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Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

nytimes.com

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Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#211

Post by DoreenMichele »

creata wrote: post #203
DoreenMichele wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say that based on the two data points I quoted with sources. Presumably 'more than half' is less than 95 percent in most cases.

You're probably right. I just wasn't sure that production and consumption of GMO soy would be so neatly linked like that, because so much of that soy is going to livestock.

Yeah, the lack of certainty of a conclusion is why the word "probably" is in that sentence. It's a qualifier. It indicates I don't actually know for certain and this is guess work. (The guess work preceded the googling up of hand-wavy numbers. It's an internet discussion, not a defense of a PhD dissertation.)

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#212

Post by ejolto »

Nilef wrote: post #129
jonplackett wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not completely obviously! Micro plastics was hard since you kinda have to choose between bottled water or tap water! We got a water filter for this one. Heat meant loose underpants and no warm baths ever. Teflon- easy. Replace with a carbon steel pan. Improve your chef skills AND sperm! Western diet is basically high sugar and refined carbs. Just didn’t eat anything with refined sugar on the label in any amount whats…

Would love to hear more about the mind of brands/foods you ate with no sugar. I’ve attempted this before and it’s extremely hard to find products with 0 sugar! Guessing you avoided the local Tesco?

Not OP but I do this by avoiding processed foods, making everything "from scratch".

Examples:

- Pizza sauce from crushed tomatoes, tomato puré and spices.

- Marinade for marinating meat from spices and olive oil and either balsamic vinegar or lime.

- Pick my own blueberries that I freeze and put in plain yoghurt.

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#213

Post by forgotmypw17 »

danlugo92 wrote: post #207
slipper wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Teflon will always be scratched. Yes, in theory you could "use it correctly", but nobody ever does. So it's better to simply not have them.

Whats a good alternative? The ceramic ones?

Enamel

Ceramic

Cast iron

Stainless steel

In that order, in my opinion.

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#214

Post by petertodd »

danlugo92 wrote: post #207
slipper wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Teflon will always be scratched. Yes, in theory you could "use it correctly", but nobody ever does. So it's better to simply not have them.

Whats a good alternative? The ceramic ones?

Personally I just use cheap and simple solid stainless steel cookware, and scrub aggressively. Chainmail scrubbers work well for really baked on stuff: https://www.amazon.com/Knapp-Made-CM-Scrubber-Stainless/dp/B...

I used to have teflon cookware. It's great in theory. But in practice, I find indestructible stuff that you don't have to baby works much better for me. Of course, if you don't have much upper body strength, other approaches may work better.

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#215

Post by DoreenMichele »

stickfigure wrote: post #209
DoreenMichele wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we've been eating GMOs for millenia. That's a little like saying "There's zero difference between traditional animal husbandry and cloning." Sorry, I think there is a meaningful distinction between traditional human intervention in plant varieties and the more recent intervention called GMO. Most of the world seems to agree that there is a distinction, enough so that we invented new language for what it is we are doi…

Africanized "killer" bees are a result of traditional crossbreeding techniques gone awry. Don't romanticize traditional agriculture; mashing up genes randomly is not an inherently safer process.

I'm not romanticizing anything.

GMO is relatively new. We know a thimbleful of information about nutrition and health generally. We know even less than that about what more recent inventions do to the human body because there is simply less of a track record and time span in which to determine meaningful data and conclusions.

Saying "We don't know what this new thing does to our health" in no way romanticizes anything. It doesn't even implicitly suggest we know a heckuva a whole lot about the old thing. But the old thing is probably not going to randomly open up some metaphorical worm hole to some bizarre outcome and maybe the new thing will and we just haven't had enough of a track record to notice yet.

Thalidomide was briefly prescribed to pregnant women for nausea until they began having babies missing limbs because of it.

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#216

Post by lupire »

petertodd wrote: post #75
WA wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soy isn't that easy: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Medical-me... There was one study with 99 participants. A counter argument is Asia, where men eat a lot more soy and don't have reduced sperm count.

They've also eaten soy for much longer than others, literally thousands of years(1) at this point. That's more than long enough to evolve countermeasures if it did have an effect. They also eat soy differently, mainly in products which are fermented. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#History

So when bullies bully people for eating tofu, they being especially stupid because tofu is the one form of soy that isn't "anti-masculine"?

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#217

Post by lupire »

tracker1 wrote: post #121
petertodd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've also eaten soy for much longer than others, literally thousands of years(1) at this point. That's more than long enough to evolve countermeasures if it did have an effect. They also eat soy differently, mainly in products which are fermented. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#History

I think a lot of it comes down to how it's processed... fermentation probably made it safer to consume over time. I think the aversion to dietary fat for the past 3 generations combined with refined seed/bean oils has been hugely detrimental to human health as well. Not to mention, even with reductions, we still consume a massive amount of sugar per capita compared to pre-wwii levels.

Oils are dietary fats though?

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#218

Post by jules »

jonplackett wrote: post #116
ilyaeck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so wrong with a biscuit?

Like I said, I was going for the nuclear option and biscuits have sugar in. Sugar makes you fat. Fat belly means less testosterone. This is part of the anti-western diet thing.

What were the things you did? Did it improve testosterone levels too? If that is the mechanism, could you raise sperm count with artificial testosterone? Or would that be counterproductive?

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#219

Post by ceejayoz »

ejolto wrote: post #205
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We got a water filter for this one. Is that enough? I keep reading about how microplastics can be too small for a carbon filter and that you would need a reverse osmosis device, to completely remove plastics. I can't say am really sold on using a device with a plastic membrane to completely remove plastics. All the online materials on the topic are for the majority just product placements, it feels very disorientin…

> Is that enough? It must have been enough since his sperm count increased 4x, no? Either the filter worked or microplastics don't effect sperm count much.

I’ve got an anti-tiger rock to sell you…

“Something changed, therefore this must be the reason” is a fallacy if there isn’t additional supporting evidence.

Re: Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

#220

Post by giantg2 »

gspr wrote: post #202
jonplackett wrote: post #47

As someone who has had to do IVF for our child and go through the challenge of figuring our what to do to try and improve sperm quality, I can tell you once you start looking into it, basically everything about modern life is bad for sperm. Heat, radiation, plastic, micro plastics, soya, tap water, Teflon, antibacterial soap, underpants, western diet. It’s a perfect storm. If you’re going though it though I offer a r…

> radiation I don't doubt much of what you're saying, but is there any evidence to support that modern life exposes you to any more harmful radiation than life in the past did?

Yes, there have been numerous studies showing that the radio frequencies (radiation) used by cell phones and wifi are correlated (maybe causative, but not 100% sure) to reduced sperm count and quality. This is especially true when you have your phone in your pocket or your laptop on your lap.

Stuff like wifi and cellphones were not a thing in the past. There just weren't many consumer RF products a generation or two ago - phones had cords, there was no wifi or even internet, no bluetooth headphones or refrigerators, etc. Most of the RF radiation was produced by commerical or government sources (plus some ham radio), such as FM, AM, and military communications. This generally meant that you were far away from the source, which means they where mostly using different wavelengths and the power you recieved was lower (you quadruple power loss when doubling distance). Now days, you have multiple cell phones in your home, wifi at home and work (work can really blast you with all the access points they seem to over-install), bluetooth and a cell card in many new cars, and IoT devices seemingly everywhere.

Not to mention it seems we have more commercial exposure too. We have GPS, satellite TV, StarLink, cell towers, etc all vying for 100% coverage. However, I didn't look up the wavelengths, so these might not be an issue, or might cause some other kind of issue. I guess I'm just saying it should be no surprise that sperm count and quality is decreasing if we know that certain RF is linked to it and we are increasing that RF exposure.

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