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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

#351

Post by DevX101 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #273
DevX101 wrote: post #158

The thesis of the book 'Countdown' is that this is largely due to widespread plastic and other endocrine disrupting chemicals. I believe this is one of the most important risks to humanity, after climate change, and global war. So far, I've taken some lifestyle changes to combat this: 1) Threw out all of my teflon cooking pans 2) Refuse to consume food in heated plastics 3) Throw out teabags (they have plastics). Use…

Regarding tea bags, sometimes I see plastic tea bags which are crazy, as they must have a weak structure/large surface and the hot water surely washes out a lot of plastic. I am assuming the normal paper tea bags I get in Germany with a metal clip should be plastic free though, or am I missing something? Yes we are down to discussing tea bag brands now but as you are saying, it's an emergency :-(

What consumers think of as normal "paper" tea bags release 11.6 billion “microplastics” and 3.1 billion “nanoplastics” into each cup. It's not paper.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#352

Post by njovin »

rootusrootus wrote: post #260
zug_zug wrote: post #151

So this trend has been going on for a while now, I looked a bit into it about 5 years ago here's what I found: - Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones). - The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immed…

Perhaps we need to invest in more testing, and then work on a whitelist instead of blacklist approach.

I've heard on a few podcasts that this is how European countries do this. We need to stop letting for-profit companies gamble with the health and longevity of the species in the interest of profits.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#353

Post by FeepingCreature »

badRNG wrote: post #315
zug_zug wrote: post #151

So this trend has been going on for a while now, I looked a bit into it about 5 years ago here's what I found: - Tons of popular and legal products/chemicals are "endocrine disruptors"[1] (fancy term for mess with hormones). - The FDA/EPA doesn't deny that, they don't themselves even really require tests for long-term health effects in humans (too difficult). Instead they give animals a 1000x+ dose and look for immed…

> My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming. I don't want to diminish the importance of a paradigm shift in how regulators treat various chemicals, but I don't think this will be anywhere near as severe and immediate threat as climate change. Ultimately, if there is a substantial pool of people who's fertility is not adversely impacted by some yet to be identified chemic…

Ultimately, if there's a substantial pool of people who are not existentially threatened by global warming...

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#355

Post by greenhearth »

lm28469 wrote: post #126
standardUser wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#356

Post by highwaylights »

anon99879 wrote: post #342

I've never written about this before but thought it might be useful for someone who may be experiencing the same/similar problem and believes there's no real prospect of having children. During several years of trying to conceive, I undertook 2 sperm tests with the clinic and on both occasions drew a blank - literally nothing. I can't describe how brutally crushing this is to receive as news - especially from a poorl…

I have nothing to add to this, I just wanted to say congratulations to your family and applaud your sharing of this information for whoever else it might help. :-)

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#357

Post by ben_w »

aspyct wrote: post #164
bhouston wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is. Less people in the world. Look at Japan and South Korean population projections out 50 to 75 years -- they may cut their populations in half, and it could keep going? Hard to extrapolate trends out that far though...

Sorry, but isn't that a good thing? Putting aside the fact that we're (at least in Europe) paying for a pension fund we'll never have, isn't reducing the amount of people on earth the right solution for basically all problems long term?

Good or bad depends on too many other variables to easily forecast.

We could, in principle, if we really were all willing, rapidly transition to a beautiful solar-hippie future where all the food was either vegan or GM bacterial derived milk [0] or vat-grown cultured flesh. The Earth can support hundreds of billions this way using only land that is currently desert.

We almost certainly won't do that, but we could.

Conversely, rapid depopulation can mess up our economy. How rapid is too rapid? I don't know.

This outcome is IMO more plausible than the solar-hippie outcome. Still not certain, as 75 years of technological change is a lot and could very plausibility give us medicine that seems like magic today — the last 75 includes the eradication of smallpox; the first of each of kidney, heart, heart-and-lung, liver, face, uterus, womb, penis, hand, arm, and leg transplants; first each of pacemaker, cochlear implants, artificial heart; first CT, PET, medical ultrasound, and MRI; first stem cell therapy; robot assisted surgery; organ culture for lab-grown (some of the are still experimental) noses, ears, skin, kidneys, liver, and bladders; the defibrillator; oral contraceptives; genetic engineering; and too many vaccines to bother listing.

The next 75 years could, not implausibly, give us anti-aging drugs that keep us in peak health until whatever kills us; or give us external artificial wombs; or at the very least, turn skin cells into healthy sperm in-vitro.

[0] why isn't this already a thing? Vegan cheese substitutes are 45% mediocre, 45% just bad, and 10% single use case things like smoked tofu

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#358

Post by twobitshifter »

seydor wrote: post #103
propagandist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be environmental.

it can't really be genetic

Epigenetic effects are possible in formation of gonads, it’s one of the mechanisms involved in sex differentiation.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#360

Post by Method-X »

twobitshifter wrote: post #337
DevX101 wrote: post #158

The thesis of the book 'Countdown' is that this is largely due to widespread plastic and other endocrine disrupting chemicals. I believe this is one of the most important risks to humanity, after climate change, and global war. So far, I've taken some lifestyle changes to combat this: 1) Threw out all of my teflon cooking pans 2) Refuse to consume food in heated plastics 3) Throw out teabags (they have plastics). Use…

Along the same lines as tea-bags, is it possible k-cups have an effect? The keurig machine is already plastic, so does using a reusable cup buy you any benefit?

The reusable cup is also plastic.
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