Why Is the Age of Puberty Dropping?
Nobody knows for certain why girls are entering puberty earlier, but the most popular theory involves insecticides, such as PCB, which can break down into compounds that may have estrogenic activity in young girls, thus triggering the onset of puberty. Others attribute the drop to in increase in childhood obesity. “My own bias is that a major contributor to earlier puberty is the increasing prevalence of obesity over the past 25 years — especially in 6- to 11-year-old girls,” says Paul Kaplowitz, M.D., Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in Charlottesville, Va., and author of the LWPES report. “It has long been known that overweight girls tend to mature earlier and thin girls tend to mature later.” As for African-American girls maturing even earlier, Boepple believes this may be due to a higher cultural tendency toward obesity, while Kaplowitz hypothesizes that there may be genetic differences within the African-American population
