What's 'normal' for puberty
So the medical community would rather change the definition of "normal" instead of search for the anomaly that causes little girls to develop breasts ["Modern Puberty," Jan. 21]? This further proves how far the bar has been lowered when it comes to accepted medical guidelines.
Jill Chapin
Santa Monica
I was surprised that no studies on girls raised in vegetarian families were cited. I would think that one of the prime suspects would be the hormones added to our meat supply. Have any such studies been done? I would think it would be easy to do, since we have large vegetarian communities within our society.
Margaret Mood
Santa Ana
Marcia Herman-Giddens believes designing a study in which girls are deliberately exposed to higher doses of estrogen-like chemicals in the environment is unethical, and I agree. What about a study that deliberately reduces their exposure? I did that while raising my two daughters. Throughout their childhood, they consumed no red meat from beef and pork raised on hormones and antibiotics or dairy products containing hormones or antibiotics.
Their breasts began developing at 11 or 12, and both began menstruating at 14 -- like me, raised in the 1950s before science "improved" our food supply.
Roberta Williams
Redondo Beach
With all the hormones injected into our food, what makes an intelligent person think it is not going to affect our bodies? Now we get to wait and find out what's going to be the payoff of all the genetically modified foods we are eating. Why is it other countries will not allow these foods to cross their borders but the Food and Drug Administration says it's OK and so safe that it doesn't even have to inform us if it's in the food we are buying? When is the FDA going to start protect us instead of big business?
Catherine Shaffer
Glendale
Whom should parents, as well as your writers, believe: expert endocrinologists, such as textbook author Dr. Paul Kaplowitz, who clearly points at better public health measures and the rise in obesity as reasons; or biologist Sandra Streingraber, who conducted research for a group trying to find environmental causes of breast cancer, and who is quoted as stating, "They've introduced all these chemicals into the environment . . . What are they, nuts?"? Is this the reasoned analysis of a scientist or the backward logic of an activist?
