401–410 of 640 posts
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Haha. I unfortunately did take it a bit more seriously. There was a point where if someone offered me a biscuit with my decaf tea my inner monologue would say “if you eat that biscuit you might never have children”. It was at least in that way the easiest diet I ever went on. 100% motivation!
What's so wrong with never having children?
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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.
While I tend to agree with you WRT to diet and exercise, I think this is a secondary issue to what's being described here, similar to how I think modern science and technology has skewed the natural selection process with a bias that may select for undesirable attributes. Some of this bias may be for good intentions (allowing less fertile couples to conceive) while some may have questionable outcomes (selection based…
First let's not anthropomorphize nature, or natural selection. But secondly, in 1st world countries, the more money you make, the less likely you are to have kids! We've done a terrible job at incentivizing couples to have kids since women have entered and made up a good part of the work force, and it's hard to blame someone in a good career, married to someone in a good career, to take off 10-15 prime years of their lives to have children.
I think that waiting to have children until later (late 20's to early 30's) is a big problem in terms of fertility and successful child bearing. Unfortunately the human clock doesn't really jive with the "4 years of college, work a bit and then think about marriage and kids".
I don't have a conclusion except we might want to think about increasing the birth rates among high and medium earners in our populations where they are struggling, lest we become like Japan or other countries (some in Europe which depend on importing labor in order to satisfy demand)
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Who is "they"?
It is "we". Almost all people I know will make selfish decisions that harm others for their own advantage. It seems to be simply human nature.
FTFY.
It's all about survival. Humans are animals not much different than a deer, lion or whatever. A deer will run away from something it doesn't know where a lion will attack/kill anything it doesn't know. Just like the stereotypical "git off my land" character of a country bumpkin. I mean, how do you feel when you see a stranger walking on your property? Same thing.
I always laugh when people say they feel close with nature. Um, hello! You ARE nature. The human brain just overlaid a thick layer of self awareness/logic/reasoning/emotion to the lower level animal bits. So instead of pissing on trees we instead draw lines on paper called borders and property lines. And we still live in trees, just dead ones turned into boxes called homes.
For thousands of years we struggled like any other animal to survive. If you had food you made sure no one takes it. If you found a safe place to sleep you dint want to share it. If a stranger wanders into your territory, chase or kill them, they are a threat. If you were a male you had to prove your worthiness to a female by fighting or peacocking (some things never change...) etc. Oh and we smell just as bad. The stink of a locker room or unkempt home is no different then the stink of a farm or zoo. You're a smelly hairless great ape. Deal with it.
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> 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…
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While I tend to agree with you WRT to diet and exercise, I think this is a secondary issue to what's being described here, similar to how I think modern science and technology has skewed the natural selection process with a bias that may select for undesirable attributes. Some of this bias may be for good intentions (allowing less fertile couples to conceive) while some may have questionable outcomes (selection based…
I often wonder if it's something like car tire dust. All those vehicles eroding away the tire material which then goes into the air, soil and water. It goes somewhere.
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genes get arbitrarily modified by evolution, breeding, or manual intervention. could a gmo food cause a problem? sure, so could a food whose genes were modified by breeding or accident of nature
Evolution and selective breeding don’t arbitrarily modify DNA. The actual methods are small random changes, copying from some other location possibly backwards, or removing segments. GMO significantly expands what kinds of changes are possible. In practice the difference is generally not that significant, but there is some increase in risks. Personally, I would prefer a different label for new GMO foods. Presumably,…
Of course /nothing/ meets the goal posts of "arbitrary" including state of the art genetic modification.
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Absolutely agree that being generally healthy will make a difference. But what if you aren’t over weight and already fairly healthy, like I was? Then you have to look at other things too.
If you had to say what was the best intervention?
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.
I know it's anecdotal, but of my friends with fertility issues (3 couples who mentioned it to me), none are remotely overweight, they're regularly active, and they eat well. I'm sure inactivity and obesity are a major issue in regards to fertility, but I'm not personally seeing that.
I went to glass containers for food storage and transfer food out of plastic packaging as soon as possible. Precocious puberty: I had a mental health hit (near collapse) from something that happened in my mid 20's. I started dating the stepdaughter of a neighbor (upper-middle class area) who said she was 19, and she definitely seemed it by being smart, chill, age-mature, sensible, and fully-developed (Tanner V). Lo a…
You confused a middle schooler for a 19 year old? Yikes.