Before I met Brian, I was a firm believer in spending as little as humanly possible at the grocery store, and a huge fan of fast food. The weekly trips to the grocery store consisted of getting as many snacks and meals as possible for as little money as I could get away with, and trips to McDonald's 3 to 4 times a week was the norm for my family. It was stress free, the kids enjoyed the food, had an indoor playground to enjoy with other children year round, and I could kick back in a booth and read a book or the paper and relax. I thought by monitoring their dessert intake, and not allowing them to drink soda pop, I was doing my job as a parent at ensuring they ate well.
As time went on, I didn't notice the fact that we were all grouchy, all feeling poorly, and wanting to physically do less and less. I first noticed something was wrong when my then nine-year-old began to spot and was growing breasts. I still hadn't noticed the fact that I had gained 25 pounds in 3 months, or that my kids were constantly hungry even though they were eating 3 times more calories than recommended for their ages. But this was enough to get me to begin to research.
The first thing that I discovered in researching was the effects of the added hormones to our milk. Studies show that since added hormones were introduced into our milk supply, girls are starting puberty at much younger ages than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Where the norm when I was growing up was 11 to 13 years of age, it has now become age 8 and up.
“So what is the big deal?”, many of us have wondered. It would seem on the surface that it is just something girls would have to deal with at a younger age, they would have to deal with it sooner or later anyway, right? Beyond not being able to enjoy a few more years of being a child (which should be enough reason alone), the effects on our daughters' health later in life is frightening.
Here are just a few of the effects of early onset puberty in girls. Take a look...
- Cancer. The earlier the age of first menarche, the greater a girl's risk of developing several types of cancer, particularly breast cancer, due mainly to greater lifetime exposure to the hormone estrogen.
- Menstrual and fertility problems. Increased lifetime exposure to estrogen is also associated with an increased risk of problems such as PMS, menstrual cramps, uterine fibroids, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, fibrocystic breasts, and more.
- Stunted growth. Early puberty is often associated with advanced skeletal age, meaning that a 6 year old girl might have the bone structure of an 8 or 9 year old. Although they might initially be taller than slower-developing girls, girls who experience precocious puberty are likely to end up shorter, because after the initial growth spurt or spurts, puberty triggers the body to stop growing up and start filling out. Slower developing girls have more time to grow tall than the average girl who experiences precocious puberty.
- Lesser brain development. Unfortunately, puberty also eventually triggers the end of brain development. Again, this gives girls who experience early onset puberty less time to develop to their full physical potential before growth ceases.
- Depression, anxiety, and stress. Being different is hard on both early and late developers, and combined with the mood swings associated with puberty, many girls who experience precocious puberty also have problems coping and may need extra emotional support from parents, teachers, and other trusted adults.
- Sexual harassment. Sexual harassment of schoolchildren by other schoolchildren is a growing problem in the United States, and early developing girls are often targeted earlier and more frequently than other students, which can exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other mental problems.
- Sexual precocity. Girls with precocious puberty are often treated as sexual beings earlier than other girls and may be targeted more by older boys and even adult men than slower developing girls. They also have to deal earlier with their own sexual feelings. Girls who experience early puberty may be more likely to engage in early sexual activity, increasing their risk of teenage pregnancy or STDs.
So I switched to organic milk. Was that enough? Absolutely not, because it doesn't end there.
When I met Brian, he talked a lot about the importance of organic foods all the way around, and when I mentioned taking the girls to McDonald's, I thought he might possibly have heart failure. He insisted that we watch a film called Super Size Me. So I found the documentary online, we went and grabbed our Value/Happy Meals at the drive-thru, and sat down to watch it. By the end of the film, both myself and my girls found ourselves not very “happy” at all with what we had just consumed, and the value that we began to see was not in the cheap yet tasty meals we'd just eaten, but in ourselves instead.
My children sat in awe and looked at the little toys that came in their boxes for the first time through different eyes. They realized that they, and I, had been bribed into contributing to a food industry that is beyond evil and signing away what could be years of our lives if we didn't change something, by a little toy that was worth about $1. That was all it took. And we had considered ourselves to be fairly smart people up until that moment...
The girls got paper, markers, and pencils, and went about expressing themselves the way that children do, through coloring. They made signs that had the golden arches logo on them, with a circle around it and a line drawn through it. They then brought them to me, and pledged to be done with that food forever. I had never been more proud of them, as their maturity that day soared beyond that of most adults I know.
More to be continued in the next blog...until then, watch that film. If you don't, you'll wish you had.
Copyright © 2011 Anita Brown
Super Size Me can be watched free at Hulu.com. Go to http://www.hulu.com/watch/63283/super-size-me
No comments:
Post a Comment