In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
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.

Actually, it appears that fat tissue is also an endocrine tissue, and
makes hormones like estrogen. I don't know that anybody yet really
knows why.

It is known that women who have too little fat will stop menstruating,
and will thus become temporarily sterile. This often happens to female
atheletes, especially rabid runners.

This response is thought to be normal, an evolutionary reaction to the
fact that it takes a lot of energy to make a baby, and if a woman tries
without sufficient stored plus available energy (plus material), child
and woman may well die in the attempt.

So, during famines, it's best to suspend operations and wait for a
better day. So, this may be one reason why fat tissue is involved in
the endrocrine system. And the converse, surfeit, may be one cause of
early sexual maturation in girls.


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

It almost never is in new medical research, Joe. It's something that's hard
to get used to when you write and edit medical documents, but they're
fastidious about it. Eventually you gain a sense of when correlation is all
you're going to get, yet medicine marches ahead with many successes based
upon correlations. If they can't trace the intermediate biochemical pathways
(viciously hard in endocrine functions, like this one), they don't say
"caused by."

In fact, the phrase that shows up endlessly in the medical literature is "is
associated with." It makes my skin crawl, but we know what they're doing.

All true. But it reinforces my point that one should be very cautious.


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?

You really have to read the clinical studies to understand most medical
science research. This is not logic class. It's medical research, and it has
to march to different drummer than physical science, out of necessity.

I have read many of them. I've subscribed to the New England Journal of
Medicine for many years, and I designed instruments for pharmacological
research in the 1970s.


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.

No, we don't. If we're medical researchers -- which you and I are not --
we're damned good at controlling for variables. If we don't, we never get
through peer review.

I've become much more cautious in my claims of causation after spending a
few years in the medical writing field. "Pretty well established" is
accurate. It's not a case of having no clue. It's a case of knowing what the
professional limits are to proof in that field of science.

What is "pretty well established" is most often a correlation, in many
cases the correlation being a showing of the efficacy or comparative
efficacy of a treatment. Very often nobody has the slightest idea what
causes what, but if a treatment works, one just uses it. Years later
someone gets lucky, and the root cause becomes known.

The classic example is ulcers. You remember all those exhortations
about how stress causes ulcers, complete with various long-winded
rationales? Turned out to be complete nonsense, with ulcers being
caused by a bacterial infection of the stomach.


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.

I read around five pages of that story a couple of weeks ago, and I would
have finished it if I was still editing articles on homone replacement
therapy. I did read the entire W.H.I. report when I was working in the field
because I was working on a estrogen/progesterone drug at the time.

If I recall, the WHI report was discussed, and did not turn out to be
the final answer either.


Taubes tells the story well, but keep in mind this is a story about the
efficacy of *treatments* with complex relationships of hormones over time,
at different periods in a woman's life. What you and I are talking about is
a simple correlation between eating hormone-laden beef and the early onset
of sexual characteristics. It's been well documented, particularly in some
extreme cases in Italy and Puerto Rico.

One reason to finish reading the article is to understand why caution is
advised. Even what looks like a "simple correlation" may be nothing of
the kind. We are forever discovering unsuspected complexities and
unsuspected confounding correlations.


There's a lot that isn't known about it, obviously, but the fact that masses
of kids eating the same things develop these characteristics, while other
kids don't, tells researchers that there's smoke here. You don't wait until
you have all the causative paths nailed down or you're likely to wind up
with a lot of cancer and other complications. It's clear that they have an
endocrine malfunction that would be best explained by ingesting
inappropriate hormones. That's how it works.

Not so fast there. It is not at all proven that we have found the
correct correlation, never mind causal chain, so it's far too soon to be
coming to a hard conclusion. For one thing, tracking exactly what
people eat is notoriously difficult - they don't remember or misremember
what they ate. Especially if they are overweight and dieting.

The converse is the various experiments on rats and other animals that
show that a little starvation increases life-span. There are many
theories on why this is so, and the research community is very much on
the case.

This is thought to be true in humans as well, although it's hard to come
by people willing to starve themselves to 80% of free-feeding weight,
and one would need to keep them under observation for 100 years, so this
study will never be done.

My favorite theory is that aging is caused by damage by substances
leaking away from the oxygen metabolism that powers us, and the more
food one has the faster one wears things out.

But what is quite clear is that diet matters a lot, in some very complex
ways.


That's why it's so frustrating
for people oriented toward physical science rather than life sciences,
particularly matters of human health.

Yes. Biological systems are far more complex than physical systems.

What is also clear is that genetics matters a lot, and differences
between people are always confounding us as well. At least all
electrons are identical.


BTW, you don't need a subscription anymore to get into the NYT archives.
It's all free again, as of a few weeks ago.

Oh? It wasn't obvious when I checked an hour ago. Oh. I see. They
want you to register, but it's free (perhaps aside from the spam).

Joe Gwinn