Rising rates of premature puberty in Taiwanese girls might be the result of neurochemical changes brought about by the girls watching too many “idol dramas” featuring passionate scenes, pediatricians are claiming.
Yet-to-be-published research conducted by Cathay General Hospital pediatric department director Hou Chia-wei (侯家瑋) on 5,000 samples gathered over the past decade shows that in addition to obesity, consumption of fried food, brain damage and gonadal tumor — all factors that can lead to precocious puberty — overexposure to “idol dramas” on TV can also lead to the condition.
Idol dramas, a particular brand of televised drama in Taiwan, features pop idols or other celebrities as their major characters.
One example was that of an eight-year-old girl nicknamed Hsiao-mei (小美). Standing at 130cm and weighing 35kg, she already exhibits signs of breast development.
The doctor treating her determined that over the past year, she often joined her mother watching idol dramas, which forced her to stay up later at night. Added to the fried chicken and chicken skin she would eat while watching the programs, the behavior is believed to have led to early puberty.
Hou said Hsiao-mei’s precocious puberty was of the acquired type, the result of factors such as obesity, premature access to romantic novels or idol dramas, excessive eating of chicken skin or chicken rectum, as well as the accidental ingestion of makeup containing estrogen.
Hou said she suspected that idol dramas caused early puberty because watching passionate and intimate scenes often depicted in the genre excited the hypothalamus region of the brain, causing the secretion of female hormones such as progesterone and the follicle-stimulating hormone, causing the sex glands to mature too early.
Long periods of watching idol dramas can cause the appearance of secondary sex characteristics — features of the two genders that are not associated with the reproductive organs, but that play a key role in the selection of a mate, like breasts in a woman — to appear well ahead of normal time, Hou said.
Progestogens, named for their function in maintaining pregnancy, are also present at other phases of the estrous and menstrual cycles.
The average age for menarche — the first menstrual period — for girls in Taiwan is about 12.35 years and the average age of Taiwanese boys hitting puberty is 14.5 years, Hou said.
Hou said parents should keep their children away from idol dramas until they are in high school to avoid outside influences on their physical and mental development.
Other pediatricians expressed reservations about these claims.
Chou Yuan-hua (周元華), a doctor in the department of psychiatry at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, said the possibility of early puberty resulting from watching idol dramas was pretty low.
Past research shows that for videos to disrupt normal endocrine secretion, the signal would have to be strong enough to affect the pituitary gland, Chou said.
Neuroimaging research has shown that when adults watch pornography, blood will converge near the hypothalamus, causing images of that area to brighten, Chou said, adding that this only showed the watcher’s thoughts are changed.
Tsai Fuu-jen (蔡輔仁), a professor at the China Medical University Hospital, said early puberty was entirely dependent on genetics and that the influence of eating habits and other aspects is small.
In terms of the research on the relevance of watching idol dramas with early puberty, Tsai stressed it still lacks more specific scientific facts to prove the issue.
Most actors and TV producers were shocked by the reports on the possible connection between TV programs and sexual precocity.If this could indeed affect a child’s sexual maturity, they said, the Internet would be a more likely culprit.
“Wouldn’t fried chicken be more likely than TV dramas to cause sexual precocity?” asked TV actress Tammy Chen (陳怡蓉).
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
TRANSLATED BY JAKE CHUNG, STAFF WRITER
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching