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Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#121

Post by Arete314159 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #109
JPKab wrote: post #43

The lack of federally funded research on this topic is astounding. It's been like this for a long time, but ignored. Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia. They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse. Edit: The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the is…

Its the same with obesity, which has been sharply increasing in much of the world since the 1970s, but pretty much all the conventional explanations (increased availability, excess sugar, excess carbs, excess fat, decreased physical activity, etc.) don't seem to stand up to scrutiny. Hypothesis: the cause in both cases is likely industrial contaminants considered essential to the running of modern civilization, so no…

I read an interesting study on this. It showed that obesity rates were lower in places like Colorado, and theorized that the reason was that they were at the headwaters of their water source, so there was less opportunity for contaminants to enter their water.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#122

Post by throwawaysleep »

vanderZwan wrote: post #100
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #34

> Swan also recommends reducing exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals by being a savvy consumer Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthalate as 'Parfum'. What we need is not savvy consumers what we need is regulators to get serious.

I genuinely hate this (meaning Swan's) take. The modern world is waaaay to complex to offload all responsibility to "consumers". They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.

With sustainability and sweat shops, the trade off is making things a lot more expensive, so the offloading is more that most people don't care.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#123

Post by 310260 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #98
Deukhoofd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is not saying sperm counts are not dropping, but arguing that that is not linked with dropping fertility (and that the original study is racist for only including western countries or something).

To be fair I think it is kinda racist to categorize sperm as either "Western" sperm vs "other" sperm. They couldn't do the bare fucking minimum and at least separate by continent or wealth? Health?

It is really weird the original study decided to categorize it this way. Especially because there are potentially drastic environmental differences between say the US and Australia. Same goes for the "Other" category. How are China and Brazil similar?

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#124

Post by toomuchtodo »

rayiner wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have enough investments and fiat to not be the poor sucker who can’t pay for help end of life as the young, productive cohort compresses.

Unless you’re investing in canned soup and ammo, you need young people working for those retirement “savings” to be worth anything. The modern retirement system is merely an additional layer of indirection over the traditional system of kids taking care of their elderly parents.

Young, productive workers and consumers will exist somewhere globally, it’s a matter of capturing some of that productivity as investment return. If it all goes to hell, sure, the rows in a database are going to mean very little and you’re going to fallback to fuel, food, and firearms until the end (unlikely).

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#126

Post by lm28469 »

standardUser wrote: post #89
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #34

> Swan also recommends reducing exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals by being a savvy consumer Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthalate as 'Parfum'. What we need is not savvy consumers what we need is regulators to get serious.

I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more inf…

> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board

These companies shouldn't be able to use these ingredients in the first place, labels or not. It's not our job to read lists of 30+ ingredients and their wikipedia entries to know if we're at risk or not

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#127

Post by mhitza »

propagandist wrote: post #17
raxxorraxor wrote: post #2

Hopefully they will never discover that this is due to excessive wanking.

It must be environmental.

My bet is on the microplastics that have been found everywhere, from the arctic snow[1] down to the placenta of unborn babies[2]. They are known to be endocrine disruptors, however they only got their media spotlight (as far as I am aware) in the last ~4 years. Thus we're far away from being able to fully understand their effects on the human body.

Fun part is that I have some crazy (non-scietifically backed) theories that they are the cause of behavioral changes in humans which became more prominent in our society in the last 10-20 years. Unfortunately this is unresearched territory, as the only important article I came across were related to animals thus far [3][4]

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/22/micropla...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32629346/

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31673028/

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#128

Post by standardUser »

Bubble_Pop_22 wrote: post #86

Now we only need a vaccine against HIV and STDs in general and we can finally do away with condoms.

I can't remember the last time I talked to a gay man who wasn't on PrEP. It's arguable that in reasonably responsible circles, HIV these days poses little-to-no risk, even among sexually promiscuous people. And most other common STDs are completely curable. The big exception is herpes, the spread of which is not prevented by condoms.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#129

Post by Inviz »

andai wrote: post #67
Inviz wrote: post #8

I had a test recently and I have 0% "normal" sperms, when 4%-14% is the normal range. Pretty radical. The doctor said to take vitamins, to get testosterone to normal level, and to excercise. In other words not much to do

Am I reading this right that the average person has 86-96% abnormal sperm?

That's what I gathered. The report had a set of different potential abnormalities , by intersecting them all the number gets kind of low. Here's a photo of the report if you're curious https://imgur.com/a/LtG2KVb

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#130

Post by rc_hackernews »

kneebonian wrote: post #39

It is interesting, I have a friend group that consists of about 5 married couples all of whom have been having issues conceiving and have been trying for a while now, but are still having issues. Curiously enough my wife and I just had our 4th and every time we've conceived within two months (even when I was hoping it would take a little longer). From what I hear our friends story is not unusual and many in our age b…

This has been my exact experience too. Wife and I...no trouble conceiving.

Friends in late 20's to early 30's have had a lot of trouble conceiving, i.e. they needed to do IVF.

Not sure what's going on with that, and this is purely anecdotal, but I've been hearing people having troubles having kids a lot it seems.

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