Lyle Hurd: We’re talking to Dr. Sherrill Sellman, author of What Women Must Know to Protect their Daughters from Breast Cancer. I would like to expand that to say what mothers and fathers and educators and public officials need to know. I wonder if you can give me some idea—you mentioned that precocious puberty is a major problem, starts with young women that are sometimes 8-years-old, 6-years-old, it affect young men. Why? What do you attribute this to? Is something going on in our society or environment? What’s the precursor, or why are we having these problems? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: Well, first of all, I’d like to say that if a family goes to the doctor, seeing this condition in their children, the doctor will most likely say, “we don’t know why this is happening”. But there are some known causes that have been attributed to this early development of pushing puberty into young children at an early age. Let’s look at some of those things. Well, let’s look at some of those things. Well, first of all, we are well aware that there are chemicals in our environment that are called hormone mimics—these are estrogenic chemicals that can actually go right through the placenta barrier and enter the womb. Many of these chemicals that have hormone disrupting effects can alter the development of the fetus—can either cause reproductive abnormalities while still developing in the womb or can predispose these children to be highly sensitive to these chemicals and to kind of simulating estrogen levels when they’re out of the womb and developing, in critical times. So, these hormone mimics actually can fuel the early development, cause aberrations, cause genetic issues—can alter things. So we are surrounded in a sea of these hormones that are stimulating and pushing us to have high levels of these hormone disrupting chemicals in our body. In fact, what we need to appreciate is that there is no longer a child born in the United States that doesn’t have synthetic chemicals in their body. Lyle Hurd: With 247, isn’t that what the average is? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: There was a study that looked at the cords of the umbilical blood of newborns and they found an average of 200 and something—synthetic chemicals in blood of newborns. So these newborns are swimming in a sea of a toxic soup in the womb that are programming us in many ways; and particularly they’re programming our reproductive nature and our hormonal nature while we’re still in the womb. We need to remember that a female fetus has all the eggs that she will ever have to produce her children. So we have— Lyle Hurd: I’m sorry, can you repeat that please? Dr. Sherrill Sellman: Okay. So if a woman is pregnant with a female fetus, has a baby in the womb, that baby has the full compliment of all the eggs she will ever have. So in a sense, a pregnant woman with a daughter—there are 3 generations of women living in that pregnant woman. 3 generations: the pregnant woman, her daughter, and these future, these eggs, okay. In fact, there are studies showing us that exposure to some chemicals such as bisphenol A, and bisphenol A is a synthetic estrogen—a very potent estrogenic chemical. bisphenol A is put into plastics. Bisphenol A is found in plastic water bottles, for instance. It is the plastic lining of tin cans. This leeches into the water and into the food. We have found—studies have found that bisphenol A is a potent hormone mimic at a million times less than what is considered a danger by the Environmental Protection Agency. A million times or more, more powerful—minuet, minuet amounts are hormone disrupters and have been—this type of chemical—have been associated with developing precocious puberty. So, creating these hormonal levels, we’re creating infertility problems. We’re creating a predisposition to fibroids, to ovarian cysts, to a range of hormonal issues. So we’re finding that first of all the chemicals in the environment are a major role. Then we have to look at diet. And when we l