Why Kids Are Starting Puberty Earlier Than Ever Before

Hey everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe Show, where each and every week I cover the science and principles behind how to grow in body, mind, and spirit, and take your health and your life to the next level. On today's episode, we're going to be exploring a crisis when it comes to puberty.

The New York Times recently put out an article titled, Puberty Starts Earlier Than It Used To, and No One Knows Why. Well, actually, I know why. I'm going to be sharing why. Kids are developing sometimes 5 years earlier now, which is causing them to age faster, which could take years off of their life, causing numerous health issues. And I'm gonna point out exactly why that is.

So here's the reality. It's true, the average age that children start going through puberty is getting earlier and earlier and earlier. And I'm gonna go through the research that proves why today. So coming up on today's episode, I'm gonna go through some shocking statistics on this topic And what it means for these kids and your kids. And I'll also be sharing what we can do to stop this.

Hey, also make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss an episode. Just know if you subscribe, it allows this podcast to get more popular and allows me to bring on better, more prominent guests for you to learn from. So thanks so much for being part of the show and helping me grow it and influence others. Thank you. For the good. All right, so let's dive in.

Here, here is study number 1. An analysis of international studies from 1977 to 2013 showed that girls started puberty about 3 months earlier every single decade. And for boys, research has shown a 15-fold increase in precocious, which is early puberty, over the last 20 years. And in 1968, the average age of voice break was 15. So this is a normal thing in puberty. A voice as boy cracks.

That would be, uh, that was the average age around 1968 was 15. In 2019, it was 13 years of age. Now here's the crazy part. In the 18th century, so a little bit over 100 years ago, it was recorded to be around the ages of 17 or 18. If you do the math here pretty easily and you say it could have gone from 18 to 13, that means that boys today are aging 5 years faster.

They're hitting puberty 5 years earlier than they did back in the 1800s. And the same study showed a 6-fold increase in precocious puberty in girls over the same period of time. Now, you can see here in this graphic, which is very telling, you can see up here, You know, around that 16 and a half.

Now, this is for women, the age of menses, as you can see here, closer to 16 years of age or 16 and a half. And all the way, puberty is happening earlier and earlier and earlier, now around 12 and a half years of age. Now, that was in 2000.

So now, and I can tell you, when I ran my functional medicine clinic, I was surprised when families would come in and we would start to see young girls hitting their menstrual cycle closer to, uh, menses around 12 years old when it should be around 16 and a half. So this means again that a lot of young girls are aging 4 to 5 years earlier and hitting puberty 4 to 5 years earlier than they should.

And there's major health consequences from this. So doctors across the world have also reported a rise in early puberty cases during the pandemic. So we saw a magnification during the pandemic. And a study in Italy found an increase in new diagnoses of precocious puberty due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And here's what they correlated it with: the extra use of electronic devices and the increases in stress and obesity. In 2020, there was a 108% increase in patients who were referred for suspected precocious puberty. Now, study number 2 here is this.

Developmental psychologist Jane Mendo reports that girls who get their periods early are especially subject to distress and more likely than others to suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, body dissatisfaction, substance abuse, suicidality, depression that extends into adulthood, and they're more likely to be singled out for sexual harassment at school.

And some studies show a link to long-term health risks, including breast cancer and testicular cancer, uterine cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, and shorter adult height. So they don't grow to their full height and don't develop, especially this is important for athletics.

Here are a few things I want to get into that we're seeing may be causing these issues. And foods grown with exposure to chemicals and pesticides are a culprit, according to a study out of Denmark.

Daughters born to mothers who were exposed to a mixture of pesticides during their first trimester of pregnancy experienced first signs of puberty significantly earlier, on average at 8 or 9 years of age, than daughters born to non-exposed female workers on an average of 10.5 years of age. We're talking about a 2.5-year difference alone from mothers who are exposed to pesticides during pregnancy.

That's not even counting what the child is fed growing up. And residues of growth hormones in conventional milk were up to 20 times higher than that found in organic dairy products. Did you hear that? If you buy organic milk, Versus conventional. Conventional dairy has 20 times more growth hormones, chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics in it, specifically growth hormone, than in organic milk.

And antibiotic residues were detected in 60% of conventional milk samples. So we know— and listen, here's some of the antibiotics that are found in conventional dairy.

So listen, if you go out to almost any conventional, uh, store and you buy milk that's not organic, here are the chemicals and the antibiotics you're going to find in your milk supply: benzopenicillin, tetracycline, oxytetracycline, chlorotetracycline, um, and streptomycin. Listen, there's a lot more on this list. You can see some of them here, but let me just point this out.

A lot of these— some of these are antibiotics that are used for acne. Some of them are used to treat a A lot of different types of infections, specifically, typically fungal and bacterial infections as well. These are all found in the milk supply, all of these. And so this is why consuming organic natural foods is so important.

If not, what it's doing to our kids is causing them to age more quickly, have anxiety, depression, having— we talked about acne, a lot of other health issues if they're consuming conventional meat, dairy, or any conventional food products and processed foods are also going to contribute to this, but especially foods that are sprayed with chemicals. Now, here's another big cause.

Obesity has been linked to earlier periods in girls since the 1970s. Numerous studies since have established that girls who are overweight or obese tend to start their periods earlier than girls who have an average normal weight. In one decade-long study, nearly 1,200 girls in the state of Louisiana found that those children who were obese had earlier periods.

Now, here's why this is, and you may not realize this, but body fat acts as an organ. Did you know that? So like your liver or your heart or your lungs? Well, body fat acts as an organ, and body fat secretes growth hormones and chemicals that cause you to age faster. It causes something called inflammaging.

So you age more quickly with this inflammation due to obesity from insulin levels being too high. So just know if your child is overweight, especially due to the foods they're exposed to and stress levels, they're aging more quickly. So they're going to hit puberty more quickly.

In this study as well, I want to point out, or another study, the girls with the earliest breast development in a 2009 study had the highest urine levels of phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors that are used to make plastics more durable. These phthalates are found in fragrant shampoos.

So even the shampoos your kids are using, if they're not natural, perfumes, deodorants, deodorants have other issues like aluminum in them, toothpastes, which those are another problem, they have fluoride, nail polish, sunscreen, and lip balm. Now think about how many girls are using fragrant shampoos, perfumes, deodorants, they're using toothpaste, nail polish is very toxic, sunscreen, lip balm.

All of these have these phthalates which have been shown to increase rates of puberty or hitting puberty earlier. Here's another surprising one. Stress is also a puberty accelerator with familial disruption, including father absenteeism. So if the father's not around or they don't have supportive family members, that increases stress. Which causes children to age faster.

This is one of the biggest stressors. Also divorce rates. If parents go through a divorce, it's much more stress on the children according to this study. And single-parent families have rapidly escalated in many countries compared to the past.

Now know this, some of these things are out of your control, but what you can do for both yourself and your kids is do everything you can to eliminate the chemicals and create a stable family environment that lowers your kids' stress rates. Now listen, there's good stress, right? Athletics and your kids learning and growing, we want some good stress.

But negative stress around relationship tension and around chemicals and obesity to where the body is secreting hormones that cause inflammaging, inflammation that causes them to age faster, This is the culprit of early pubescence in children today. Here are some things that you can do in order to help your kids.

Or listen, maybe you don't have kids yet, or maybe you're a grandparent, but you just want to spread this truth because listen, you might save someone's life. You may transform someone's life by sharing this information with them because we're talking about millions and millions of kids hitting puberty. 5 Years earlier than they should. Think about that.

Many kids, according to the 1800s, should be hitting puberty around 17 or 18, and now they're hitting it around 12 or 13 years of age. It's crazy. So here are some things you can do. Number 1, eat organic to avoid hormones and pesticides in your food, especially meat products, dairy products, and the dirty dozen. Okay? Meat and dairy products.

Now listen, I'm a big fan of wild organic meat, Wild-caught fish, pastured eggs, and raw organic fermented dairy. Okay? But I am not a fan of any conventional meat and any conventional dairy products because of the toxic load. There's something called the law of bioaccumulation.

If you eat meat and dairy regularly, what'll happen is all of the— here's the principle, remember this, you are what you eat. Yeah. What they ate, or you are what you eat, what they had injected into them. So 80% of the antibiotics given today in the United States are not given to humans. They're given to livestock like cows.

So we are getting the majority of our antibiotic exposure not by taking conventional antibiotics, but by our meat and dairy supply that has all of this antibiotic residue. As I showed there, the dairy products, all of those different antibiotics are found in conventional dairy products, and some of them are going to be found in meat supply as well.

So know, by simply changing up and buying organic meat products and dairy, you can radically improve your health and the health of your children. And again, eat meat, eat wild organic, don't eat anything conventional. Number 2, children should be more active. Gen Z spends an average of 7 hours a day on their phones. Think about that. 7 Hours a day on their phones. This is according to studies.

Being active will reduce obesity and in turn help to prevent early puberty. And listen, what I would do is limit children's screen time to maybe an hour a day in the afternoon, and that's it. And also, what should they be exposing themselves to? Things that are going to help them grow and develop, or else don't give them a tablet or a phone at all. In, in junior high or high school.

I mean, that's what, when I see the parents who I see really raising up great kids, that's, they're, they're very, very set on either not having kids on social media at all or having very strict boundaries and also helping dictate what they're exposing themselves to on a regular basis. Think about this. We've heard the principle, you are what you eat.

Now that includes growth hormones and everything else, but also children are what they consume, what they watch on TV. The music they listen to, the screen, what, what they're looking at on their screen on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook. And so you really wanna make sure that they're feeding themselves things that are going to help them also reduce stress, right?

This is a major stressor. What happens is this dopamine, they're, they're, they're, your kids get on this, uh, dopamine addiction and this continues to cause stress levels and cortisol to be high, causing them to age more quickly. Yeah.

Most people don't realize how when stress hormones get elevated, like norepinephrine and cortisol and many of the other stress hormones, when stress hormones are high, that causes inflammation, which leads to something called inflammaging, where you age more quickly.

So your children, you really need to be aware of how much screen time they're having a week and do everything you can to get them outside. Children being outside is one of the greatest things they can also do to detox their body. When you're indoors, you don't have many plants. There aren't a lot of things that support detoxification.

When children are outside in nature, your body can naturally detoxify at a higher level, which can turn back the clock on their aging or pause them aging so quickly. And step number 3, avoid chemicals.

Doing everything to support your kids and getting natural deodorant and natural toothpaste that's free of the chemicals as much as you possibly can, and avoiding things, as I mentioned, like the phthalates. These You know, in order to avoid those, non-toxic shampoo, as I mentioned, deodorant, toothpaste, and everything else will help your kids tremendously.

And listen, if your child does start puberty early, talk with them and make sure they feel supported. Many kids who experience early puberty become antisocial in their teen years because they feel like they can't relate to their friends and classmates. At their same age.

And at the same time, start taking these actions now to help slow down the clock on their aging and to make them feel more accepted and included as well. So remember these solutions. Number 1, eat organic. Number 2, reduce exposure to chemicals. Number 3, reduce screen time. And number 4, spend more time outdoors in nature.

If you can support your kids in doing this, they're going to age more slowly, live longer, and have more energy. Much, much better health. Hey, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on early puberty. Did you know that a lot of kids today are aging and hitting puberty up to 5 years earlier compared to the 1800s? And have you noticed this?

Again, I noticed this when I was in practice, how early children were starting to hit their— hitting pubescence. And I want to know, hey, have you seen this? Have you been around high schoolers recently and junior highers and actually seen this? I think a lot of us have experienced this.

And again, one of the best things you can do is share this video, share this podcast, because more people need to know the truth about what chemicals are doing to ourselves and our children. They're causing us to age more quickly and causing major, major health issues. I want to say, hey, thanks so much for tuning into this week's episode. Of the Dr. Josh Axe Show.

Remember, each and every week I cover the science and principles and how to grow your body, your mind, and your spirit, and take your health and your life to the next level. And if you're not subscribed, make sure to subscribe, like, and share this.

And remember, every time you subscribe and share, you're making this channel more popular, which allows me to bring on more high-profile guests so we can transform more lives in the process, including yours and mine. I want to say, hey, thanks so much for watching. Thanks so much for listening. Can't wait to see you on the next episode.