this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
459 points (96.7% liked)
Not The Onion
18667 readers
304 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I learned something new today.
I also did hear that girls go through puberty sooner because girls now are fatter than they used to be due to a number of factors.
Ya, my biology professor had a theory that it was because of estrogen being introduced to the water supply through birth control. After the pill was introduced breast size started increasing and girls started reaching puberty earlier. Makes sense.
So! It's actually kinda crazy how accurate your professor might be. Because progesterone, the chemical in birth control, does indeed break down into estrogen under the right circumstances. The components of broken down progesterone pass through the body via urine, enter the water system, and - this is the important part - is far too small and difficult to be collected or filtered out of the water.
So people taking birth control have absolutley added an insane amount of estrogen to the water supply. And most tap water now does have low levels of estrogen in it because people have been taking birth control for 60+ years.
In that same time, the average age of puberty has continued to fall.
So, it sounds a bit wild, but that theory is far more feasible than most realize.
There're also other endocrine disrupters in the water such as pfoa/pfos etc. We should absolutely be filtering our tap water or drinking RO water if we can.