Diet taboos for precocious puberty

There are only two types of food that really need to be strictly avoided - substandard ingredients illegally contaminated with exogenous hormones and functional supplements with unknown ingredients.； Most of the so-called "taboos" circulated on the Internet, such as soy milk, fried chicken, and out-of-season fruits and vegetables, have no solid evidence. There is no need to excessively restrict food or even fast, but it may easily affect children's normal nutritional intake.

Last week, I was helping organize follow-up cases at the pediatric endocrinology clinic, and I happened to come across a typical example: my grandma dragged her 8-year-old granddaughter to the consultation. She said that the child started to develop breasts six months ago. She insisted that the child had sneaked out and ate half a fried chicken leg a few days ago. She cried and asked the doctor to prescribe hormone-removing medicine. After checking, it was discovered that the problem was that the "Children's Growth Factor" bought by WeChat Moments, which the grandmother used to make for her children every day, illegally added estrogen analogues. After taking it for more than half a year, not only did the bone age exceed one and a half years, but it also induced pseudoprecocious puberty. As for the half of the fried chicken leg, he was simply taking the blame.

Let’s talk about the pitfalls that really need to be walked around. The first is poultry and aquatic products from unknown sources and without quarantine certificates. Don’t believe the gimmicks of “wild eels” and “wild turtles”. Many illegally farmed poultry products use illegal additives to accelerate ripening. The exogenous hormones remaining in such ingredients are the real culprit that may induce precocious puberty. Previously, we have encountered cases where parents gave their children unqualified quail eggs bought at roadside stalls, and breast development occurred within half a month. Another category is various supplements - whether they are children's health products under the banner of "growing taller" or "enhancing immunity", or supplements such as snow clams, royal jelly, collagen, and bird's nests that mothers eat themselves. Don't feed them to your children casually. This kind of food itself contains estrogen-like ingredients, or is illegally added with hormones by unscrupulous merchants. Eating them in a short period of time may make the child have a good appetite and grow quickly. In fact, it will overdraw the development space in advance, and it will be too late to regret it when the bone age is closed.

As for those "taboo foods" that everyone talks about so much, there has always been a lot of controversy. Take soy milk, for example. Many nutritionists of the older generation did recommend giving it to children less in the past few years, believing that the soy isoflavones in it are phytoestrogens and can induce precocious puberty. However, the latest "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents" and the Pediatric Endocrinology Consensus have long made it clear: the activity of soy isoflavones is only one-ten thousandth to one-thousandth of human estrogen. Normally, if you drink one or two cups of soy milk a day, the amount you consume will not even reach the onset of action threshold. Unless you drink soy milk as water, three to four liters a day may have an impact. There are also fruits and vegetables that are out of season. Many people say that they use ripening agents. In fact, the ethephon used to accelerate ripening is a plant hormone, which only acts on plants. It cannot activate hormone receptors when entering the human body. Last year, I met a parent who was afraid that the out-of-season fruits and vegetables contained hormones, so he did not feed his children strawberries and watermelons for a whole year. As a result, the child still had precocious puberty. In the end, it was found that it was caused by sleeping with a night light on for a long time, and it had nothing to do with half a dime of food. Of course, some conservative clinicians will suggest that if a child has already shown signs of precocious puberty or has an excessive bone age, he or she can temporarily reduce the intake of foods such as soy products and snow clams. This is a "prefer to have it" preventive measure, but for healthy children there is no need to apply it one-size-fits-all.

Oh, by the way, there is another point that many people are confused about: it is not fried chicken itself that causes precocious puberty, but eating too many high-calorie fried foods, milk tea, and cakes for a long time leads to obesity, and fat promotes the synthesis of estrogen, which increases the risk of precocious puberty. In the cases I have come across, many children who eat fried chicken once a week are fine. On the contrary, those who drink milk tea and eat cakes every day and are overweight generally have early bone ages. To put it bluntly, you have to control the quantity. There is no need to beat the fried chicken to death with a stick. After all, which child can refuse crispy fried chicken legs? Eating it once a week to satisfy your craving is better than secretly saving your pocket money to buy three-no snacks.

To be honest, you don’t have to be too tight when raising a baby. Instead of focusing on what you can’t eat or touch every day, it’s better to let your child move more, control his weight and stay up less late, and don’t always turn on the night light to sleep. It’s more effective than any taboo. If you really find that your child has signs of premature development, you should first find a doctor to find out the cause. Don't blindly fast your child by yourself. In the end, if you fail to prevent precocious puberty and end up with malnutrition in your child, then the gain outweighs the gain.