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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

#371

Post by DoreenMichele »

buildbot wrote: post #353
DoreenMichele wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once told me allergic reaction to soy may actually be allergic reaction to GMO soy, not soy per se. There may be very different stats from one country to another on how much GMO soy gets used.

Can you link a study that shows GMO soy having different proteins that would cause a specific reaction vs. non gmo? Otherwise it seems like you are hear to just spread anti gmo fud, which really hurts actual discourse around GMOs.

I replied to one person who said they consumed a lot of soy in one situation with zero problem and then reacted really strongly and negatively to soy in another and I suggested a possible explanation, a possible difference between the two soy sources. I did so as food for thought for that one individual and I don't really care what anyone else thinks of the comment.

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

#372

Post by mekkkkkk »

cblconfederate wrote: post #281
mekkkkkk wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shorter attention spans, more lethargy, lower overall intelligence. You could point at a number of cultural and political developments over the last decades and argue that these neurochemical changes could be a contributing factor. However, it must be pretty much impossible to know for sure. The supposed effects are too intangible and the compounds are too pervasive. We can only speculate.

This might well be true, and there may be a measurable correlation if someone is willing to investigate it. However i m not sure what s the way forward: policies to reverse this health crisis, or adapt politics to this new reality?

If the causality is correct, then this "new" reality is already here. Hence, adaptation is too currently happening. Big policy changes to curb plastic use is only a favor for our grandkids.

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

#373

Post by forgotmypw17 »

gruez wrote: post #357
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to gamble with your health while the jury is still, technically, out, I can't stop you... > At normal cooking temperatures, PTFE-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity. > Only few studies describe the toxicity of PTFE but without solid conclusions. > There are some reports where PFOA was detected in the gas phase released from the cooking utensils under n…

> At normal cooking temperatures, PTFE-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity. I don't think it means what you think it means. Reading further into the paper, it says >At normal use conditions [ Which seems absolutely tiny. If spread out the emissions across the hour (because the 4.75 ng figure was cumulative emissions), the exposure to the cook would be in the parts…

I guess it's all relative and a matter of opinion...

4.75 nanograms may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that, at 414.07g/mol it is 6,908,293,060,000 parts of the stuff, it seems like quite a bit to me. And that's in just one cooking session.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since my chemistry class.

The EPA drinking water standards, the ones watered down by industry influence, are measured in parts per trillion.

Here is a science question for you: If the EPA limit for PFOA in drinking water is 70 parts per trillion, what volume of water would need to be mixed with 4.75 nanograms of PFOA in order to bring that water to within the allowable limit for drinking water?

Now, here is a quote from the EPA:

> These studies indicate that exposure to PFOA and PFOS over certain levels may result in adverse health effects, including developmental effects to fetuses during pregnancy or to breastfed infants (e.g., low birth weight, accelerated puberty, skeletal variations), cancer (e.g., testicular, kidney), liver effects (e.g., tissue damage), immune effects (e.g., antibody production and immunity), thyroid effects and other effects (e.g., cholesterol changes). There is limited information identifying health effects from inhalation or dermal exposures to PFOA or PFOS in humans and animals.

Based on this question, do you think there are any "health effects" if exposed to PFOA and PFOS below these "certain levels".

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

#374

Post by MisterTea »

tubularhells wrote: post #159
Bombthecat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You... avoided all that? How? You didn't wear underpants or what?

Why would you need underwear when you could just freeball every day?

Some fabrics aren't kind to sensitive bits. I prefer to have cotton boxers between my bits and whatever rugged exterior cloth is worn.

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

#376

Post by dukeofdoom »

hobo_mark wrote: post #369
dukeofdoom wrote: post #367

I followed this girl on youtube that built a tiny house in the mountains. She carries her own water, makes bread from wheat she mills, makes her own hummus and cabbage and eats copious amounts of each and vegetables. Hardly has phone/internet service because she lives in a mountain valley. Plays music with friends, reads and does yoga for entertainment. Surprise, surprise. You are your habits! She looks very fit and…

If she didn't look very fit and healthy, you would not be following her on youtube, and would not know she existed, even with the same lifestyle.

Thats true to a degree. But I'm betting many unfit people would get fit if adapting the same diet/lifestyle habits.

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

#377

Post by specialist »

mizzack wrote: post #255
eyko wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are typically made to improve profit in some fashion, not to improve human health. The main goals of GMOs are to increase yield and protect against disease / pests, which is practically the same goal we've had for thousands of years of crop domestication. Take for instance wild pre-domesticated maize vs present day non-GMO maize[1] and you'll see what "natural" crop selection does. Not only do we select for st…

Your pesticide/herbicide primary concern is a defining feature of GMO staples: glyphosate tolerance. I.e. you're going to find a lot more Roundup in GMO end products than non-GMO.

Exactly. My 3 main concerns with GMO are anything related to pesticides, anything transgenetic, and the privatization of biology thru IP capture.

I'm sorry those risks fall under the rubric of GMO and not "corporatism" and "theft". Blame the GMO rhetoric on big agriculture.

A helpful contrasting example for the apologists:

Wheat with better nutrition and yields: good.

Wheat which requires matching pesticides, herbicides; where seeds are sterile; where seedstocks cannot be shared, reused, resold; where wheat incorporates genetic code from other plants: bad.

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

#378

Post by wonder_er »

tzone wrote: post #266
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…

Weight loss and proper exercise will probably deliver 99% of the improvements for 99% of the people. Stressing about heat, radiation, micro plastics, or other random stuff seems like extra stress for not that much benefit. Most people in Western world are either out of shape, or straight up obese. It makes sense that, that will have huge negative effects on fertility.

In some communities, weight gain is a down-stream effect of "metabolic syndrome", and the "solution" isn't to count calories or exercise more - it's to simply eat _differently_.

Sugar is a particularly odious contributor to problems.

Like OP, my wife and I also struggled with infertility for a few years (two miscarriages, years of doing everything "right", and not getting pregnant.) We're finally pregnant, and out of the most dangerous time period.

Our traditional fertility doctor was pushing us hard to do IVF (we didn't want to), so we said "eh, thanks, we'll just take a break for a while."

I asked the doc if there was any association between diet and pregnancy, and she said no. I facepalmed so hard.

I wrote up notes on a book about sugar here: https://josh.works/notes-gary-taubes-case-against-sugar

Might be worth skimming the notes to determine if it's worth reading the book.

Oh, and for others trying to get pregnant, and curious to learn more about endocrine disruptors and the effects of diet and metabolic syndrome on fertility (for men and women) I'd recommend reading _It Starts With The Egg_ [0].

This book walks you, the reader, though a lot of recent research, boils it down to a "do this/don't do that" checklist at the end of each chapter, it was perfect for my engineering brain.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21782260-it-starts-with-...

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

#379

Post by xkv »

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…

Cannabis was a big factor for me. My sperm morphology improved after I ceased using it. Anecdotal, but there are a few studies that support the idea (cannabis in general doesn't have a lot of studies because it is a Schedule 1).

If you're a heavy user, it can't hurt to stop while you're trying, and it may help. (I don't see it mentioned often in these discussions.)

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31267718/

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30916627/

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

#380

Post by wonder_er »

driverdan wrote: post #333
jonplackett wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sugar makes you fat. Nonsense. Overeating makes you fat, not a specific carb. Having a biscuit with a few grams of sugar is not going to impact your health in a meaningful way if you're not overeating.

> Overeating makes you fat, not a specific carb.

Eating sugar creates a cascade of hormonal knock-on effects that can make you fat.

I beg of you (especially if you're struggling with your weight!) to consider the alternatives to Calories-In/Calories-Out eating.

My dad is a doctor, he's _convinced_ it's all CICO (which is what was taught to physicians in the 70s, and today), he struggles with his weight, constantly, and is super unhealthy. He eats low-fat everything, and is in miserable physical shape.

He's blind to alternatives. It is unbecoming of a man of science to be so tied to a possibly-incorrect view of such an important topic.

Consider: https://josh.works/notes-gary-taubes-case-against-sugar

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