Rachel Marie Stone’s review of a new book on breasts for Books and Culture points to some troubling environmental data about BPA, which appears in most plastic products:
The mammary gland is “the most sensitive organ to known harmful industrial chemicals.” Substances like BPA—which appears in the lining of food cans and in most polycarbonate (#7) plastics—activate the estrogen receptors on breast cells, causing all kinds of problems, including increased rates of breast cancer and a lowering of the age of puberty. Fifty percent of girls in the U.S. now have breasts—or the beginnings thereof—by age ten, a phenomenon that’s pretty unusual in the long view of human history and that’s socially problematic: our daughters are reaching physical puberty well before they reach emotional and cognitive maturity.
(Boys and men are not off the hook either; phthalates and BPA function not only as estrogen-copycats but as anti-androgens, and have been linked to smaller penises, lower sperm counts, and other physical markers of feminization in boys. Is Mark Driscoll about to get on the BPA-banning bandwagon? We can only hope.)
It’s enough to make one think there’s might not be such a great future in plastics after all.
August 13th, 2012 | 9:25 pm
I too worry about BPA, but her claim that it is behind the problem of early puberty ignores that Puberty onset has slowly decreased since the 1500′s.
Age 10 for breasts means age 11 at puberty.
When I was a missionary in Africa, our high school girls didn’t go through puberty until age 15 or so..was it no BPA’s or from the low protein diet?
Yet here in the rural Philippines, both my granddaughter and her mother had onset at age 11 despite a traditional diet without canned food…indeed, my mother born in 1915 went through puberty in the US at age 11…
and the increase in breast cancer correlates with the birth control pill and the fact that breast cancer is lower in those who have only a few children or none…
August 14th, 2012 | 2:41 am
I can’t tell if you posted this to show how wacky the review or book was, but the paragraph is inciting fear by correlation of BPA and telarche. The studies on BPA are mainly done on mice. The recent JAMA study showing a metabolite of BPA in one’s urine was just that–we can detect small amounts, we do not know what it means. There have been no epidemiological studies, as far as I know, on humans and endocrine disruption caused by BPA.
But another endocrine disruptor is FAT. Age at menarche decreases with the number of hours of TV watched per week. And this may lead to a place called New York City and a ban on trans-fats, but I will leave that to New Yorkers to figure out. . . .
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