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Falling sperm counts, declining egg quality, and endocrine disruptors

nytimes.com

581–590 of 640 posts

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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be off here, but I'm guessing based on the tea comment, that he may be British, which means a biscuit is actually a cookie in American terms.

Correct! What the hell is an American biscuit then?

Via Wikipedia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscuit_(bread)

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

#582

On this topic I can recommend the dystopian movie “Children of Men”. It’s about modern world of basically our time where nobody can get children and what issues arise.

Off topic tangent: "Children of Men" is also a great litmus test for search engines. Searching for "movie without babies" in Google yields "Children of Men" as the first result (and has since before 2010). Other search engines generally return movies about babies and stuff like that

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

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do your research and act on it yourself. Or, we could acknowledge that most of the general public doesn't have the education necessary, and have the government regulate on our behalf. You know... like they're elected to do. Average Joe truck driver or Jane LPN shouldn't have to have an indepth knowledge of endocrinology just to be safe from the greed and callousness of polluting corporations.

> Or, we could acknowledge that most of the general public doesn't have the education necessary, and have the government regulate on our behalf. It's also worth acknowledging that having this kind of regulation makes our society more efficient. I would be capable of informing myself on this issue, but I don't. The are so many issues of this kind that if I were to attempt to inform myself on all of them, I wouldn't be…

On one hand, it is more efficient. On the other hand, it has proven to be vulnerable to centralized error, as we can see from tobacco, GRAS, PFOAs, and many other examples.

I believe that the regulation system overall is GOOD and not malicious, and catches up EVENTUALLY, but it's incredibly SLOW, if anything just due to its SIZE. You could be waiting for YEARS or decades for it to catch up to information that is available to you TODAY, if you just open your eyes and look.

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

#584
post #218

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.

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?

If you take testosterone, your pituitary will tell your testicles that there is enough testosterone, and that they can chill out, so the testicles will produce less testosterone and less sperm.

This is why anabolic steroid users can develop shrunken (atrophied) testicles.

In addition, through enzymatic equilibrium, you will also produce more estrogen (excess testosterone is converted to estrogen and vice versa), which will further decrease male reproductive ability, and in sufficient quantities will stimulate breast gland growth.

In short, administering exogenous testosterone will have counterproductive reproductive consequences.

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

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shocking to think that our society would discount the future for the present... On a serious note however, babies and a growing population is an enormous advantage to a nation. I would think it would be massively popular to increase benefits to those who are having children. Full disclosure, I found out my wife is pregnant yesterday, but still.

Babies and a growing population is an enormous advantage only if there are enough resources for everyone and they are distributed in such a form that does not end up cause social infighting. Otherwise it just contributes to instability. There are also women who are infertile due to no fault of their own (e.g. cancer, etc.), why should they be excluded from any resources whatsoever due to something that is not their f…

Nobody is excluded from any resources. Every person gains the benefit when they are a child.

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

#586
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However there are no humans that are evolved to eat seed oils. I am cautious about these sorts of issues and typically buy the least processed oils (and foods in general) that I can find, however it is my understanding that humans around the world have been producing and eating (mechanically expressed) sesame seed oil for thousands of years. I can't say whether that has any impact on whether people are "evolved to…

You’re right. I consider chemically extracted the default, but I should have been explicit that I didn’t mean mechanically expressed seed oils.

There isn't any "chemically extracted" seed oil, at least not with a chemical reaction. The use of a chemical reaction is indicated by "interesterified" or "hydrogenated". That isn't used for extraction; it alters the melting points.

The use of solvents to extract oils isn't a chemical reaction. It's not really different from using CO2 to extract caffeine from coffee, using water to extract tea from tea leaves, or using alcohol to extract vanilla flavor from vanilla beans. The common solvent for oil extraction is hexane, which is removed by boiling it off with a vacuum and/or heat.

The solvent-extracted oil will have unmodified molecules. The proportions of the various molecules may differ because the ease with which they are extracted will depend on the processing conditions. You get different proportions of molecules in the mix if you change the temperature, pressure, time, or solvent. For some use cases you might prefer one mix or another. You could get a different viscosity, melting point, or smoke point.

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

#587
post #435
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Weight loss and proper exercise will probably deliver 99% of the improvements for 99% of the people. In addition to be factually incorrect, consider how what you said sounds to the many people who are healthy, active but are having problems with something they thought would be easy. This is very stressful for many people, seeming especially cruel after years of worrying about accidental pregnancy, and the medical t…

Yeah this is like people telling me my sleep apnoea will get better if I lose weight. Nevermind that I was underweight when I was diagnosed because my sleep issues had ruined my appetite.

I get that it will help a lot of people whose issues are caused or worsened by weight but those people will have doctors who can tell them, you don't need to make assumptions about my lifestlye, and even if you do it seems weird to assume I wouldn't have already been told that by my sleep specialist

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

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct! What the hell is an American biscuit then?

> What the hell is an American biscuit then? Basically, a chemically (as opposed to yeast) leavened bread roll.

Typically richer and flakier than a soda bread, though.

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

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also entirely possible that cultural factors can influence the number of people who develop a homosexual sexual orientation. Humans are highly malleable and affected by culture.

Not malleable enough for conversion therapy to work.

I believe it's not proven that it can work, not that it's proven not to work at all. I suspect there is a strong motivation to discourage research into its effectiveness and discredit that research which has been done, and for understandable reasons, like not wanting people who are homosexuals to see their orientation as a psychopathology.

In any case, I suspect that sexual orientation develops and crystalizes long before conversion therapy is generally resorted to.

I also wouldn't be surprised if conversion therapy has the opposite effect of that intended, of re-inforcing homosexual orientations, by presenting it as central to the subject's identity.

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

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also entirely possible that cultural factors can influence the number of people who develop a homosexual sexual orientation. Humans are highly malleable and affected by culture.

Not malleable enough for conversion therapy to work.

To my mind, that's a little like saying "Wow, it sure is shocking how forcible rape fails to get people all hot and bothered and learn to love sex."

Conversion therapy is the opposite of someone deciding "Hmmmm. You know, I never thought about it before but now that I am in some new circumstance with people with different traits, I'm finding myself weirdly attracted to categories of people that never did a thing for me before and maybe, just maybe, gender per se was not the trait that really mattered to my ability to get turned on."

Conversion therapy is forced on people in an ugly fashion by other people who hate them for what they are and desperately want to "fix" them. Regardless of the reason for therapy, this approach is almost always counterproductive.

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