ASU2003

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1529765/posts

But what effect is all that extra estrogen having?

Is it causing guys to have puberty later and have less testosterone?

http://health.yahoo.com/news/168226

Is it causing girls to enter puberty earlier and develop faster?

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2610700

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2610353


Although I'm not sure that there is really a correlation, I wonder if they have seen the same decrease in testosterone and early puberty in countries that have a lower usage of birth control (with the pills that have estrogen and progesterone). But it is interesting to see that the African-American girls start earlier than the Caucasian ones? Do more African-American girls drink water that has estrogen in it? Or is it something totally different (like maybe obesity causes higher levels of estrogen*), and since that estrogen gets expelled in urine which goes to the waste water treatment plant that can't get rid of it, it gets consumed by someone else making their testosterone decrease and estrogen increase(causing the health problems).

Now I am going to sound like one of those fluorine in the water people. But, if it wasn't possible to remove this extra estrogen from the water supply, would they tell us?

Maybe I am just paranoid that in 50 years we will see this happening more and more.

* http://www.endotext.org/obesity/obes...ityframe12.htm
35. Schneider G, Kirschner MA, Berkowitz R, et al: Increased estrogen production in obese men. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 48:633-638, 1979
38. Kley HK, Solbach HG, McKinnan JC: Testosterone decrease and estrogen increase in male patient with obesity. Acta Endocrinol 91:553, 1979

Kali

Very interesting.
How about this for a reason why the above things are happening to little girls and adult men and causing obesity all over the world. I bet the places where they don't use Prednisone- people are not obese.

PREDNISONE
Given from birth into adulthood for varied medical conditions; given in small doses to very high doses.

I've even noticed a lot of men these days have boobs. Never did before unless they were extremely obese.

The problem is that the medical field is not going to give up using steroids and so they deny that steroids cause such problems. It is a miracle drug but can have long term negative side effects. Some of which I'm living with right now.

__________________
"According to the map we've only gone four inches" -Dumb and Dumber

Lizra

I always thought the hormones they give dairy cows to make tons of milk was messing things up....but what do I know!

__________________
Happy atheist

Willravel

Diet is almost certianally responsible for the drop of testosterone in males. I know because I'm on the testosterone diet. Mine has never been more regular. I do think that hormones in cattle, poultry, and other common meats and even dairy could be responsible for the ever decreasing age of children entering puberty. I think it represents a dangerous prescedent, and needs to be VERY carefully studied as quickly as possible, as the effects could be detrimental to our reproductive processes.

Or it could just be that we're evolving in order to reproduce earlier.

ASU2003

I think those get offset by the testosterone they give beef cattle to grow faster and have more meat.

Lizra

Nah...they just mix up to make a F'd up chemical cocktail.......

__________________
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timothy4testes

all hormone treatments are bad but who cares you can have unprotected sex with strange men and wont get pregnant

Gilda

Estrogen in water is at such a low concentration that it's going to have no effect on testosterone levels. Hormone production in the body does work on a negative feedback loop, and ingestion of massive amounts of estrogen will significantly reduce the production of lutenizing hormone, which intern will reduce the production of gonadotrophin releasing hormone, which in males will reduce the amount of testosterone produced. This would take massive amounts of estrogen, enough to make the person ingesting it physically ill, perhaps as much as 12-16mg of estradiol a day, or double what a transsexual takes to induce female secondary sexual characteristics. The amount of estrogen in water is also a trace amount of what the average male already poduces naturally through chemical conversion of testosterone. It can't be having the effect indicated because a man's body already produces more estrogen by several orders of magnitude than is being ingested.

It likewise would make little sense to assume that girls' puberty is affected. If the amount of estrogen were enough to produce an early puberty, we'd likely be seeing a much larger percentage of boys at about the same age displaying partial development of female sexual secondary characteristics. No such increase has been evident.

timothy4testes: Not all hormone treatments are bad. There's really no evidence that animals treated harm humans, and humans often benefit greatly from the treatment.

__________________
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Kali

Sounds like you got all this information from a text. Try talking to people who have adrenal problems, they'll tell you how just a small increase in hormones (any kind) can have a noticeable physical and mental change.

I luv you people who have no clue what's going on in the outside world. And I also don't believe the reports that say taking small amounts of a hormone causes cancer.

__________________
"According to the map we've only gone four inches" -Dumb and Dumber

JustJess

Okay, but adrenal hormones are entirely different thing than the hormones that Gilda is discussing. And if it were from a text... that makes it wrong? Information doesn't appear in texts in a vacuum. And she has a transsexual sister - do you think she hasn't done a LOT of research on this stuff?

My point is, you having a rough time with adrenal hormones is an entirely different thing than having trouble with estrogen.

__________________
My heart knows me better than I know myself, so I'm gonna let it do all the talkin'.

Gilda

Most of what I report there comes from real world experience, from having done a lot of research into the way hormones work, particularly the effect of estrogen on physically normal males, personal experience related to my sister's sexual reassignment and talking to other MTF transsexuals of varied ages, talking to the endocrinologists, gynecologists, and surgeons who treated my sister, and from my wife, who is a nurse.

The question was related to a general trend towards early puberty in girls and lower testosterone levels in men. This implies that whatever is causing these effects is having a broad effect on the population, that people with no apparent physical disorders are showing these changes.

I have no doubt that what you say is true, that people with adrenal disorders are sensitive to much smaller fluctuations in hormonal levels. That's not what we were talking about here, which is the effect of ingested hormones on the development of otherwise normal girls and grown men. There are too many other factors to control for to blame trace amounts of ingested estrogen.

__________________
I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that.

~Steven Colbert

Willravel

Have there been any conclusive studies linking hormones in our meat with any effects, be they positive or negative, in humans? I've read a lot of speculation over the past decade or so, but I have yet to see a conclusive yes or no from a reliable study.

hrandani

Gilda while normally I would not choose an argument with you I have taken several courses (Human Biology, Human Development, Embryology, Biochemistry, Organic Chemistry & Endocrinology) which touched on this subject (some at some great length) for a BS in Microbiology, and every single textbook, journal article and model the professors put forth contradicted what you are saying here.

Nearly everyone was in consensus, except for two scientists that were on the board of a major chemical manufacturer that was pumping this shit into the water, that the amount of hormones we are putting in the water from birth control, animal treatment, and the huge number of compounds that act as estrogen once in the body are severely affecting male sperm count, and causing rises in breast cancer as well. There were even two researchers in Britain who were wondering if the estrogen compounds were affecting the proportion of gay men, whose brain structure was more like that of a woman, and brain structure is determined in the womb and cannot be changed. Thus sexual orientation is biological. Anyway, they had been following this trend since the 70's, and it is a fact that in many areas where there is normal wastewater exposure, fish and reptiles have been exhibiting severe sexual side effects, e.g. no penis for the males, or males turning into females due to the high levels of estrogen and estrogen-like compounds in the water. Two years ago I took an exam which had us draw out the entire pathway of sex steroid production and conversion, and explain in elaborate, graphic detail why progesterone-like compounds were fucking up sperm counts and creating micropenii. I would like to be a good poster and ferret out sources for this, or at least elaborate more thoroughly, but I'm afraid I don't have the time right now.

I'm baffled that you have information that told you otherwise. But faced with the decision that everything I've learned in the past 3 years is wrong or you might be mistaken, I'm forced to conclude that perhaps you may be mistaken. So there it is.

In addition, and this is not verified, but I am pretty sure I remember hearing that most people vastly overestimate how much testosterone they need. One guy induced puberty in his two toddlers just from the contact they got from his hands from his earlier daily self-treatment of testosterone cream.

It seems you've been fed a lot of information from MD's and companies, and because they have very different goals from environmentalists (who I admittedly despise, because they are self-righteous prigs) and chemists, it appears to me that you were innocently misled. Antibiotics and steroids in our meat is incredibly harmful in the long run because the sex hormone pathways in nearly all of the bigger animals are identical. (Antibiotics are bad because of this little thing called evolution, but that's for another day). However few people are interested in the long run.

The human body has an absolute limit for how much sex hormone it is willing to suffer through, and high estrogen is a very bad thing, as anyone who was on a high dose of birth control can attest. High levels can cause incredible amounts of cellular stress and vastly increase risks of cancer and disrupting the reproductive pathway. While it might be a good solution for sex change/ psychological perspective, it's incredibly stupid, wasteful, and dangerous from a biological point of view.

Anyone who's studied embryonic development can attest that very small levels of hormones or hell, even chemicals in general can lead to massive differences in the fetus later on. And that's really what this is concerning, not full grown men and women, because you can only see the difference in vast numbers such as rising breast cancer rates, and few real 'uh oh' scenarios, but what happens to babies bathed in these steroids that are present during embryonic development later on when they're grown up. That is a well documented and researched phenomenon and the results are universally very negative.

Gilda

Edit: Let's just say I'm going to remain skeptical until I see evidence of a causal link from a reputable peer-review journal.

__________________
I'm against ending blackness. I believe that everyone has a right to be black, it's a choice, and I support that.

~Steven Colbert

analog

Yep. Individuals can make a lot of observations that seem ok on the surface, but I take things on more than the words of individuals. Anything in medicine really needs the peer-review process to be certain of much of anything.

ASU2003

I would be interested in looking at the results of a study. I am one of those armchair environmentalists that don't like it when companies or people screw with the environment and don't tell the public what impact their product causes.

hrandani

http://www.reproduction-online.org/c...full/132/4/527

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=14317888

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=14288340

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...t_uids=5950843

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=14277673

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/A...-Guillette.htm

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/chapters.htm

This organization seems to have a large amount of information on the subject, though I am not familiar with them and they do seem to have an environmentalist bias. Then again, everyone has a bias. You just need to account that in the reckoning.

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2...ticide2005.htm


There are reams of evidence available, from both sides. From all sorts of sources, from all types of researchers. This new shade of affecting humans is an old debate, older than global warming. But like global warming, despite the obfuscation there's a clear, but complicated answer neither party likes to admit exists. I don't understand why you want to engage in a debate on this through citation of peer review journals, which are not written for laymen, are very biased to influence with the journals, typically seek sensation or glory, or at least interesting points in the field. More frequently studies written up in peer journals revolve around small, provable experiments and do not outline in great terms the entire field. These basics we are discussing are all old, essential, and unremarkable. This is textbook material and that is precisely where I learned it. When I first began to read this board, people attacked and mocked Host for his well researched posts, which I greatly admired, and so I dislike being called out for lack of documentation. Other people outright admit they skip over lengthy posts, or posts with links. So here's a shorter summary in light of that. Which nobody will look at or click.

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/Basics/chapters.htm

Any doctor who tells you that it's ok to take large amounts, or even medium amounts, of sex hormones and not expect any negative repercussions is telling an outright falsehood. But that's ok because doctors lie - all the time. They have to. It's their job to be reassuring, to let the patient know everything's going to be ok - even when they are fairly sure it isn't. The body is incredibly complicated. All forms of life are. It is impossible to say someone is going to be alright on such medication, or after such procedure, but that is exactly what doctors are expected to do, repeatedly. Paternalistic, but that's how it's taught. Doctors frequently do not bother with the details, they try their best and move on with their life, the details are for the scientists in their laboratories and the malpractice committee. Yes, these are blanket statements, and they are not going to always be true.

Everybody knows about the effects of castration, most have heard about man-tits and other unpleasant side effects you get from hormone therapy when you lose a testicle. Sex hormones are enormously important for regulating a wide variety of bodily functions, even post development.

All mammals, possibly all animals are very sensitive to sex hormones during development, infancy, and childhood. Sex hormones alter many portions of development, including brain chemistry with regards to reproduction, sexual aggression, and sexual organ operation.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...lligators.html

This is a particularly interesting study, Lake Apopka where a large amount of chemicals were spilled and found to affect wildlife in regards to sexual development. There are more such examples, including the one lab where they were using a plastic to study breast cancer samples and their control was showing rampant growth, which should have only happened in the presence of estrogen. Guess what, after months of testing to find the contamination the lab found the plastic had an estrogen-mimic compound in it, and the company (Dow? I forget) hadn't mentioned the change in their catalogue. Water in all cities is not treated adequately to filter out enough chemicals.

http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/hormones/sabotage3.html

I am willing to go back and transpose sections from my human developmental biology, sexual biochemistry textbooks if you are really interested. This is a non-debate for me, like global warming. Whether or not it is truly a measurably negative effect that chemicals dumped in the water or the air are hurting us, and our environment, I do not believe companies should have the free reign to do such. That is to say in more moralistic terms, whether it is horribly harmful or not at all to humans, it is still pollution and it is still wrong.

ASU2003

I didn't skip over your lengthy post, and I am happy you posted it.

But, it is late right now, and I need to get some sleep. I will read the links tomorrow.

All I know is that there is a lot of stuff about chemistry and biology that we don't know, and trying to get a unbiased, legitimate study is very hard when it comes to the environment and corporations.