@Jermofoot:
@Cmdr:
But I’ve always been told that the reason our children are maturing earlier and earlier (as in old farts thinking kids are maturing earlier when in reality the time difference between generations is not that significant, perhaps as much as a year or two or as little as only a few weeks) is because we have better access to food and medical care, because we get enough vitamins and minerals because we take a pill for them each day, because we have better oral hygiene, etc that our bodies are growing fast enough to achieve the level of growth needed to stimulate puberty to begin.
While they aren’t sure what exactly is happening (and I threw out the reason for it I’ve heard most), none of the answers I’ve heard have been “good.”
When you think about it, food in America is probably more available, but it’s more adulterated, less nutritious (fast food), and made for convenience.
GG, already got some good info posted, but here’s one from the BBC (albeit, from a few years ago): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4530743.stm
I’ll agree that there is much more sweets, candies, salty foods and fast foods loaded with fats and other stuff out there and that they do make up a significant portion of a child’s diet.
But I think I have a strong case when I say that there is better access to fruits and vegetables (which parents foist on their children routinely) as well as multivitamins (something that we did not have 200 years ago) as well as more scientific knowledge as to what our bodies need to be healthy.
So if we compare the diet of an American adolescent in 2009 vs an American Adolescent in 1809 (200 years ago) and looked at the ages of the adults when they died (of natural causes only, not accidents, or murder, etc) I think there’s a good argument to be made that children have more calories during the day, better vitamin and mineral balances in their diet, better nutrition all around and better access to the food needed to maintain a healthy body.
It can also be said that better medical treatments (dental as well as physical) and better access to physicians and dentists add to the benefit of better access to nutritious food (which includes vitamin pills). And it is the better diet and medical treatment that allows children to enter puberty earlier and live longer - albeit, in some instances in a manner that is obese or over weight.
In other words, it’s not that children are obese that makes them enter puberty earlier, it’s that they are healthier in general that lets their bodies develop sufficiently enough to trigger puberty.
Just curious, are girls entering puberty at age 9 in Europe? I think it’s kinda silly to pick an age at random and say “this is too early” or “this is too late” if you want my opinion. Last time I checked, there was no factory producing little human girls that all entered puberty at the same time. Some girls are just early bloomers and some late. I had a friend who didn’t get her breasts to start developing until 14 years old.
Did the studies offset the number of 9 year old girls with breasts by the number of girls age 14 who had not yet developed breasts? Did the studies take into consideration increased nutrition in food as well as increased medical treatments and easier lifestyles that probably contributed greatly to the amount of young girls who could develop to the point their bodies triggered the start of adolescent development?
We’re talking the human body here. We cannot just go out and say: Red Dye number 16 is to blame for all children in the world developing mature sexual organs before the age of 13. (That’s an exaggeration on purpose, it’s supposed to be silly, but convey a point. The point is, there’s probably a lot more involved than obesity in children. )
Now, the study did say that they looked at 354 girls from 10 cities. That’s a bloody awfully small sample set don’t you think? I mean, we have a population of over 300 million. If half of those are children and half of those are women, that means 37.5 million of them are girls under the age of 18. We are looking at girls age 3 to 12 in the study, so of the 37.5 million girls under the age of 18; 19 million of them are in the ages of 3 to 12. (Just a guesstimate, not a fact.) So the study is attempting to say that these 354 girls are indicative of 19 million girls across the nation? I’m not saying they are wrong, but I am having a hard time getting it passed the “bull sh*t” detectors, if you catch my meaning.
Also, they cut off the study at age 12. That means they could not possibly have measured the number of women who do not enter puberty until the age of 14, because they never collected the data! Perhaps if they had taken 354 girls aged 10-19 (another 9 year span) and attempted to collect data on how many of them did not develop until late in life the girls 3-9 that developed early would be balanced with the girls aged 10-19 who developed late? (Probably not perfectly balanced, most girls develop breasts between the ages of 11 and 13 at least a couple of decades ago, probably still today, so there is significantly less girls to develop from 13 to 14 than there are from 9 to 11 and that will skew the balance a little.)
