On Oct 7, 8:59 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message

...





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.

Uh, have you been reading the articles or literature about rimonabant? We
could talk about that one at length, which is something I never expected
would present itself here, and I'll avoid at all costs now. g

Yes, I'm acquainted with the supposed endocrine functions of adipose tissue.
I'm not aware, though, that there's any indication that it makes estrogen.
Most of the research on endocrine functions of fat tissue has been on the
negative functions that relate to cardiometabolic risk: triglycerides,
cholesterol, and so on. I wrote a four-page leave-behind for physicians on
this very subject. But I'm about six months behind and we had dozens of
articles on the subject, running around 12 - 15 pages each, and I easily
could have missed something more recent.

Sanofi-Aventis, our client, was paying for all of the big studies. They have
a multi-billion dollar interest in the results.



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.

The endocrine function of adipose tissue is just as marked in men, though.
And it's focused on intra-abdominal adipose tissue, rather than subcutaneous
fat. Young girls usually have mostly subcutaneous fat unless they're really
obese. Please don't ask me how I know this. d8-)







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.

Well, which reaction is the cautious one? The one that recognizes a marked
correlation and discourages the use of hormones in beef, or the one that
worries we may be overreacting, and that encourages waiting until we can
prove the causative pattern before doing anything? Medicine, out of
necessity, considers the first reaction to be the conservative reaction. The
second one is conservative only if the business interests involved are your
primary concern.



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.

Well, then, you know how rare it is, in endocrinology or other fields that
involve complexes of phenomena, to see any sure claim of causation. In your
reading about adipose tissue and endocrine functions, how often do you see
anything that says "and this causes this"? Not often, I'm sure.







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.

True enough. But we aren't talking about a treatment. There is no treatment.