Most people in Western world are either out of shape, or straight up obese. It makes sense that, that will have huge negative effects on fertility.
In addition to be factually incorrect, consider how what you said sounds to the many people who are healthy, active but are having problems with something they thought would be easy. This is very stressful for many people, seeming especially cruel after years of worrying about accidental pregnancy, and the medical treatments are a figurative (and often literal) pain in the ass. Unqualified strangers taking the opportunity to offer judgmental “advice” is not something anyone wants even in general, and it’s certainly not more appropriate in this situation.
We spent about 5 years on this (and have a great 3yo). If anyone reading this has questions, feel free to ask.
I said to most of the audience, this doesn't mean anything, and to those that this means something, they probably already know this anyways.
So, for the general public (non-biologists) you have to either explain it differently (at least don't use acronyms). or at least cite a reputable website so that we, normies, know you are not trolling!
It is unreasonable and not the goal of this forum use a level of discourse here so that all comments can be understood by general public. This a bunch of nerds chatting, not US Weekly.
I personally find this entitlement culture annoying. If one really wants more information and leads one can ask for that without a lecture about doublespeak
Sometimes it will be useful to provide appeals to authority as a shortcut to skeptical verification of internet facts, but it seems wrong to attack the fundamental basis of clear communication - asserting a clear and concrete statement that enables you to independently check if it's true or who thinks the same.
We can't go around the internet citation-needing every statement; you should find the equilibrium of faith-disbelief-verification that works for you, that's the only thing that scales.
Here's a small study that demonstrates that losing weight can increase fertility:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3177768/
Additionally, this mechanism is why drugs like clomifene and anastrazole work for male infertility.
"This study found obesity to be associated with poor semen quality and altered reproductive hormonal profile. Weight loss may potentially lead to improvement in semen quality. Whether the improvement is a result of the reduction in body weight per se or improved lifestyles remains unknown."
What makes that work is what the person you're replying to asked for: sources. I don't get medical advice from random strangers on the street, I get it from people who have credentials or organizations which hire those people. When I get a contractor, I'm looking at their licenses to assume that they at least know how to install a dishwasher to code.
* What is aromatase and what is the relationship between an overexpressed aromatase and excess body fat
* What is estradiol and what is the possible reasons for converting testosterone to estradiol
* What is the negative feedback loop in the hypothalamus and what is the interactions between estradiol and the hypothalamus' negative feedback loop
* What is GnRH and what causes the lowering of my GnRH
* What is LH/FSH and why is it obvious that low GnRH causes a lower LH/FSH
* How are these related to fertility
IMPORTANT: To be honest I am willing to read (obviously more than 16 minutes) to learn about this stuff, as you can see in my comment, I'm asking for something to read! a link to a place that explains these. Even if it takes more than 16 minutes. Of course, I'm sure somewhere on the internet these information exist. But just writing a claim without any citation, is not helpful.
Searching for this stuff is difficult due to the lack of knowledge (on my side) and all the blog spam out there.
And it is true - most issues are related to weight.
But we are also not designed for desk jobs. Most of our ancestors sweated on farms or in quarries. One of the best pieces of evidence against Intelligent Design is that the designer forgot to design us for desk jobs.
I get that it will help a lot of people whose issues are caused or worsened by weight but those people will have doctors who can tell them, you don't need to make assumptions about my lifestlye, and even if you do it seems weird to assume I wouldn't have already been told that by my sleep specialist
Sugar is a particularly odious contributor to problems.
Like OP, my wife and I also struggled with infertility for a few years (two miscarriages, years of doing everything "right", and not getting pregnant.) We're finally pregnant, and out of the most dangerous time period.
Our traditional fertility doctor was pushing us hard to do IVF (we didn't want to), so we said "eh, thanks, we'll just take a break for a while."
I asked the doc if there was any association between diet and pregnancy, and she said no. I facepalmed so hard.
I wrote up notes on a book about sugar here: https://josh.works/notes-gary-taubes-case-against-sugar
Might be worth skimming the notes to determine if it's worth reading the book.
Oh, and for others trying to get pregnant, and curious to learn more about endocrine disruptors and the effects of diet and metabolic syndrome on fertility (for men and women) I'd recommend reading _It Starts With The Egg_ [0].
This book walks you, the reader, though a lot of recent research, boils it down to a "do this/don't do that" checklist at the end of each chapter, it was perfect for my engineering brain.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21782260-it-starts-with-...
Western medicine: "What you eat is nearly irrelevant as long as you are not fat, at which point it's not what you eat it's how much and how much you exercise."
Also Western Medicine: "We don't understand why we've lost credibility in broad swaths of the population! Don't you see the degrees we've granted ourselves?"
My dad's a doctor, firmly rooted in the western style of things. He's blind to some of the ways western medicine's gotten it wrong. Taints the conversations we'd have, when I AM trying to get medical advice from him.
It's hard for him to get over me not wanting to take max doeses of painkillers, 3x/day, for a week straight, to "heal" lingering back pain.
I'm like "yeah, yeah, lets skip the meds part, and talk about healthy rehabilitation via strength training and stretching and all that". And he lectures me for my ignorance and resistance to "Established Medical Science".
I had the exact same experience with doctors just saying there was nothing a man can do to improve fertility. “It’s just genetic”.
I also second the case against sugar. I should have called out refined sugar specifically in my list. That was one thing I cut out 100% even in ingredients lists (this is tough. It’s in EVERYTHING. Even loads of savoury things that have zero business having sugar in).
Side pondering - I’ve often wondered if McDonalds got a really raw deal from Super Size Me (great documentary) and that it was just the super size soft drinks that were the cause of problems - remember the guy in there who has eaten thousands of Big Macs? But he never had the drink. And he was thin as a rake (dunno how many kids he had though!)
Remember that couple in there two who went BLIND when they stopped drinking soda. Crazy.
I, too, have tried hard to eliminate all sugar. We're not perfect, but we're way past the 80/20 principle of diet improvement.
I only eat twice a day (sometimes once) and the primary meal is a mushroom/spinach/egg omelet, usually with avocado or sardines, some tumeric/curcumin powder from Costco sprinkled on top, EVOO/Coconut oil, and usually some cheese.
Zero sugar, technically even zero carb.
Dinner varies a bit more, biased towards avoiding things that can be metabolized into blood glucose. It was my birthday recently, my wife got me an icecream cake. I protested a little as I tucked into it. :)
It's amazing the effect that avoiding processed sugar can have, and a little intermittent fasting baked in.
When my wife and I host family, I always am struck by how much work breakfast is. Extra eating, extra dishes, etc. My wife doesn't do that eating schedule, but it works for me.
Re: Super Size Me and the sugar - that's a great point! The soda is a particularly odious offender, I'd love to see the effect of eating just the burger every day.
Many people were grandparents by that age 150 years ago.
I too have many friends who waited until their 30s to have children. Most ended up in IVF (or adopting.)
Fertility (not precisely the right term, but one commonly used) charts — based on age — are very steep. After the peak in the early to mid 20s, it plummets very quickly. For women, anyway.
The low-sperm count issue, on the other hand, is very curious... not entirely sure if they have a grip on the true cause.
This is going to be the dominant driver for female infertility. My wife and I waited until she was 32 and I was 40 and we struggled for two years. Eventually we talked to a doctor and both got tested. I was in the 98th percentile for sperm health, but unfortunately her egg production was closer to a woman 10 years older. We did IVF and got very lucky on the first try, with one viable embryo, who is now a curious and amazing four-year-old.
We've been trying to get pregnant now for 3 years. We tried IUIs (very different from IVF, think "turkey baster" a few times, to no success.
Ironically, it wasn't until we stopped trying to get pregnant that we got pregnant. We did a one-week intensive marriage counseling program (strongly recommended, not cheap, worth every penny of the $6k cost) and it possibly healed so much in our marriage we got pregnant _the week after the counseling_.
After trying, with great adherence to all the best practices, for the prior 3+ years.
I blame in part the extremely high housing costs in US metro areas. We are both in tech, but also want to live in a nice place (Golden, CO). Housing affordability is a joke, I have no doubt that the price of housing affected our child-rearing plans.
We bought a house in Golden (barely. Inflation and all, it's a stupid rigged system oppressive to everyone.)
Now I want to fix the housing cost problem here in Golden, in Lakewood, and ultimately in Denver.
It'll take some years, but if all goes according to plan, I'm going to die, peacefully, in my sleep, in about 80 years, within 150 feet of where I'm sitting right now.
I've got time to work on these affordability problems.
The issue discussed in this article has quite a few biologists I've interacted with concerned which deal with products we redistribute or manufacturer back into the environment that may be causing these issues. Endocrine disruption is occurring in other species in the wild less or not clearly effected by the issues described above (selection bias, cultural biases in exercise/diet, etc.), and for all intents and purposes, seem to be going along with a sort of survival of the fittest model yet they're still having endocrine issues.
In the anthropocene era, it's quite possible some of our behaviors are causing this and it wouldn't be the first time: lead and CFCs come to mind in the past. We have what appears to be a smoking gun, but we still haven't identified the shooter. We should definitely improve the factors that we can like diet and exercise and look to remedy socioeconomic selection biases for reproduction but the issue at hand may be one you can't simply diet and exercise your way out of and we need to continue to investigate it and find the root cause.
A rubberizer additive put in tires was getting atomized and then washed off into the streams. It makes salmon swim in circles until they die.
Does it do anything to people? We don't know.
Quite a metaphor when applied to people.
First let's not anthropomorphize nature, or natural selection. But secondly, in 1st world countries, the more money you make, the less likely you are to have kids! We've done a terrible job at incentivizing couples to have kids since women have entered and made up a good part of the work force, and it's hard to blame someone in a good career, married to someone in a good career, to take off 10-15 prime years of their lives to have children.
I think that waiting to have children until later (late 20's to early 30's) is a big problem in terms of fertility and successful child bearing. Unfortunately the human clock doesn't really jive with the "4 years of college, work a bit and then think about marriage and kids".
I don't have a conclusion except we might want to think about increasing the birth rates among high and medium earners in our populations where they are struggling, lest we become like Japan or other countries (some in Europe which depend on importing labor in order to satisfy demand)
On a serious note however, babies and a growing population is an enormous advantage to a nation. I would think it would be massively popular to increase benefits to those who are having children. Full disclosure, I found out my wife is pregnant yesterday, but still.
There are also women who are infertile due to no fault of their own (e.g. cancer, etc.), why should they be excluded from any resources whatsoever due to something that is not their fault?
For the greater good of others, taking one for the team.
'Solaria' is this planet of abundance with strict population controls and where robots do all the hard work and wealthy generation for their owners.
But that's hardly "modern" at all. Any improvement since the dawn of time that increases survivability for any creature that otherwise could not have lived and bred without it would lead to that result. Where does one draw the line?
But what if you aren’t over weight and already fairly healthy, like I was?
Then you have to look at other things too.
It's amazing what a little exercise can do for your body!
Unless you’ve been trying for over a year that’s just a perfectly normal amount of time for it to take anyway
This got a chuckle out of me sir.
I imagine the sperm sent you a memorandum of protest about your unhealthy lifestyle. Sure it was an illegal strike but it worked.
I know it's anecdotal, but of my friends with fertility issues (3 couples who mentioned it to me), none are remotely overweight, they're regularly active, and they eat well. I'm sure inactivity and obesity are a major issue in regards to fertility, but I'm not personally seeing that.
You might be accidentally making a counterpoint if it turns out that the retention of fake estrogens are what are mediating the effect.