Tuesday 12 April 2005

Pic of the day: "Obviously all the nutrition goes to her breasts." Don't let this happen to your child! (Screenshot from the anime Bleach.)

Childhood's end?

When I was around the age of 14, I went through the (officially) religious ritual of Confirmation. In this age, it is purely a formality and an excuse to get expensive gifts, although I was already tentatively a Christian by then and saw it differently. My mother however noticed something else. She brought me a picture from her own Confirmation. The age was the same, but the children looked different. In fact, they looked like children. We did not. Pretty much everyone in my class except me were visibly young adults, no doubt able to procreate although it would be a disastrously bad idea. In contrast, none of the boys from 35 years ago could have passed for men, despite their more adult-like clothes, and few if any of the girls.

Now another generation has passed. And for every passing year I see more small girls with boobs. I believe the median age of puberty here in Norway may be 10-11 for girls and 11-12 for boys, but it is still sliding. I recently read that 8 years is now considered normal for onset of puberty in American girls, much to the shock and chagrin of their parents. Black girls are nearly a year ahead of their white classmates.

A Swedish study (from "Karolinska Instituttet", a medical university) implicates fat as the most important "risk factor" for early puberty. Notice that here in Scandinavia, we don't use growth hormones on cattle, which pretty much lops the head off one of the more popular theories from the States. Of course, it could still be some kind of newfangled environmental pollution, like pesticides or plastics. But why cross the stream to get to the water? We already know from long experience that skinny girls tend to develop later; basically it seems that the body first needs to build up a certain amount of fat before it can move on to the rest of the maturation. This makes perfect sense biologically. In the wild, humans don't grow up just to get a job. They start procreating almost at once. This is a pretty heavy duty for the woman: She needs to fuel the growth of a child not just for the 9 months leading up to birth, but at least as much for the next year or two (or even more, still in the wild). If she's skinny, even a small interruption in the food supply could lead the whole "child" project to a tragic end pretty quickly.

And yet there are chubby girls who don't start to get buds at 6-7. So fat is not everything, clearly. What is it then? Well, here's my theory. I haven't really heard this from anyone else, I think, but it makes sense to me. I think there are two alternate mechanisms to bring about puberty: Age and fat. These may either combine, or each may set a limit to how early the hormone pulse can start. So even if you are a blob of fat, if your time has not yet come, you remain a fat child. Conversely, even if you are well into your teens, if you are too skinny you don't develop. (Actually you do, but very very slowly. It's not like you can postpone puberty to 25 even if you diet every day.)

I further propose that different families and possibly different ethnic groups have different balance between the two prongs of adolescence. This would probably depend on the living conditions of their ancestors. If all you need to "occupy" a piece of land is breathe, then it makes sense to breed as fast as possible. A tribe that is fertile at 9 has a pretty big advantage over the neighboring tribe that waits until 18! On the other hand, if you have to survive harsh climate and unfriendly competitors, you may need knowledge and skill to defend yourself and your babies. The knowledge and skill at age 9 is not much to write home about. The Roman writer and historian Tacitus was impressed by the purity of Germanic boys and girls, who reputedly bathed together in the rivers even in their late teens without any untoward behavior occurring between them. Modern historians tend to brush this off as an early case of glorifying the "noble savage". But another less cheery explanation is the harsh living conditions of the Germanic tribes at the time, in a chilly climate and still with limited access to iron tools to clear the massive forests.

Depending on your family history, then, you may be predisposed to breed like a happy rabbit. Or you may be primed to reach your full stature physically and mentally before taking on the awesome responsibility of bringing forth a new generation.

***

But why the change now? Well, the current situation is one in which mindless breeding is a viable strategy. In pretty much all of the western world, poor people will be fed even if they are unable or unwilling to fend for themselves, and they are allowed to continue having kids. More often than not, they are paid extra for each child. But even so, evolution is not so fast a process that it should make a visible difference for each generation. Fat, on the other hand, is increasingly visible. People continue to get fatter and fatter. It is only natural that this spreads to the children. They may even be born fat, and never experience anything else.

It's not just small children. For each passing season, I see more and more women with astoundingly big backsides, the type we usually associate with America, but now they are starting to show up here in Norway too. Not just middle-aged women, although of course they dominate, but even the occasional high school girl will wobble along with like 25% of her body mass stuck on her backside and thighs. (There is usually some counterbalance on the front too, but this takes longer to develop and there seems to be limits.) I can only assume that when they grow up, they will become completely engulfed. There's really just one or two in the city that I can think of who have become utterly immersed in a shapeless blob of fat, but no doubt this is the trend of the future.

Of course, there is also the occasional man with such an immense beer belly that you just stand there waiting for it to drop off and slide to the ground. But from a reproductive perspective, men are expendable. There will always be enough men for all the nubile women, even if the "women" become so at the age of 6. This is, in fact, part of the problem, but I don't profess any expertise in that area. My proficiency is in quickly estimating the fat reserves of females! (Kinda kidding, although before I got my glasses around the age of 17, I used to identify people by body shape rather than by face.)

***

In conclusion, I'm not saying starve the kids; bad things come from that too. But if they are overweight when they are small, you may want to change the lifestyle of the whole family ... either that, or prepare yourself for many years of sleepless nights, not to mention worried days while the young woman is jiggling her stuff through grade school.