Heart disease risk is also increased.
Finally, precocious puberty usually means reduced stature through accelerated growth and accelerated bone maturation that stops sooner than girls who mature later.
The early occurrence of puberty shortens the duration of pre-pubertal growth in a fashion that is not compensated for by an increase in peak amplitude," says a paper in the Oxford journal. In historical studies, "there was a negative correlation between the age of onset of precocious puberty and adult height, confirming the poor height prognosis of the most severe and early cases."
MeatEspecially Hormone-Raised MeatMay Be a Factor
A 2010 study in Public Health Nutrition of 3,000 girls found that girls who ate eight portions of meat a week by age three, and 12 portions of meat a week by age seven were likely to have an early start of menstruation. In fact, the girls were 75 percent more likely to have begun their periods by the age of 12 if they were eating a high-meat diet when they were seven years old. Not mentioned in the study, led by Imogen Rogers from the University of Brighton, was whether the meat had been grown with livestock hormones, a practice that also raises concerns.
"We have always had access to junk food, but never in human history have we been the subjects of such an intense ingestion of chemicals and hormones," writes Christina Pirello on the Huffington Post. "Dr. Andrew Weil states that more than two-thirds of the cattle raised in the U.S. are given hormones, usually testosterone and estrogen to boost growth. According to Cornell, there are actually six hormones commonly used in meat and dairy production: estradiol and progesterone (natural female sex hormones); testosterone (natural male sex hormone); zeranol, trenbolone acetate and melengesterol (synthetic growth promoters that make animals grow faster)."
Pirello urges people to eat more produce and avoid hormone-fed meat, noting, "If hormones can make an animal fat, what do you think will happen to us?" AlterNet has covered the wide use of the drug ractopamine in livestock production, which also produces unnatural weight gain.
More than a decade ago, milk made by giving cows genetically modified recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) was thought to be linked to precocious puberty. The persistence of food safety advocates has largely driven rBGH, originally made by Monsanto, out of the milk supply.
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