Posted March 23, 2008

Today we celebrate our hormones.

Hormones are our body's chemical messengers. This is the scientifically recognized definition, except in the State of New York where hormone has a slightly different meaning. It is a universal fact, however, that everything we do is controlled by hormones.

Oversleep in the morning? Hormones. Grumpy before you have your first cup of coffee? Hormones. Cannot form committed relationships? Hormones. Spend money like a drunken sailor? You are a hopeless, self-absorbed nincompoop. (This is the one exception.) Evidently, hormones evolved over millions of years for one important purpose: to totally absolve us from responsibility for anything we do.

For most of those years, hormones traveled throughout our bodies largely unnoticed, unless you happened to be a scientist or a vital organ. During this time, most people, vital organs included, believed there were only two very important hormones, estrogen and testosterone.

Estrogen is the important female hormone. It controls important female behavior such as crying at weddings, balancing on stiletto heels and entering any store with the word "Sale" in its window.

Testosterone is often called the male hormone because it causes aggressiveness, ear lobe hair and the crude remarks made by construction workers when women walk by.

However, the BBC is reporting that Professor Roberto Salti, a researcher at the University of Florence in Italy, wants to include another hormone, melatonin, as important because too little melatonin speeds the onset of puberty.

Your first reaction might be, "Just what we need. It's bad enough our children are forced to rush headlong from Halloween into Christmas, and now you're telling me they're rushing headlong into puberty, too?"

If, however, you are a baby boomer, you realize the grim reality. If your grandchildren don't get enough melatonin they might actually grow to adulthood before you do. What, you might ask, can we do to combat something like this? More thorough cleaning of toilet seats, perhaps?

I'm afraid we're way beyond that.

According to the BBC, you're going to have to, and you might want to write this down, turn off your kids' televisions.

Many parents have already heard this advice because the sex and violence on television has also been thought to make children grow up too fast. This has been hotly contested by experts in child behavior, such as television executives, who base their defense on mounds of scientific evidence called "ratings."

But using sensitive laboratory equipment and a year's subscription to "Scientific American," Professor Salti demonstrated that children deprived of television for a week showed a significant increase in their melatonin levels.

(He also discovered these children became catatonic and sat, remote control in hand, desperately trying to change the channel on their fishtanks.)

The results were indisputable. Turn on the television and the melatonin hormones stopped doing their job of keeping children children. Instead, the hormones were busy sitting around the pineal gland, a part of the brain known scientifically as Melatonin 90210, eating burgers and watching all the sex and violence on the tube.

Response to this news has been staggering.

Sharp, for example, introduced a 108-inch television set. Preliminary tests indicate that children can now be in the next room sleeping while being bombarded by gillions of little melatonin-suppressing radiation particles, each the shape of Suzanne Somers's thighs.

Television executives began adding more sex and violence to their programs to meet the need of an increasing number of grown up viewers, citing both their research and the fact that "the hormones made us do it."

And an awestruck scientific community bestowed upon Professor Salti the greatest recognition available to a research scientist.

More research money.

Which he used to make yet another incredible discovery, and I quote "There is a big difference between the children of today and those of thirty years ago." This prompted an even more awestruck international community outside of Italy to exclaim, "Thank God we didn't spend OUR tax dollars on that."

(There are rumors that the professor is on the verge of successfully transplanting a hemorrhoid, but I stress this is only a rumor.)

Rest assured that Professor Salti's work will not be lost in some dusty museum until it is uncovered by Dan Brown in "The Da Vinci Code XIXLLV." No, there's big money in hormone therapy, which has often been compared to steroid therapy without the messy locker room injections.

I can only imagine the possibilities. Children are younger longer. The everyday person-on-the-street is at least as responsible for his or her actions as the everyday politician-on-the-street. Men balance on stiletto heels.

You'll have to excuse me now. I'm going to switch on the television and grow up.

©2008 Jay Douglas