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Originally Posted by Meg Murry.
 From my somewhat limited understanding, precocious puberty is caused in part because fatty tissue stores estrogen and estrogen can trigger puberty.
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I don't know a lot about precocious puberty, but in terms of childhood overweight/obesity, both parents AND physicians are quite poor at determining whether a child is in a healthy range by "looking." I'm talking here from a strictly medical/health perspective, not about body image, etc.
We have gotten fairly far from the body shapes and sizes that children had historically - before processed food, electronic media, and the car culture.
Of course, I'm now unable to find it, but a fascinating study was published in the past couple of years (I read it for my old job). For the purpose of a study with a different purpose, doctors and other healthcare providers at a medical center (I think it was one of the university-affiliated hospitals in the midwest, IIRC) were asked to bring in their *normal* weight children to participate as control subjects. Lo and behold, an astounding proportion of these *normal* weight children were actually overweight or obese, according to definitions that are based on what body mass indices are associated with better and poorer health. So, the very people who are supposed to be assessing healthy body weights do a very poor job by the "eyeball" method.
I don't know whether or not this is an issue with your daughter, but I just wanted to point out that assessing overweight is not as simple as it may seem, even for professionals.
I hope everything turns out just fine, and that this is nothing but a little scare!
