As you may know from The Minds of Girls (2018) and The Wonder of Girls (2002), Michael Gurian has been concerned for a long time about what girls are absorbing–and the consequences to their bodies and growing selves.  In today’s blog post, he focuses on this topic so that we can fix the dangerous situation our daughters are in.  Many girls are hitting puberty too early for good health.  For girls who are not, this early puberty phenomenon of is the tip of a still-dangerous iceberg.

A note:  Girls’ health and well being will be one of the major topics at this year’s Gurian Summer Training Institute.  For more on that event, click https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2024/.

I was glad to see “Puberty Starts Earlier Than It Used To. No One Knows Why” in the New York Times recently.  I recommend the article, by Azeen Ghorayashi, if you have access to the Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/science/early-puberty-medical-reason.html .   There is a lot of useful research in the article.

Meanwhile, I felt discomfort reading it, beginning with the title, which is misleading.  The article says, “No one knows what risk factor — or more likely, what combination of factors — is driving the age decline or why there are stark race- and sex-based differences,” the article reads.  “Obesity seems to be playing a role, but it cannot fully explain the change. Researchers are also investigating other potential influences, including chemicals found in certain plastics and stress. And for unclear reasons, doctors across the world have reported a rise in early puberty cases during the pandemic.”  Some of my discomfort reading this comes from the fact that we do know why puberty is starting earlier in both boys and girls, we do know why even more girls experience it than boys.

The rest of the article, while providing useful history of some studies, also backs off of providing real solutions.  After including useful information on efforts to lower age cut offs for developmental puberty, the article ends:  “But lowering the age cutoff remains controversial, with many pediatricians arguing that the risk of a disorder is still large enough to justify extra precautions. Others, like Dr. Herman-Giddens, say that the changes are a sign of a legitimate public health problem and should not be accepted as normal.  ‘It might be normal in the sense of what the data are showing,’ Dr. Herman-Giddens said, ‘but I don’t think it’s normal, for lack of a better word, for what nature intended.'”  Again, my discomfort:  we don’t need to be vague on solutions–we do know the solutions.

I hope you will read the article and others like it on girls and early puberty.  They are useful.  I hope, too, you’ll feel more of a sense of urgency than Ms. Ghorayashi does.  For decades we have known the dangers our girls face, the multiple causes of the phenomenon, and the solutions.  My intention now is to list them for you so that you can act locally to help our children live safer, happier lives.

The Causes of Early Puberty

By 1995, when I began researching The Wonder of Girls, puberty markers had already begun to move in the U.S. and, soon thereafter, around the world, especially in industrialized countries.   Girls were starting to develop breasts at 10, on average.  This was a change from 11, on average, before the ’90s.  Black girls, on average, showed these signs at around 9 years old.  As it stands now, pubertal age for girls is dropping approximately three months per decade.  The drop exists for boys, but it is more severe in girls because of sex-specific hormonal development: More estrogen and less testosterone in girls makes a difference: estrogen often binds with endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) which can mimic estrogen, and endocrine disrupting chemicals are the main reason for what ails our children.

What are EDCs, and why do they cause gene-expression-triggers for anxiety, depression, obesity, mood disorders, and early puberty?

In The Minds of Girls and Saving Our Sons you’ll find a great deal more analysis than I can provide here, so please consider looking at those books for much more.

In short, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are a highly heterogeneous (consisting of many different parts) molecule class found in synthetic chemicals such as air and water pollutants, pesticides and industrial chemicals, plastics, various fuels, solvents, lubricants, and some of the cosmetics girls and women use.   Some of the chemical names to look for on packaging or other disclosures are:

*polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)

*polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs)

*dioxins

*bisphenol A (BPA)

*plasticizers (phthalates).  

EDCS, unfortunately, inhabit fertilizers and pesticides, which profoundly affects the food base that our children (and we) eat.   These EDCs (sometimes called “endocrine disruptors”) can affect our children’s (and our own) cells in a mechanical and methodical way, by involving themselves in our estrogenic, antiandrogenic, thyroid, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ, retinoid,  other nuclear receptors, steroidogenic enzymes, neurotransmitter receptors and systems, and many other pathways.  EDCs exist outside our bodies, but once they are in, they are in.  They then:

*can create hormone biosynthesis

*can affect metabolism

*can ruin or harm reproduction

*can affect breast development

*can help lower testosterone levels (our males have around 30% less testosterone in their bloodstreams than they did 30 years ago)

*can cause diseases such as cancer, thyroid issues, obesity, heart and cardiovascular issues

*can trigger de novo mutations in sperm/egg and in utero that then can trigger autism (ASD), ADD/ADHD, anorexia/bulimia, depression, anxiety, and other brain disorders, all or most of which tie into our endocrine systems more than we realize.

Overall, these chemicals are interfering with “healthy homeostasis,” which is the body’s baseline for development, its physiologic stability.  Because the body’s development depends on its genetic cells, but EDCs affect those cells, EDCs put our cellular homeostasis at risk.  How do we know?  Because of decades of epidemiological studies of both humans and animals.  The National Institute of Health has been publishing studies along this line for almost thirty years, studies you can find on the NIH website, e.g., https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine.

Try These Solutions

Despite that we’ve known for years about these chemicals in our food, water, air, even women’s cosmetics, popular articles that come out about them hold back on urgency.  Why?

Perhaps we are facing our own self-destructive sense of inevitability:  since many of these chemicals are inextricable in so many places, we may just think of them as “forever chemicals” and hope they don’t affect OUR child.

It is possible, also, that big business (a broad term, I know) depends on these chemicals for profit (or, so it believes), thus, conscious and unconscious lobbying exists in our culture, especially in the U.S., to avoid dealing with the chemicals.  It should be noted that European countries are far ahead of the U.S. in removing these chemicals from new products.

Whatever our inertia as a culture, perhaps if we look around us at the amalgam of these four changes in child development, we might get inspired to do battle against these chemicals.

*the increase in children with autism and other brain issues

*the increase of children with obesity, other diseases, and other physiologic issues

*the increase of mood issues that have adolescent (pubertal) onset, including anxiety and depression

*the increase of early puberty incidence over the last thirty years.

We have no way out or around these chemicals.  The inevitability of negative affect on our children and ourselves is going to be sacrosanct unless we do some things right now.

Solution 1:  Lobby your people of governance to get the chemicals banned.  Study what Europe and Canada are doing for inspiration and practical steps.

Solution 2:  If you can go real organic–even if it takes you about a year to transition over one food at a time–try to do that.  In using more organic products (make sure they are foods that don’t use fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides with the chemicals I listed above), you will be cutting out some EDCs from your children’s diets.

Solution 3:  No more plastics!  Or…if you have to use plastic for something, make sure it never gets heated up.  On the soccer field, for instance, where children need hydration, try to get every child to bring their own safe bottle, not plastic, or, if plastic bottles are needed once in a while, don’t let the sun heat them up too much.

Solution 4:  Cut out junk food from your children’s diets (and your own!)  A splurge now and then may be okay, but junk food increases a child’s chance of ingesting EDCs because junk food not only over-sugars, over-salts, and over-fats a child’s diet, but also does so while pumping EDCs into the child.  Dangers are being compounded into dangers.

Solution 5:  Check the bottles on all cosmetics for the chemicals I listed above and for any other dangerous chemicals I have not listed.  Do lots of research regarding what’s in those cosmetics.  Talk to others about them.  Go to stores that sell organic products and compare ingredients.

While sexual abuse and other potential causes of early puberty exist, the primary cause(s) mainly come back to EDCs, including the most well known cause of early puberty, obesity.  It is true that EDCs are already here and, thus, inevitable in a sense; but we do have agency as parents, teachers, and others caring for children.  We can do something about them in our own homes, one food, condiment, or cosmetic at a time.

For more on issues facing boys and girls, please look at joining our Summer Training Institute in June.  It is easy to do on Zoom and packed with useful information and practical strategies.  To learn more and to register, see: https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2024/.

For more original writing by Michael Gurian, please subscribe to his substack at michaelgurian.substack.com.  Thank you.