Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought • Hacker News Board

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#641

Post by throwawaydad12 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #325

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll rather hang myself then going to a nursery home now and even more so in the future. I'm living a happy life and looking forward to tomorrow - and yet I am dead serious about that. I've seen enough people in those places. Did you notice that one thing you learned while growing up and maturing was that you started to notice when the party is over and it's time to leave instead of hanging on until the very dire end…

Something like 95% of suicides fail and then they'll toss you into a home or someplace terrible to keep you from doing it again.

The situation is a bit more complex than that, but in any case, that's a rather weak rationale for not committing suicide.

Here is a better reason: You'll be dead quite soon in any case, so unless you're in agony, you may as well enjoy your final days here. Think of some of your favorite activities and pick one. Rinse and repeat.

Sound shallow? Maybe, but I've spent an awful lot of time contemplating the question.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#642

Post by bluGill » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

zhynn wrote: post #578

siglesias wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot recommend highly enough having a set of glass bottles[1] at home. Fill them at the tap (or wherever), refrigerate them, take them to the gym, in the car, serve to guests. Point is to have many, keep a rotation going. Has greatly reduced reliance on plastic. 1) https://amzn.to/3H2YadV

You can often buy milk at a coop in a glass bottle which can then be reused. Most of our beverage consumption is out of re-used milk bottles. :)

In my state it is illegal to use a glass milk bottle for anything other than milk from the dairy that the bottle is from. The law is from many years ago, and so there are a lot old bottles from now-defunct dairies that legally cannot be used even though everyone does.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#643

Post by morelisp » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:08 PM UTC

DevX101 wrote: post #351

UweSchmidt wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's 11603.1 whole plastics!

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#644

Post by TurkishPoptart » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

Knufen wrote: 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]

How do we avoid this? So no Costco plastic water bottles, ever.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#645

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #612

Knufen wrote: 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…

With all of these it's a matter of quantity. For instance, bullet point 9 about soy makes me question this list. It turns out that phytoestrogens are much less potent than real estrogen, and the only people that were found to have measurable effects from soy was through a study of older men that ate massive amounts of soy every day in Japan. There is real estrogen in cow's milk, which would have a much stronger effec…

[deleted]

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#646

Post by adrian_b » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

concinds wrote: post #562

Knufen wrote: 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/

There is no real difference between eating food to which refined sugar has been added and eating sweet fruits. The sugar is not bound to anything and it is released in the fruit juice when the fruit is chewed, so it is not digested more slowly than when eating a sweetened cake with the same proportion of sugar (but the cakes are frequently made much sweeter than the fresh fruits).

The great danger that has been created by the availability of cheap refined sugar and similar sweeteners, like HFCS, is that it has become extremely easy to create food that has an unnaturally high concentration of sugar or fructose and that it has become extremely easy to eat an excessive amount of sugar per day.

Most cultivated fruits contain around 10% sugar, while a few are sweeter than that, with up to around 16% sugar, like grapes, fresh figs or fresh dates.

When eating only fresh fruits or defrozen fruits, it is unlikely to eat too much sugar, but it is still possible.

It is recommended that the daily intake of sugar should not exceed around 50 g (i.e. around 25 g fructose).

That corresponds to around 300 g of grapes, or around 500 g of apples or pears or blueberries (or most other fruits), so eating amounts less or equal with these every day should be safe.

On the other hand, a single chocolate might contain over 60 g of sugar. Most industrially-made food, including juices or yogurts or breakfast cereals, contains excessive amounts of sugar, so many people eat daily 100 to 200 g of sugar, or even more, without being aware of this.

When eating dried fruits or honey, it is also possible to eat too much sugar without a lot of effort, e.g. around 80 g of most dried fruits is enough to provide the maximum recommended daily intake of sugar.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#647

Post by Klonoar » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

DrThunder wrote: post #546

It's obesity 100%. You can try to blame microplastics all you want but plastics have been around for a long time now and the amount of people having issues in the last generation has skyrocketed along with the obesity epidemic. You cannot sit around on screens all day, eat unhealthily, never lift weights, never do any cardio and expect to have enough testosterone to reproduce.

I mean, you have to look at the whole picture. Obesity is the big one to solve, but you have to kill the sugar issue if you want to do that.

The average American (to say nothing of the rest of the world) is absolutely abysmal at keeping count of their sugar intake.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#648

Post by UglyToad » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #635

UglyToad wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, that study of 99 (predominantly overweight) men from an infertility clinic that definitely shows soy affects sperm count. As far as I'm aware the evidence just isn't there with respect to soy and cherry picking the single study that shows some potential link is just helping fuel a dietary myth, would be my view.

Yeah, I feel like the soy myth has been disproven time and time again but won’t die already. This and seed oils get hit with the exact same playbook, then disregard significant chunks of the world that have zero issues with them.

Yeah, like I get people maybe being wary of soy. There's a lot of mistruths and half understood myths out there. In addition to various contradictory findings from studies [0].

But for a list speaking from a position of expertise it felt quite jarring to see it included as a definitive "don't" and made me wonder about the agenda of GP (soy with respect to fertility is indelibly linked with the far-right "soyboy" meme).

As a chemist the idea that phytoestrogens might have the same impact as estrogen isn't completely buck-wild, but also as a chemist I know that two isomers with the exact same composition can have wildly different effects in the human body. So I'd need to see a lot of solid evidence before treating is as anything more than a myth spread by misinterpreted studies of red-clover consumption in Australian sheep from the 1940s.

[0]: https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(10)00368-7/pdf

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#649

Post by citizenpaul » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:17 PM UTC

Knufen wrote: 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…

>it takes approximately 7 months for sperm to fully develop

Can you explain this more? I was under the impression it took something like 60days for sperm to generate in the body.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#650

Post by biomcgary » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

nosianu wrote: post #598

biomcgary wrote: post #469

Years ago, I published a paper suggesting that humans have genomic evidence of strong selection pressure on some sex hormone pathways. So, I am quite curious about whether sperm counts are plummeting solely because of environmental changes (e.g., human created hormone influencing toxins, including "the pill") or also because natural selection in humans has drastically changed with the advent of modern society. In spe…

So how do you integrate into your theory the additional fact mentioned in that article that sperm count and male health were associated? > “One can view the decline in sperm counts as a biomarker for male health in general,” says Kristensen. > In fact, a study in a 2018 issue of the journal Andrology found a higher risk of hospitalization among men who had lower sperm concentrations. Those with sperm concentrations b…

Possibly chemicals, but, alternatively, natural selection has been relaxed across the board in the modern societies since agriculture and even more after industrialization. How often do you see males literally fighting over sexual access to a female, which would select for physically healthy males?

Selection pressure for intelligence may have increased, but education level is negatively correlated with reproduction, so maybe not. Multiple generations of relaxed selection would have a cumulative effect on health AND sperm production.