Messing with reproductive milestones is huge. It’s really messing with mother nature. In a big bad way. So when little girls start developing breast buds at 6 months old like reported by reproductive endocrinologists in Puerto Rico, this is not good. Or when so many more young women go into peri-menopause earlier, which they now do 2 to 15 years earlier, this threatens the family lineage as well as the woman’s personal health.

But when a woman enters menopause earlier this is like an eclipse of the hormonal sun. Her whole health is under siege prematurely including her brain, bones, heart and her life mojo and umph. On the other hand, we are now living longer. So her quality of life is threatened like a big bag hungry Siberian tiger scratching at her life’s door.

I have been reporting that the science is clearing saying this since I wrote Hormone Deception (How our environment is threatening our hormones and what to do to protect ourselves and our families.) It was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1999/2000.

But I was shocked and pleased to see that the conservative e-magazine that reaches over 5 million health professionals, today, Medscape, had an article about it.

This article is called Environmental Endocrine Disruptors: Should We Be Concerned? It’s by James H. Liu, MD from the major society on women’s hormones that gives guidelines to female health care providers, called The North American Menopause Society, whose acronym is NAMS.

Should we be scared? They say, yes, we should be very scared.

Women exposed to more endocrine disrupting chemicals (which we now swim in a soup of them on a daily basis) go into menopause significantly earlier than women less exposed. Altering this major life milestone, is of enormous significance.

This article was based on researchers examining 111 endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) with a focus on known reproductive toxicants or chemicals with half-lives longer than a year. These EDCs were associated with a mean age of menopause 1.9 years to 3.8 years earlier in women with high levels than in women with lower levels: β-hexachlorocyclohexane, mirex, p,pˈ-dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene, 1,2,3,4, 6,7,8-heptachlorodibenzofuran, mono-(2-ethyl-5-hydroxyhexyl) and mono-(2-ethyl-5-oxohexyl) phthalate, and polychlorinated biphenyl congeners -70, -99, -105, -118, -138, -153, -156, -170, and -183.

Conclusion: Women exposed to EDCs were up to six times more likely to be postmenopausal than women who were not exposed to EDCs.

Bad news: Be scared.
Good news: You can take action.

With being aware you can reduce exposure.
Also, you can get some of this stuff out of you.
Fireman exposed to nasty chemicals on the job have been professional detoxed for years. I share their protocols and other guidelines. In my book the last third is a set of exact steps how to do this and room by room tours of home, office and super market cart, and life style hints to keep your family safer.

There are many avenues to reduce exposure. And in the future I say there will/should be insurance reimbursed detox centers when wanna be parents will go to get detoxed prior to conception.

The egg and sperm are highly lipid filled and everybody loves fat, including these EDCs.

  1. So egg and sperm are the 1st dirty environments that have to be cleaned up to protect the developing organs, especially the brain, of the fetus.
    2. EDCs in the womb are the next environment and set the stage for what is now called the fetal origin of adult disease. Much of our future adulthood health is set in this pristine womb and the chemicals that swim within the dolphinous fetus, influence it’s future.
    3. The next environment is the breast milk as breast feeding mom’s detox about 80% of their life-time exposure to EDCs to their thirsty slurping precious new babies.

So the EDC beat goes on. But one of the adult affects of EDC exposure is changing the time, making it earlier, when women enter menopause and leave reproductive/high hormone years behind. This is a major side effect of the result of technology and the over 80,000 new chemicals introduced into our planet since after WWII.

It’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature. She doesn’t like it and it does not bode well for our future health outcomes. Unless with awareness we take action.

We will have to live a lot better with a lot more conscious elbow grease creating better epigenetic modifications of our disrupted genes, to get our way out of this darkening scenario. We can do it. But not just sitting back on the couch and munching on more chips in plastic bags melted with plastic shrunk cheese slices.

This article by NAMs says avoid foods in plastic, avoid refined foods. I remember when I first wrote Hormone Deception nobody was really comfy giving precautionary action measures yet as the science was still being unveiled. But I interviewed many scientists who said they wouldn’t say it out loud or in print but in their homes they only used organic milk and didn’t microwave plastic.

So being one of the thought leaders of functional medicine I have a bent to say what we can do. And it’s come to pass. But you have to do it to make a difference..

It is becoming obvious that we must become mindful not just in meditation, but in exposure and in detox. We can and must make a difference.

And there you have it.