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.

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.


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.



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.


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.

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.

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

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.

--
Ed Huntress

And now they found that estrogen treatment in women has a correlation
wiht breast cancer. In the last 10 years or so the use of estrogen has
decreased as well as the cases of brest cancer in women.

John