In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article . com,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Oct 7, 1:15 am, Too_Many_Tools wrote:
On Oct 7, 12:47 am, Wes wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote:
And shot full of hormones and antibiotics, just to keep them alive.

I'm starting to wonder about that stuff crossing into humans,
expecially
the
hormones. When I was 15, girls were not as well endowed as they are
now.


Wes

Oh Wes....it is just your imagination. LOL

In all seriousness, hormones from meat production have been detected
in people, in the unborn and in our water supplies.

So yes...it is likely that girls are entrying puberty earlier because
of them.

TMT

Maybe I should mention that girls ARE entering puberty MUCH earlier
than they used to...the question yet to be answered is WHY?

The largest effect, which has been known for decades, long before modern
additives existed, is nutrition. People are a lot better fed than they
used to be, often to the point of obesity, so it's going to be hard to
prove that anything extra in the food is the cause, although people will
try.

To prove the case, we would have to find hundreds of underfed girls that
nonetheless were getting the full dose of extras extras, and follow them
from birth to age 20 or so.

Actually, fat tissue is easy to distinguish from glandular tissue. And
that's not the only premature (or "precocious") sexual development that's
been tied to estradiol levels in meat.

Telling tissue types apart is easy for sure, but that was not the issue.

And "been tied to" is a statement of correlation; causation is not
proven, and that is the difficult thing.

The classic example is the true statement that there is a positive and
significant correlation between ice cream sales and automobile accident
rate - they rise and fall together. So, to save lives we should forbid
the sale of ice cream?


It's pretty well established.

What is pretty well established? The problem here is that we have
confounding variables, integrated calories versus a whole slew of
additives, all of which increased at more or less the same time, making
it hard to disentangle correlation from cause from effect.

There was a good article in the NY Times Magazine of a few Sundays ago
on these same kinds of methodological problems, but with respect to the
health effects or non-effects of hormone replacement therapy.

I think it's this one: "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?", By
GARY TAUBES, Published: September 16, 2007, but don't have electronic
access to check.

Joe Gwinn