Green watermelons, golden-yellow pear, purple pearls-like grapes, bright red lychees... In winter, all kinds of off-season fruits, emitting a rich or light fragrance, continuously enter thousands of homes. However, just as people are savoring the delicious fruits, discordant reports have also emerged: in Jinan and Xi'an, boys and girls as young as three or four have shown symptoms of precocious puberty, such as boys growing beards and girls developing enlarged breasts, from eating excessive amounts of "hormone fruits" that ripen early.
"Hormone fruits" can easily lead to precocious puberty in children. Many medical experts generally believe that there are indeed factors in the children's environment that can cause precocious puberty or abnormal sexual development. If estrogens are added to fruits and vegetables, they do become more vibrant and fresh-looking, but they can also have adverse effects on the human body, especially on children. For example, pork fed with a fattening agent called "Jiyuefei" contains hormones, which theoretically can have an impact on the developing bodies of children.
Experts advise: try to keep children away from "hormone foods". Avoid eating fruits with abnormal shapes, overly beautiful colors, and bland tastes. Instead, give children relatively safe seafood and "green foods" more often.
Consuming fruits that have been "ripened" and preserved with chemicals is very harmful to the human body. Many of the chemicals used for "ripening" contain estrogens, which can cause precocious puberty in females and underdeveloped male sexual characteristics. Therefore, it is essential to wash such fruits thoroughly before eating, preferably soaking them in warm water for a period of time.
Horticulturists say that a single fruit tree can be treated with over a dozen types of hormones during its growth, and their use can increase yield by 20%.
"The state has not enacted laws or authoritative regulations to prohibit the use of plant growth regulators," said Associate Professor Liu from the Horticulture Department of Shenyang Agricultural University. "When we guide farmers in fruit cultivation, we specify the parts, timing, and concentration for using growth regulators. For instance, they can be used during the tree's development period, flowering stage, and young fruit stage, but are prohibited during the fruit harvesting period. We believe it is inappropriate and harmful to human health to use ethephon (a senescence-promoting agent) to force fruits to redden during their ripening period."