This article I came across last month about a 10 year old girl who was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer. This story is both shocking and frightening because of the possible health trend it describes. It brings to mind a big concern that I have been seeing in my practice over the years, early onset puberty. Some girls I am seeing develop breast buds even as young as 7 or 8 and I've read about cases of some children developing early puberty signs as young as 3 years of age. Just 20 years ago puberty was averaging around age 12 and 20 years before that even later than that. Luckily, if I see the early signs of puberty in young girls I do a lot of educating the parents and use diet and herbs to try to head off the early puberty signs until later. The goal is to push back puberty as much as possible to age 12. Why does it matter? Statistically, girls who go into puberty early will have an increase life-long of risk for hormonally related cancers and health concerns. This includes increased risk of breast cancer, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, not to mention risk of fibrocystic breast disease, uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts. These cancers and illnesses are to a great extent avoidable.
There has been much talk about the breast cancer gene which, if positive, presents a very large risk of the woman developing breast cancer sometime during their life. However, there is much one can do to alter genetic risk by making changes in your lifestyle and environment to reduce the severity or risk of onset of an illness. Even without the breast cancer gene hanging out in your cells, a woman's risk of breast cancer is anywhere from 1 in 3 to 1 in 8 American women. Not good odds. Increasingly we are seeing "adult" diseases in children. Including type 2 diabetes in obese children and a juvenile form of ALS (a degenerative, and deadly neurological disease) and now breast cancer.
We need to look more closely at hormone disruptors and their large impact on increasing the breast cancer risk, being aware that plastics (like bisphenol A in baby bottles, plastic bottles and can lining), pesticides, heavy metals, phthlates and parabens in skin creams all add just a little bit to your overall risk for hormone disruption and increase your risk of hormonally related cancers. Many synthetically formed chemicals affect how our hormones act and many can pretend they are human hormones, mimicking human hormone action.
Fortunately, there is actually a lot parents can do to help prevent early onset of puberty in their children and also reducing the risk of hormonally related cancers for themselves. Here are 5 quick tips:
- Don't microwave food in plastic containers or with plastic wrap. Remove the food and put onto a microwave safe dish or bowl. The plastic contaminates the food with heating in microwave.
- Avoid soy and soy containing foods. This is particularly true of soy oils which are in MANY processed foods because they are a cheap ingredient. Check in mayonnaise and prepackaged foods. Soy is estrogenic and will act as a estrogen in your kid's bodies. Fermented soy products are ok like miso, tempeh and naturally fermented soy sauce.
- Avoid eating too much non-organically grown meats and chicken. Or choose the ones that were grown without growth hormones.
- KNOW what is in your beauty products. MANY make-up, lotions, shampoos are extremely high in hormone disrupting chemicals. If you aren't sure, check the Environmental Working Group's database "Skin Deep" which contains toxicity information on most commercial products.
- Eat the fruits and vegetables that are organically grown. At the very least avoid the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables.
Fruits and vegetables that have high concentrations of antioxidants are a must to counteract the some of the adverse effects of toxins and contaminants in food, air and water. One concentrated fruit based elixir I use of chemical toxicity is called
Liquid Life by
Mitogenx, designed by one of my mentors. Awareness that hormone disruptors affecting our children is the first step toward prevention. We are seeing increasing feminization of our boys (aka man-boobs), a huge increase in prostate and breast cancer in adult males and females, respectively and early hormonally related cancers in our young girls. Take a look around and educate yourself for your kid's sake, much of this is very preventable.
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