Younger Girls, Bigger Breasts: Are Chemicals to Blame?
Double X
Florence Williams
July 28
We’ve all heard the stories and seen the evidence: Girls are getting breasts a lot earlier than we remember from our own elementary school days. Nobody really knows why. But because girls are also getting chubbier (along with the rest of the population), that’s been the favored theory of causation. Here’s the general evolutionary scenario: If you can eat more, you can reproduce earlier. And in fact, thanks to better nutrition and less disease, the average age of sexual maturity in girls has dropped slowly but steadily, about three months per decade, since 1850.
In 1997, though, Marcia Herman-Giddens, a scientist at the University of North Carolina, noticed that the pace of advancing puberty had greatly, unexpectedly, accelerated. And that’s no longer a good or neutral thing, because girls who enter puberty on the early end of the spectrum are at greater risk for breast cancer later on. They also tend to suffer more psychological and behavioral problems such as depression and substance abuse.