Are Hormones Making Us Shorter?

Background Info(oooo)

While looking for background information we found several websites with information similar to our study. One such site was www.health101.org. This site talked about the increase in hormones in dairy products causing girls to go through puberty and mature sooner. The website also talks about the height of women in Japan. It states that the average woman’s height began to decrease after an increase in hormones in dairy products. Another site we found was www.swedish.org. This site talked about hormones and their affects on humans. This site talks about hormones causing cancer and early puberty. Another site we found was www.centerforfoodsafety.org. This site talked about hormone in meat products and their causing of cancer and negative impacts on child development. While on Google we also found another website www. envirocancer.cornell.edu which talked about the effects of hormones on early puberty in girls.

It was much harder to try and find sites that had similar studies to our study. We switched from Google after several unsuccessful attempts to find statistical information that was similar. Using the Yahoo web browser we found several sites that had graphs and charts comparing teen’s height and weight. The site www.righthealth.com had this graph and several others discussing the reason for the changes in average heights among teens. Another site we found stated that hormones in meat and dairy products a lower puberty age (www.greaterthings.com).

There are several sites we found about groups who are concerned about the hormones in our food and the health risks they can cause. One such site was www.checnet.org which was concerned with hormones harming children and their early development. Most of these sites were not focused on the same issue as our project. Many of the sites were more concerned with hormones causing cancer than their effects on height. One site that we did find that focused on height was www.kidsource.com which discussed some of the effect of hormones on teen’s height. This site was however still not very helpful because it focused mainly on kids height and weight and not heavily on hormones effects on the two.

Most sites on Google and Yahoo were focused on how hormones effect teen’s health not how the increase in meat hormones effect teen’s height. When using the search engine we would use keywords like average height, hormones and height, and statistics of height. Many of these search engines only gave us tables and charts relating to height and weight of teens and children. They also gave us many cites that only focused on hormones and had nothing to do with teen height. Another problem we faced when researching background info was that most cites were mainly focusing on hormones and teenager nutrition rather than the altering effects they have on teen’s height and growth.

We were finally successful in finding information on average height when we used a government medical website that was about the average height, weight, and body dimensions. The website http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_008.pdf gave us many useful statistics that allowed us to come up with an average height from 1948-1950.