have gone through puberty yet, if they are dancers/athletes etc, or at least, not started menstruating. So they won't be on the pill.
 
New article about this phenomenon:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/a...more-and-more-girls-are-hitting-puberty-early

Why More and More Girls Are Hitting Puberty Early​

A pandemic-era rise in early puberty may help physicians to better understand its causes.
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When Gray and Gualy were kids, pediatricians thought that the average age of onset of puberty in girls—defined in most medical literature as thelarche, when breast tissue begins to develop—was about eleven years old. Menarche, or first period, was thought to happen around age thirteen. Only a small percentage of girls had started puberty by the age of eight, much less started menstruating. But, by the two-thousands, new research had found that eighteen per cent of white girls, thirty-one per cent of Hispanic girls, and forty-three per cent of Black girls had entered thelarche by age eight, according to a study published in 2010. Often, these girls were taller than most of their peers and showed other signs of accelerated physical maturation, such as pubic hair and underarm odor. Thelarche typically presages the onset of menstruation by two to three years, meaning that some of these girls would have to deal with the mess and discomfort of a monthly period before they’d finished elementary school. Researchers and physicians hypothesized about possible causes for the increase in early puberty, such as increasing rates of obesity; greater exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in food, plastics, and personal-care products; and stressful or abusive home environments.
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The new data may offer some safety in numbers to early-developing girls—if Gray and Gualy were growing up today, they might have found a friend or two on the same accelerated track. But early puberty is associated with a daunting list of adverse physical and psychological outcomes: various studies have suggested that early-maturing girls are at greater risk for developing obesity, breast cancer, eating disorders, depression, and a range of behavioral issues. Especially in the midst of what is increasingly understood to be a post-COVID youth mental-health crisis, the startling new uptick in early puberty is troubling to some physicians and parents. But, because the spike appears to have been triggered within a compressed, well-defined timeframe, it also offers rich terrain for better understanding the condition’s causes and effects. It also provides a chance to rethink puberty: to see it not as a gateway into adulthood but as another stage of childhood—one that is highly variable from kid to kid and need not be cause for alarm.

“We are in a great natural experiment at the moment, and we might not know the results of it for another ten years or more,” Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco, said. “I do wonder if this is going to be a cohort of kids whose puberty was more rapid because they were in a critical window of susceptibility during a time of great social upheaval.”
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MrRING said:
New article about this phenomenon:
https://www.newyorker.com/science/a...more-and-more-girls-are-hitting-puberty-early
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Wonder if this is a latent evolutionary survival response to when there is a possibility of females living shorter lives? Such as the Latinx and Black societies mentioned.

I would imagine that the original medical studies would not have looked at marginalized or minority societies which have higher rates of poverty and would most likely have lived in areas that were highly questionable as to the environmental risks (such as chemical, toxic waste) they were exposed to. Lower socioeconomic areas are regularly subjected to poor environmental controls.

Was there studies done shortly after WW2? When the atomic bomb dropped. Was there a rise in females reaching puberty earlier than as studies predicted?

Also, let's state something that women know. Less research has been done involving females, in general, than males, by a landslide.
 
By chance this topic just came up in an archived Coast to Coast A.M. programme (1997-04-07).

One statistic brought up was that 15% of white and 50% of black girls in North Carolina were undergoing precocious puberty owing to elevated levels of oestrogen in their diet (I didn't catch the definition of 'precocious', but 'as young as eight' was mentioned). ABC news was cited as a source.

I'm interested in the racial variation and whether it's genuinely racial or in reality an occult socio-economic or geographic variation.
 
American research conducted on puberty, obesity, race, and income

Briefly: obesity or being overweight, younger age of puberty for girls, being black, and poverty are all positively correlated. More than half of black women and girls are overweight or obese in the US. I am guessing that it is socio-economic rather than racial because the African immigrant families I have known were all thin. Admittedly, a small sample size.

Over the course of my life, I have seen black Americans get much fatter; this during a time of increasing income relative to whites – and not an artifact of inflation. I think this is not some sort of reaction to anticipated shorter lives and therefor capacity to reproduce at a younger age. I think it is not from food-based phytoestrogens. Over the course of my life, I have watched the way American blacks celebrate with food at major holidays change to gorging at every social get-together, even just getting lunch with coworkers. Of course, not everyone, but enough to attract my attention. I was raised in a multi-racial area and went to a high school (secondary school) where whites were the minority.

Obesity hastens puberty in girls and postpones it in boys.
Obesity and the pubertal transition in girls and boys - PMC (nih.gov)

“African American women have the highest rates of obesity or being overweight compared to other groups in the United States. About 4 out of 5 African American women are overweight or obese.”
Obesity and African Americans - The Office of Minority Health (hhs.gov)

The poorer the black person or family, the greater the chances of obesity or being overweight.
Socioeconomic Correlates of Obesity in African-American and Caribbean-Black Men and Women - PMC (nih.gov)
 
@Endlessly Amazed @Yithian

1.) Might it be to do with differences in food diet?

Does traditional Southern African-American food have a higher fat content than the diets eaten by other groups?

So as relative wealth increases, more food is bought and eaten?

This list has some low fat foods, but also quite a few fatty meats, deep fried grains and rich desserts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soul_foods_and_dishes

2.) If you add in the popularity of high fructose corn syrup-laden sodas too?

3) And the decrease in manual labour since the 1960's towards office jobs?
 
1.) Might it be to do with differences in food diet?
Answer: No, I think it is quantity more than type. I was raised eating Eastern European food, and it contained all the soul food on the wiki link you gave, except for the fried cornbread. We had fried wheat dumplings instead. And our "pot liquors" for stews were different.

Does traditional Southern African-American food have a higher fat content than the diets eaten by other groups?
Answer: I don't think so. If the obesity was because of the traditional food, then the previous generations would have been just as overweight.

So as relative wealth increases, more food is bought and eaten?
Answer: I don't know and don't think so. My earlier comment was to forestall any conjecture that it was poor people (only) who gained the weight.

2.) If you add in the popularity of high fructose corn syrup-laden sodas too?
A: Yes, I think this is a factor.

3) And the decrease in manual labour since the 1960's towards office jobs?
A: Yes, this too.
 
Reminds me of an entry that was discreetly dropped by the Guinness Book of Records. From TV Tropes:

You will look in vain for World's Youngest-Ever Mother, for instance: as the record-holder was only five, this category was discreetly dropped partly because of the paedophilia connotation and partly because there was a well-grounded fear that somebody out there would seek to beat this record, with legal implications for any publication seen to be implicitly encouraging the attempt. The "youngest mother" record was also dropped because the unfortunate holder, from a Third World South American nation, had eaten a diet of meat packed with fertility hormones which had brought about a very early puberty. As she was indeed also a victim of paedophilia—a male relative was later imprisoned, but released due to lack of evidence, and the identity of the biological father remains a mystery—Guinness World Records deleted all reference to her, out of respect for all the misfortunes she had suffered.
 
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