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Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

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Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#581
post #478

I did my Master Degree in Organic Chemistry where we tried to develop a male contraceptive pill. I spend a lot of time studying sperm so here is a short list of thing to avoid regarding sperm quality (not ranked): 1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a] 2. Heating food in ANY type of plastic [a] 3. Caffein intake [b] 4. Sugar intake [c] 5. NOT exercising regularl…

> here is a short list of thing to avoid > 7. Age [f] wait wat

Technically, you can easily avoid age :)

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#582
post #478

I did my Master Degree in Organic Chemistry where we tried to develop a male contraceptive pill. I spend a lot of time studying sperm so here is a short list of thing to avoid regarding sperm quality (not ranked): 1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a] 2. Heating food in ANY type of plastic [a] 3. Caffein intake [b] 4. Sugar intake [c] 5. NOT exercising regularl…

"Sugar" doesn' seem to include fruits, thankfully. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29266782/

Yeah, right... Totally believable.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#583
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it can't really be genetic

Maybe with longer lifespans, people making conscious choices which partner to have children with, and IVF being an option, there just isn't that much evolutionary pressure on sperm counts. Something that reduces your sperm count by 50% but makes you 10% more attractive could absolutely be an evolutionary advantage in the developed world. Not that I think this is what's going on, but I think rejecting it outright is t…

IVF and things like caesarians & other prenatal care are surely having an evolutionary effect. Fertility and ability to give healthy live birth used to be the most fundamentally important evolutionary pressures for us (and basically every other species), and now we can opt out of them.

IDK how long we'd expect it to take for most of humanity to become dependent on a high-tech society to reproduce, under those circumstances, but it'd seem really weird to me if that's not the direction we're going. But maybe that takes hundreds or thousands of years to have a pronounced effect, rather than tens.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#584
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hormones are injected into the egg-having partner to induce a mass release of eggs. Ova are not created in this process.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#585
I have been very interested in this topic for the last year.

A huge problem here is the lack of understanding of which products have phthalates in them. Most manufacturers don't list whether their products contain them, you have to really scour the internet to find products specifically listed as not containing them.

I don't know much about chemistry, but a real need here is the ability to test products for these chemicals. If there were an at-home test for their presence or a website or service that could test household items, we could take better control of this situation. As it currently stands we're left sitting here Googling individual products and nobody is really sure what chemicals are present in their home.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#587
post #112

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 would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.

Close, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ and https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/, by the same association. Crowd-sourced databases that you can query scanning the barcode using their app.

The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#588
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions This response sounds like real science for sure.

> “By proposing an alternative approach to sperm count data, we aim to contribute to the burgeoning discussion among reproductive health scientists and other researchers and clinicians about men’s health,” said Boulicault, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!

Personally, I have a hard time putting much stock in the opinion of those who use exclamation points.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#589
post #478

I did my Master Degree in Organic Chemistry where we tried to develop a male contraceptive pill. I spend a lot of time studying sperm so here is a short list of thing to avoid regarding sperm quality (not ranked): 1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a] 2. Heating food in ANY type of plastic [a] 3. Caffein intake [b] 4. Sugar intake [c] 5. NOT exercising regularl…

> 1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a] So drinking containers should generally be ceramic, glass, or stainless steel?

Or titanium[0]. Neat fact about anodizing titanium: the colors are the result of the thickness of the resulting oxide layer and how it refracts different wavelengths of light[1].

[0] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/drinkware/products/tita... There are many. This is my favorite.

[1] https://chemistrytalk.org/titanium-anodizing/

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a] So drinking containers should generally be ceramic, glass, or stainless steel?

I'd want to know that drinks aren't full of that stuff regardless of the end-user container material, before worrying about it. They're surely exposed to tons of plastics in the manufacturing process, including at times when various components are heated. Even water supplies in a house will typically have been in contact with plastics—at the treatment plant, in the house for any modern house (they're pretty much all…

> ever start with a hot tap for water you're gonna boil?

I've been told I shouldn't do this, so I don't, but I always feel like a rube waiting for a big pot of pasta water to boil from cold when I know I could have just used my giant tank of heated water and save 10 minutes of waiting...

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