Americans are Getting Sicker – Part 2

Why are girls going through periods so much earlier?

Partially adapted from the JRE podcast with Casey & Cally Means MD 2024

Why are girls going through periods so much earlier?

If you ask the New York Times, a headline will appear that says — girls are going through puberty earlier. But they’ll highlight that no one has any idea why, and of course, that’s because there’s no double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed RCT in a journal that can precisely pinpoint the one reason why it’s happened. If we pull our heads above water and put the dots together, which is not evidence-based to say what’s happening in our environment right now, excess estrogen drives puberty early.

Got Plastics?

Just look around in our world. Well, let’s look at our environment: plastics. So, we’ve got plastics everywhere.

Eight billion metric tons of plastic have been produced since the 1900s.

• 1855: Alexander Parkes created Parkesine, often considered the first man-made plastic. It was made from cellulose treated with nitric acid and a solvent. Interestingly, this was the time of the philosopher Nietzsche and the era of the machine gun.

• 1907: Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic made from phenol and formaldehyde. Bakelite was durable, did not conduct electricity, and could be molded into various shapes, making it highly useful for industrial applications.

When plastic was finally commercialized, it was discovered that when plastic broke down, it acted like an estrogen, which we call xeno-estrogens. The term “xeno” is derived from the Greek word “xenos,” which means “foreign” or “strange.” In various scientific contexts, “xeno” is a prefix that indicates something foreign or external to the normal context, particularly in biological or medical terms. These xeno or exogenous estrogen molecules bind to estrogen receptors and act like estrogens.

So now we’ve got plastic everywhere. It’s literally in the air we breathe, the waters we fish, the soil we farm, and just about anywhere else you can think of. We’ve found plastics in every part of the human body. So, it’s logical that it’s affecting our bodies and our young girls’ bodies; it’s likely affecting our bodies in the womb. A study conducted and published in early 2024 by researchers from the University of New Mexico Health Sciences, among others, revealed that microplastics were found in every one of the 62 placenta samples they tested. We’re pushing estrogens, which spark puberty in young girls. There are many reasons why we would have extra estrogen.

Pesticides, pesticides, pesticides.

Here’s a little primer on pesticides:

• Early 20th Century: Arsenicals were common, with lead arsenate being widely used in the United States from around 1892 to control pests like the codling moth on apple crops. Today, this would be unthinkable.

• Mid-20th Century: The synthesis of DDT in 1874, with its insecticidal properties discovered in the 1930s, marked a significant milestone in pesticide history. DDT was extensively used post-World War II, heralding the era of synthetic organic pesticides. German scientists did a lot of work on the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia, which aided the development of pesticides. His inventions also led to the poisonous gas Zyklon-B, a cyanide-based pesticide.

• Post-WWII: The development and widespread adoption of synthetic pesticides like DDT, organophosphates, and later synthetic pyrethroids transformed pest control. Due to the proliferation of these new chemical agents, the 1940s to 1960s are often referred to as the “Age of Pesticides.”

• Late 20th Century and Beyond: Environmental and health concerns led to regulations and bans on some pesticides, like DDT, in many countries. The US has always been behind Europe and other countries in limiting the use of pesticides.

Atrazine, is tasteless and invisible pesticide. It also increases the activity of an enzyme called aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. Although it’s banned in Europe, the US sprays 70 million tons of it per year on our agriculture. It’s illegal overseas, and we buy it from other countries. So, China, Germany, and other countries are selling us chemicals, and 70 million tons are sprayed on our food.

Studies have shown that Atrazine acts as an endocrine disruptor in frogs. It demasculinates male frogs, reduces testosterone levels, and consequently affects their reproductive capabilities. In some cases, male frogs exposed to Atrazine develop both male and female gonadal tissues, a condition known as hermaphroditism, or even completely transform into functional females.

Atrazine deposits into our visceral fat, the metabolically active fat around our midline. That’s where cholesterol is metabolically active and converts testosterone to estrogen. So, we are living in this wildly estrogenic environment created by humans, tasteless and invisible.

Putting the pieces together

Going into later life and talking about estrogen, we’ve got a huge percentage of women on birth control, hopefully post-puberty. There are tens of thousands of adolescents placed on puberty blockers in the name of gender-affirming care. Where we’re putting women on exogenous estrogens for acne, for PCOS, for menstrual regularity, and sometimes, of course, for actual birth control, it’s ubiquitous now. How do we allow this to happen in the environment, and we all know this? And then, of course, it’s affecting boys as well. This is why awareness is crucial.

Think about this: we’re living in a place where there are tons of estrogen-like compounds.

We also have an entire food system that drives visceral fat to make us more estrogenic. So, we get these estrogens, and they are put in our kid’s school lunches. The sugar everywhere sugar is driving the visceral fat, causing obesity and metabolic health disorders, which for men is going to make puberty early for it’s going to feminize them. Also, more than 20% of adolescents are considered obese in the US.

We’re living in an estrogenic environment that’s hard to escape. It’s essential to think about this at a foundational level to understand why this happens. It’s because these studies are all funded by chemical and food companies. Scientists are actually studying how much sugar and what type of sugar is needed to optimize food addiction, not health. This is wrong on so many levels, but some researchers are paid good money to do this. We need to change this with movements like MAHA. Hopefully RFK Jr. can spark change in this arena. Please refer to my previous article on Making America Healthy Again (MAHA) here:

The experts regarding chronic conditions have all put their heads in the sand. Regarding nutrition, it takes common sense, like waiting for a double-blind placebo-controlled human randomized control study to know whether 0.5% of our brains being plastic is a good thing. Do we need to have a human randomized control 10-year study to know whether an herb that is being sprayed on almost all of our food kills every cell? Not to mention that people wear hazmat suits to spray this stuff.

The broader approach to healing connects back to the earlier points on traditional medicine’s shortcomings. We don’t need an RCT to know that fixing broken biology or physiology will have a favorable impact on outcomes. You have broken physiology because your cells are dysfunctional, and these cells cause disease. We’re never going to do a RCT because you know parachutes are good when you’re jumping out of airplanes. We don’t need an RCT for that.

We’ve siloed all these questions and just taken leave of our common sense. Wild animals are not getting chronic rates of obesity, diabetes, or metabolic dysfunction. We’re born without chronic disease, and humans instinctively know what’s good for us. The problem is that we’ve been lied to by Harvard, Stanford, and Tufts professors. The experience of PR for the food industry and pharmaceutical industry accesses all these things. Food companies spend 80% of their budget on advertising to nutrition students. Fifty percent of a medical school’s budget touches the pharmaceutical industry. So fundamentally, on the grassroots, like micro level, these industries have coopted our institution of trust.

The potential research and clinical applications around the interaction between fat accumulation, plastics, and its effect on estrogen and puberty should be at the forefront of medicine. Future research should explore these connections to refining treatment strategies and potentially integrating dietary and lifestyle changes with traditional medical interventions.