During the pandemic, there was a large spike in the number of girls entering puberty at a very young age, a recent study from Italy showed.
“Precocious puberty,” as the condition is known, is defined as the development of secondary sexual characteristics — breasts, pubic hair, larger testicles, a deeper voice, etc. — before the age of 8 in girls and 9 in boys.
Tallow balms are easy to make at home — I make one with tallow, olive oil, and rosemary from my garden.
Entering puberty that early can lead to significant complications. As well as being associated with reduced stature and other physical problems, studies have found links with emotional and behavioral issues including substance abuse, social isolation, truancy, and sexual promiscuity.
Growing up too fast
It’s generally reckoned that girls suffer from precocious puberty at a much higher rate than boys: something like 0.2% as opposed to 0.05%, although there may be quite wide national variation. It’s not known why girls suffer at such a higher rate, but there could be a deep survival mechanism at work — perhaps one that allows girls to mature faster and reproduce earlier under particular conditions (war, scarcity, extreme stress).
The researchers behind the study looked at data for 133 diagnosed cases of precocious puberty in Italian girls between January 2016 and June 2021. While they found 72 diagnosed cases in the four years before the beginning of the pandemic, they found 61 cases between March 2020 and June 2021, a rate of four new cases a month. That’s about three times the rate before the pandemic.
The average age of sexual development has been getting lower and lower for decades across the West — maybe by as much as three months per decade for girls since the 1970s — but clearly, the number of cases observed during the pandemic was way outside that general trend.
Fat and unhappy
So what was going on?
The researchers found a clear link between the increase in cases and weight gain, which is a known risk factor for precocious puberty. Fatter children are more likely to enter puberty sooner.
The pandemic was a disaster for children’s health all round. Trapped inside, away from their friends for months at a time, bombarded with terrifying propaganda, left with nothing to do but watch TV or play video games or scroll TikTok while their parents answered Zoom calls in the next room, children got fatter — a lot fatter. Obesity rates went through the roof, and so did rates of mental health problems: anxiety, depression, suicidality.
All that blue light from screens probably didn’t help either. Rat studies have shown that chronic blue-light exposure can bring forward puberty, believe it or not, because of changes to patterns of hormone release.
Sanitizer insanity
Another factor, the researchers think — and you may find this surprising — was the “increased use of hand and surface sanitizers.”
Remember how much people were sanitizing their hands and even home deliveries? In many cases, especially out in public, people were cleaning their hands after every social interaction and every time they walked in and out of a room.
I made a point of never using the hand sanitizers on offer, because I know they contain big doses of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, chemicals that interfere with the body’s natural hormone balance and can have all sorts of unpleasant effects, from reducing testosterone levels to interfering with sexual development in the womb or during puberty.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the young are especially vulnerable to these chemicals, and if they interfere in processes that can only happen once — like sexual differentiation in the womb, “mini-puberty” in early childhood, or “big” puberty in adolescence — the effects can be irreversible. Not good.
A very nasty chemical
One such chemical commonly found in hand sanitizers is triclosan. Triclosan is a very nasty chemical, not least of all because it can dramatically increase the absorption of other endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA.
So if you coat your hands with triclosan-laden sanitizer and then touch, say, a plastic toy or a piece of thermal paper, you’ll get a mega dose of harmful chemicals, right into your blood.
It’s not just hand sanitizer, though. Pretty much all modern personal care products contain endocrine disruptors, and for this reason they represent one of our most persistent sources of exposure to harmful chemicals. Research has shown that women are at particular risk, because they use so many personal care products. One study claims college-age women in the U.S. use an average of eight personal care products a day that contain known endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Some women in the study were using as many as 17 a day!
Photo by Rich Sugg/Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Image
Cold turkey
The simplest way to reduce your exposure to these harmful chemicals is to stop using products that contain them. Research shows that if women go cold-turkey on their favorite personal care products, levels of harmful phthalates, parabens, and phenols in their urine decrease by as much as 45% in just three days.
Of course, you still need to keep yourself spic and span, but giving up chemical-heavy supermarket soaps and scrubs doesn’t mean you can’t wash, thankfully. A lot of products can be replaced with tallow-based alternatives.
Fat of the land
Tallow is rendered animal fat, usually beef fat. If that sounds disgusting to you, it shouldn’t. That’s how soap used to be made, using natural rather than artificial fats, and as with so many things, the old ways are better.
Being animal fat, tallow has a chemical profile that’s very similar to human fat and contains various natural substances, including vitamins and cholesterol, that are nourishing for the skin. Modern soaps tend to strip the skin of moisture and nutrients and dry it out. They also destroy the colonies of beneficial micro-organisms that live on our skin and protect us, acting as a first line of defense against harmful pathogens entering the body.
A personal favorite
You don’t have to smell like beef, either, unless you want to. Tallow products can be fragranced with natural substances like rosemary oil or lavender.
Tallow balms are easy to make at home — I make one with tallow, olive oil, and rosemary from my garden — but there’s a growing number of companies that make high-quality tallow products as well.
My favorite is North Idaho Tallow Company. The company’s tallow sugar scrub — a mixture of tallow and cane sugar, with natural fragrance — is just the ticket after a heavy workout, when you need to wash away the sweat and effort and come up looking sparkling. As well as offering soaps, balms, lip balms, and beard care products, the company also sells tallow-and-beeswax candles, which are so much better than paraffin ones.
Visit idahotallow.com.
Maha, Skincare, Lifestyle, Bpa, Endocrine disruptors, Health, Women’s health, Makeup, Soap, Provisions