In article ,
"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.

Speak for yourself there. I've also noticed that their legs get longer
by the year.


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

Can't say I've had the pleasure.


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.

Estrogen production in fat is well established it seems. Google is your
friend. Here is one article:
http://www.cancerportfolio.org/abstract.jsp?SID=159653&ProjectID=312260
..


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-)

Hmm. I know what you want us to think, but really is it that you were
doing autopsies on them? How else could you know the amount of visceral
fat?


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 caution is about jumping to conclusions. Aside from accusations of
evil motive, there is lots of experience that would make one hold back,
waiting for the smoke to clear.


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.

Right. But the point is that this is *very* complex and ill-understood,
so it's unlikely that we really have the slightest idea what's really
going on. It *will* be sorted out, because there is a billion-dollar
business awaiting the evil company that figures it out. And likely a
Nobel Prize or two.


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.
There is no efficacy. All there is at this point is a correlation between
consumption of meat that's been treated with hormones or estrogen-generating
nonsteroids and the precocious appearance of secondary sexual
characteristics in young girls, and secondary female characteristics in
young boys. Yes, the boys are developing a lot of breast tissue, and it
ain't baby fat.

Sure. Treatments were the example. And if you buy the theory that
substance X in the food supply causes bad thing Y, the obvious policy
"treatment" is to forbid substance X. It's called "reasoning by
analogy".


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.

What the WHI report is about is the most extensive and thorough research
that's been done on the subject. It was a huge study. The data is still
being digested, and the complexities of single-hormone and dual-hormone
therapy (which is what I was writing about) still need more research. The
questions relate to what happens before, during, and after menopause, and
the up-and-down pattern of risks for cancer and other dangers. As I'm sure
you're aware, it's a very big subject, Joe.

Big, and ill-understood.


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.

Again, we seem to have a different idea about what "caution" means in this
case. I don't care about the financial margins in the beef business. I do
care a lot about young kids who may be getting their bodies screwed up
because we didn't know enough about supplemental hormones in beef. We know
so much about the risks from hormones in general that I find it hard to
believe we allow so much of it in beef production.

We seem to be sliding towards the European "precautionary principle"
here, a form of better-safe-that-sorry. The problem is that the effects
of a new technology cannot be known in advance, and if anything like the
precautionary principle had been enforced in Europe and the US over the
last 300 years, most of the modern world would have been smothered at
birth.

The stronger form is to read the futurist predictions of the past - as a
rule, they got exactly nothing right, both positive and negative.
People just aren't very good at telling the future.


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.

To bring this back to earth, I don't know of any research that indicates
obesity or leanness haven't been controlled in the studies that have drawn
correlations between eating hormone-laden beef and the early appearance of
secondary sexual characteristics. That's precisely the kind of thing that
would be controlled for in a study.

Well, they try I'm sure. But it's very complex, and good feeding early
in life doesn't necessarily lead to obesity, so current weight isn't a
very useful proxy for general nutrition.

A classic example is immigrants and their children, who tower above
their parents. Or 50-year-old Chinese immigrants who grow a few inches
after arriving in the US and eating the far richer diet. But their kids
still tower over them.

Another thing that nags at me is that hormones in meat are not new.
People have been eating the meat of male and female animals forever, and
this meat of necessity had male and female hormones in it, hormones made
by the critter that grew the meat. It isn't obvious that the addition
of a little more hormone (if indeed there is any left by the time of
slaughter) has any material effect compared to what is already naturally
there.


If you want to see the state of the research, there are a number of articles
on PubMed. There are other problems with hormones in beef, besides the
precocious sexual development.

No doubt. But I'll tell you my hobby horse with respect to drugs and
animal husbandry -- the use of antibiotics by the ton in animal feed.
My feeling is that this is a major cause of the development of multiple
drug resistant bacteria. If I were King, use of antibiotics in animal
feed would be forbidden outright.


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).

I don't get any spam from the NYT, but you have to tell them what you want
to get. I get the previews of the weekend sections. And I'm glad I don't
have to pay for them anymore; $90/year for The Economist is quite enough.

OK. Thanks for the pointer.

Joe Gwinn