Live data from Hacker News

Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

nytimes.com

531–540 of 640 posts

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

#531
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good parenting is forcing your boy children to take cold baths because you need their sperm to carry on your legacy.

Cold baths is a bit far, but pouring a bucket of cold water over them has many health benefits, including immune function.

To clarify my comment, this is done with gentle reassurance and playfully, not as any sort of hazing or abuse, purely for health benefits.

It is common in many cultures in eastern europe and elsewhere and the health benefits are well known.

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

#532
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Curious on your age range. We also struggled with 3 miscarriages and most of our friends had the exact similar issues and had to conceive via IVF. There were more IVF babies than natural pregnancies in my group of friends. We were lucky and didn't need to resort IVF. We all waited till we were past 35 to have kids. Our fertility doctor said age makes a huge a difference and professionals are waiting till later in the…

> We all waited till we were past 35 to have kids.

Many people were grandparents by that age 150 years ago.

I too have many friends who waited until their 30s to have children. Most ended up in IVF (or adopting.)

Fertility (not precisely the right term, but one commonly used) charts — based on age — are very steep. After the peak in the early to mid 20s, it plummets very quickly. For women, anyway.

The low-sperm count issue, on the other hand, is very curious... not entirely sure if they have a grip on the true cause.

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

#533

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…

Anecdote: I avoided all these things and more out of pure hypochondria for decades, and I impregnated my wife the two times we didn't use some form of birth control. I even have a sort of tic I integrated where I pull my testicles out from between my legs when they get constricted, and hadn't remembered why I started doing that until you reminded me that I read something about heat being bad for sperm in the 90s.

Anecdote: when we did everything "right" and nothing. The moment we just relaxed and said "whathever", it happened. Two kids.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some of this bias may be for good intentions (allowing less fertile couples to conceive) while some may have questionable outcomes (selection based purely on socioeconomic status)." 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 wom…

I feel like a wealthier and wealthier population, slowly shrinking, might be the sustainable future we need. Yes there will be challenges, but geometric, or even linear, population growth of the human species is not sustainable.

I am not necessarily disagreeing but you're description matches closely to one of the distopian worlds in Asimov's Foundation Series.

'Solaria' is this planet of abundance with strict population controls and where robots do all the hard work and wealthy generation for their owners.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ceramic pans will always fail after a short bit of time. Cook's Illustrated has yet to find one that can pass their durability tests. That said I wish they'd test the Granitestone Pro as other reviewers have said the Granitestone holds up better than other ceramic pans.

I use two ceramic pans which are still as good as when I got them 10-15 years ago from a brand called ecosafe. Not all from the set made it, one got ruined by overheating. Stainless is durable, but I suspect there are issues with chemical reactions between the food and bare metal. I think that enamel is the best, being inert and durable, and old technology, though you also don,t want to drop or overheat it. Cast iron…

> one got ruined by overheating.

My primary use case is high heat wok cooking. A lot of ceramic woks exist, they just don't last long!

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

#536
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If she was biologically mature, being attracted to her doesn't mean you are a pedophile. Attraction is a result of biology, not of man-made laws. It would of course still be illegal to date her. The last psychiatrist has written about that, but I couldn't find it right away.

This dude dated a middle school girl in his mid 20s and his only defence is that her breasts were so big he didn’t notice she was 12. He might not be a pedophile by definition, but he is still a child predator.

It sounds as if he stopped when he found out about her age. You shouldn't let your fantasies rule your judgments.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The type of calorie matters. For example, the carbohydrates in fiber are not digestable, so those calories have effectively no impact on weight. Starches take longer to digest than simple sugars, so they result in less of an insulin response than the same quantity of simple sugars (meaning, if eating in excess, less starch is converted to fat). And even when just looking at simple sugars, fructose and glucose are pro…

> the carbohydrates in fiber are not digestable, so those calories have effectively no impact on weight

Which is why fiber doesn't get counted towards calories on labels.

> Starches take longer to digest than simple sugars, so they result in less of an insulin response than the same quantity of simple sugars (meaning, if eating in excess, less starch is converted to fat).

That's not what it means. Insulin response cannot create fat out of nothing and doesn't result in more or less fat being stored.

If your glycogen stores are full and you consume more than you burn the excess calories are stored as fat regardless of the source or the pathway that stores it.

Calories in, calories out means you have to factor in how many calories from the food are available for your body to use. It doesn't necessarily mean the calories of the food you put in your mouth.

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

#538
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judgement has nothing to do with my experience. It can also be true if someone experienced extreme precocious puberty from unknown causes, is highly gifted and a voracious learner/autodidact, is emotionally intelligent, went through some shit in life, and basically had to become the "adult" (became authentically internally-stronger and didn't fall apart) of the family and of siblings when their birth parents were irr…

> went through some shit in life > birth parents were irresponsible This makes it even worse. You should stop posting before somebody contacts the FBI.

He said nothing illegal happened, so what should the FBI do? I wish the FBI could look into people like you.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware of Gary Taube. His over emphasis of the effects of simple carbs is not entirely supported by science. There is an effect but it's not as strong as he presents it. If you find avoiding sugar helps you maintain a healthy diet than great, go for it. Do whatever works for you. But if your overall diet is a healthy balance then having a biscuit with tea is not going to negatively impact your health.

You are technically correct, but also missing the point. It's like saying an alcoholic can still responsibly drink by stopping at one.

Re-read what I said. If abstinence is what you need then go for it. That's not the point I was making.

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

#540
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> went through some shit in life > birth parents were irresponsible This makes it even worse. You should stop posting before somebody contacts the FBI.

He said nothing illegal happened, so what should the FBI do? I wish the FBI could look into people like you.

ok pedo guy
Post reply on HN