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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

#661

Post by dionidium »

nicholasjarnold wrote: post #389
thehappypm wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another lesson from your story (similar to many of my friends’) is to just have kids younger. It sounds like you started at around 35 — if people started at 30, even, fertility is higher.

Yep, I can confirm this based on personal experience with a gynecologist telling my wife that at 35 the pregnancy is considered a "geriatric pregnancy" (apparently some docs now call it "AMA"...advanced maternal age). This shocked both of us, frankly. We were aware of what the actuarial tables will tell you regarding birth defect rates related to maternal age, but hearing the term geriatric in your mid-thirties is qu…

My mother-in-law who is in her 60s thinks she's "too young" to be called grandma. She's being a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I routinely hear people say, "oh he was so young" after some 65-year-old celebrity dies of a heart attack. Increasingly, I just have no idea what's going on in people's heads when they think about age. Sixty is not "young." Thirty-five is not "young" with respect to fertility.

People need to get a grip on their mortality, man.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#662

Post by hindsightbias »

RC_ITR wrote: post #229
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll let the chemistry people comment on this one but phtalates are used as a 'plasticizer' they are not plastic itself as in a micro-plastic bead I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination.…

>This is one of the problems, we are missing studies that can demonstrate sources and source contribution to this problem. This is why I hate when people compare climate change to other problems (like GP did). Sure, there's a lot of microplastics out there, but the science is still out on what that means for us. Meanwhile we know how bad Climate Change is, so if we have limited resources to fight problems, definitely…

> the science is still out

Same thing I heard for decades about AGW. And still do. In fact, they probably make up a majority in Congress. There were decades of people out there saying the science was still out to worry warts asking about the wisdom of dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.

I know more than a few white conservatives who have had to use IVF, and the AGW-denying IVF doctor I know rants about phthalates/plastics even though it’s good for her business. We have a 100X more opportunity to convince them of plastics action than we do of climate action.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#663

Post by dionidium »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #402
thehappypm wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another lesson from your story (similar to many of my friends’) is to just have kids younger. It sounds like you started at around 35 — if people started at 30, even, fertility is higher.

We have a societal problem when the rational individual choice (to provide your children the best head start) is to wait until your fertility declines to have children.

That would suggest that, in fact, it is not the rational choice. People are too precious about having kids. And when I say "people" I mean me. I waited until I was 40. That was stupid. I should have started sooner. Everything would have been fine.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#664

Post by dionidium »

onion2k wrote: post #475
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a societal problem when the rational individual choice (to provide your children the best head start) is to wait until your fertility declines to have children.

...rational individual choice... It's a choice in the same sense that I've chosen not to buy a Ferrari because I can't afford one.

This really doesn't make any sense. We are not poorer than our ancestors and they figured it out. People have convinced themselves that the requirements for having children are far beyond what they actually are.

In fact, I think it's precisely our wealth that scares people about the prospect. You're going to have to trade away some of that wealth to have children and people are understandably nervous about that.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#665

Post by PakG1 »

Aeolun wrote: post #464
PakG1 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adopting is hard. I've tried to convince my wife that we should adopt because I've always wanted to adopt anyway, but she's scared I'm not taking it seriously enough. She says with adoption, you need to emotionally commit more than you would with your own blood because the natural instinct isn't there. She's scared I can't handle the responsibility and she might be scared of it too. She said we can have the talk agai…

I’m always surprised that they think they’re the only ones that care. Just because it doesn’t show in the same way doesn’t mean I don’t care. My wife’s care consists of endlessly fuzzing over every little detail of their appearance when going out. Mine consists of ensuring he’s happy and fed. Personally my issue with adoption is that I do not want to be in a position where I treat my own child and the adopted one dif…

Given I'm still trying to remind myself to regularly vacuum, I don't blame her for her worries about my level of commitment to responsibility. I took months to file our taxes. I'd have a bad opinion of me too. I'm really lucky that she loves me for some reason!

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#667

Post by dionidium »

afavour wrote: post #450
Aeolun wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, kids may be incompatible with a lot of lifestyles, but I wouldn’t call them inherently expensive. You just have to adjust your expectations.

I dunno how you can say that. When children are young you have two options: - both parents work, you pay for childcare - one parent drops out of the workforce, takes care of children at home neither of these is cheap. Decades ago it was realistic for one parent's salary to cover the whole family but these days salary stagnation and increased costs of e.g. housing makes it much more difficult.

> Decades ago...

Even if we accept the (I think dubious) claim that we're worse off than people were in the 1950s (or whatever) there's thousands of years of procreation that precede that one specific comparison. Those people had it much worse than we do and they had many more children.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#668

Post by sitharus »

amelius wrote: post #624
colordrops wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does estrogen in food even enter the blood?

It does, but like everything absorbed through the digestive system it gets extensive first-pass metabolism through the liver before entering the rest of the circulatory system.

Oral estrogen comes in 2mg tablets, but this results a few in µg of estrogen circulating. Estrogen also comes in transdermal patches where one 100µg patch will last three days for approximately the same dose as 4mg of oral ostrogen daily.

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#669

Post by philipkglass »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #618
fnordpiglet wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic is generally defined by its mechanical and thermal properties and a dominance of polymers. There’s are lots and lots of different chemicals used as plastics today and they have wildly different chemical properties. It seems incredible to state that “all plastics” are endocrine disruptors. Many plastics are essentially chemically inert in a biological sense. In some ways DNA itself can be seen as a plastic bei…

plasticizers are a component of plastic, characterizing one ingredient in plastic as an 'additive' in order to shift the blame from plastic to plastic ingredients doesn't change the basic fact that plastics are endocrine disruptors because they leach plasticizer into food.

Not all plastics contain plasticizers, so I would say that fnordpiglet is correct. For example, low density polyethylene (commonly used for jugs holding milk and water) is flexible without addition of any plasticizers. For this reason it is also used in laboratory equipment where plasticizer contamination would interfere with experiments:

Low density polyethylene (LDPE) is a high molecular weight polyolefin material. Like all polyolefins, LDPE is nontoxic, non-contaminating and exhibits a high degree of break resistance.

The polymerization of polyethylene results in an essentially straight chain, high molecular weight hydrocarbon. The polyethylenes are classified according to the relative degree of branching (side chain formation) in their molecular structures, which can be controlled with selective catalysts. LDPE has more side branching than HDPE resulting in a less-dense 3-D structure. As a result, LDPE is naturally very flexible without the addition of plasticizers and melts at a relatively low temperature (85°C).

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/lab-pla...

Re: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

#670

Post by sizzle »

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…

7 months?? I thought I read it was 120 days, anyone have a reputable source?
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