Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
- 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 immediate drastic effects (this is abbreviated "LOAEL"). That's the reason we have a xenoestrogen in the lining of soda cans (BPA), because we're trusting that tiny doses must be negligible, which isn't necessarily a valid assumption [2].
- The attitude on a lot of chemicals is "Safe until proven guilty," but when some of these chemicals are suspect (e.g. pesticides) instead of a public announcement they are pulled from public use quietly prior to the point of definitive evidence. New/similar ones can be introduced with presumption of safe until proven guilty. (Search PFOAs if you want to get a sense of how ineffective our protection mechanisms are)
I came to the conclusion a radically new model is necessary, the EPA/FDA need to design models to test for fertility effects, perhaps multigenerationally, in their studies (fruit flies?) quickly.
My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response....
We might want to prevent them from owning our candidates, legislators and judges first.
This may be a long-overdue self-correction.
Global infertility may just be what solves global warming.
How many destitute families are you sheltering in your home?
The world is polluted, and heating up. The most obvious parameter of that is this: the sheer number of people.
You can like people and be on board with the idea that there is such a thing as too many people in one place at one time. The extreme example of that is crowding incidents in which people die, like the one in Seoul this Halloween. No, it's not always "the more, the merrier".
Buildings, vehicles, and various structures and equipment which support or carry people all have maximum occupancies.
Maybe, so do planets?
This is the worst argument ever. I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it is, but it's a really really bad argument.
It's even worse than the "if you really wanted to lose weight you'd find a way, so obviously you just don't care that you are overweight" argument.
In the EU the manufacturer needs to prove the ingredients are safe.
In the US they need to prove they're not harmful. "not harmful" != "safe"
You already lost.
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 chemical, then it will be those people who's genes will pass on. Within a generation we as a species will have developed resistance to at least the impact on fertility by some unregulated chemical.
I get the sense we (as in all of us collectively) are not taking it seriously enough. I wonder where this "fearmongering" is happening. A lot of stuff that is happening (the Western US drought that seems to be the worst in a millenium plus the consequent heavy use of groundwater, triple dip la nina, etc.) seem like they should worry us more than they actually are.
Objectively, “climate change” was happening on this planet allegedly since it was born 4.6 billion years ago. It’s a natural course of things.
To understand the scope of fear mongering you can look what “priests” were saying 10 years ago and how much of their predictions came out as true. It’s quite interesting. They use shortness of human memory.
By this logic, plenty of species have died out in the 4.6 billion years of earth and so we should do nothing about the demographic crisis in many countries. After all it’s all just life and life will go on.
You can try to change global things like earth orbit or natural course of time with same result.
To understand how stupid “climate change” ideas are, you can simply look if it’s preachers are doing anything following their preachings. They fly private jets and then tell regular people about “offsetting carbon footprint”.
It’s all about money and power, nothing else. Climate change is of no interest to them.
The truth is the truth - regardless of who tells it to you.
But what if it's some other random thing that also gives people heart attacks?
If you want a more thorough list, the NIH compiled this
---
What are some common endocrine disruptors?
Bisphenol A (BPA) — used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins, which are found in many plastic products including food storage containers
Dioxins — produced as a byproduct in herbicide production and paper bleaching, they are also released into the environment during waste burning and wildfires
Perchlorate — a by-product of aerospace, weapon, and pharmaceutical industries found in drinking water and fireworks
Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) — used widely in industrial applications, such as firefighting foams and non-stick pan, paper, and textile coatings
Phthalates — used to make plastics more flexible, they are also found in some food packaging, cosmetics, children’s toys, and medical devices
Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) — used to make flame retardants for household products such as furniture foam and carpets
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) — used to make electrical equipment like transformers, and in hydraulic fluids, heat transfer fluids, lubricants, and plasticizers
Triclosan — may be found in some anti-microbial and personal care products, like liquid body wash
> Phytoestrogens — naturally occurring substances in plants that have hormone-like activity, such as genistein and daidzein that are in soy products, like tofu or soy milk
Your comment doesn’t explicitly say that Phytoestrogens are only present in soy, but it should be clear that such compounds are extremely common, even though people tend to single out soy (largely because soy has been the most studied for potentially positive health reasons).
Phytoestrogens are present in many different grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, etc [0]
You have to carefully read product labels, 99.9% of products don't contain any info about EDC's, you have to specially seek out ones that are labeled as phthalate-free, BPA-free, etc.
Biggest offenders are in the kitchen and bathroom. Shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, perfume, are big offenders. There are special versions of these products you can find but they don't usually work as well. Most things that are scented have phthalates. Pretty much any food that comes in a flexible plastic container, most dairy and eggs have it as well (dairy because of the flexible plastic tubing used when pumping milk).
One example of a source for milk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23138015/
Also - products which would not reasonably be produced with, say, "phtalate" - would probably not be labeled phtalate-free anyway. So one first needs to know which "X-free" labels to look for.
But yeah, specifically the thing to look for is "phthalate-free".
So do I get super sperm or something?
On the other hand, people in more industrial countries are exposed to different chemicals (BPA, FPOAs, flame retardants, food additives, etc.), than people in more agrarian countries (field chemicals, like fertilizers and pesticides). These chemicals are all harmful, but it's hard to blame a single class of them for a global problem.
If I had to pick a truly universal issue, I would say childhood and young adult obesity. Surprisingly, obesity is growing rapidly even in countries where hunger is also a problem.
It is the obligation of THAT person to provide evidence, since they are making the claim that it is some "evil toxin in the environment".
Alternatively, quotes are sometimes used in a dismissive manner, but it would be unusual for an author to be dismissive of a word and yet find value in introducing it into a conversation.
Could that be explained by the unfortunate lack of trans acceptance?
Not necessarily, there are other possibilities, for example the mechanism might not be lack of male hormones, but elevated female hormones, or environmental contaminant analogs thereof.
The hormone panel is typically T,E1,E2, but human hormonal pathways are complex[2] and not fully understood. There are, for examples, hypotheses involving "backdoor" pathways that should/could be verified, but aren't due to lack of research funding directed toward an admittedly small group of people.
1. That's not to say all or even most, but it is very very common.
2. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Diag...
How well documented is this, like when this has been tried has it been done as part of a formal medical study? What I'm really hoping is someone can say something like "here's the randomized controlled trial comparing treatments".
Well, that's not quite accurate. (a) there isn't a large increase of trans people, historically speaking, just folks being more open and honest about their status recently, since it's become marginally less punished in a few specific places, than it has been prior, and (b) in recent years, trans men or transmasc folks are the largest group of those new influx, not trans women.
> There are massive amounts of compounds in our environment that are endocrine disrupters or mimic sex hormones like estrogen
If people were getting estrogen in the environment that they didn't want in any amount meaningful enough to effect them, you'd wouldn't expect to see more trans women (trans women, generally speaking, are usually deficient in estrogen), you'd expect to see more dysphoric men. You'd expect to see a sharp increase in cis men presenting with ED and gynecomastia and such. (Which, to be fair, is a thing we're seeing. But so far, appears to be mainly linked to increasing obesity rates)
> Maybe they would even benefit more from hormone treatments in the opposite direction than the "gender affirming" treatments.
This is barbaric if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. So barbaric in fact, that it's been outlawed in many nations -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_therapy for more info
It does feel like I've seen more men with more than just regular moobs, who aren't necessarily otherwise severely obese. The trans women I know have less shapely breasts even though they're deliberately taking hormones, and it's a bit bizarre. Not a huge amount, but enough to notice. I'd be willing to believe also that there's a contingent of those that are trans men too, but I just mean it's actually more bizarre to see someone who is otherwise just a cis man with like C or D cups
> This is barbaric if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
It is barbaric to not even consider a different point of view because it opposes your religion (yes, I think it is a religion at this point)
Sorry if I appear harsh, but I believe that in a couple of decades we will look back at what the pharma industry is doing to "trans" people as we look back on lobotomy now.
The world has changed quite a lot in recent decades in ways that have substantial impact on how much info is available, how much an individual can explore their own internal identity and myriad other things and it's unfortunately mostly not talked about in those terms.
We also pass out medicalized labels for all kinds of things that used to be handled differently. A child who might have been labeled shy at one time might get diagnosed with selective mutism these days and receive an IEP at school for it.
It's a really complicated topic. This is a big forum. It's not really a question that's likely to get meaningfully hashed out here in some good faith fashion that has some hope of moving things forward, either scientifically or in terms of human rights.
If you are seriously curious about this, I suggest you explore it more quietly than tossing out questions on a front page post on HN. It's not that such questions cannot be asked and explored, it's just this is a really tough way to do it and have it go good places.
Same question is of my interest as well and I find local community to be well openminded compared to other online communities where raising this kind of question will be widely perceived as offence to vocal trans community.
That's one of many spaces where we can openly bring it up and respectfully discuss.
It's quite difficult to explore the topic on your own without hearing other people.
Why?
In my experience, that's how one typically finds good info and meaningful feedback and does so with less pain than can be involved in standing on a big stage in front of everyone with a bullhorn and blaring their "controversial" supposed "position" to the world, knowing the world will scream back, often without making any real effort to understand what was actually said -- or so it can feel on the receiving end.
Personally I am open to any discussions as it is the only way known so far to explore and understand other people.
Certainly there may and probably will be some pushback and some people may get offended along the way. And that's alright. It shouldn't be the reason for censoring or shunning any topics. Nowadays we have growing share of people in society who are offended with anything and it's a sign of immaturity, not a healthy discussion.
Adults on the contrary, are called adults because among other things they can look at stuff and openly discuss everything, particularly things that may not portray them well.
Shunning discussion because it can hurt someone leads to large misunderstanding on subjects and multiplies weird beliefs that have nothing to do with reality.
I also wasn't telling you, in specific, what to do.
It was a good faith suggestion of best practices based on substantial experience with being very controversial and trying to find a path forward on my interests under circumstances where my willingness to debate, my ability to be thick-skinned and so forth were not getting me the desired results and were coming at an excessive cost.
I've expressed disagreement with your PoV and explained why when you asked.
We have exchanged opinions and that's great. Let's not dig further.
Have a good day.
The front page is the perfect place for such communication, the lack of truly social discourse and individualistic isolation is what creates such reactionary tension while trying to reconcile all the distortions in the zeitgeist of the world.
I think mental stressors of such social failure is whats leading to such childish ideas that adults seem to preoccupy their lives with today, and environmental pollution is definitely contributing to bringing those about.
I didn't suggest it should be.
I will note that so far I have two replies, both nominally "arguing against" my supposed "position" here. Both strike me as a wild misinterpretation of what I have said.
And that's exactly why tossing out questions or comments on a front page post on a large forum can be problematic.
Which isn't to say one should never do such. But it's frequently not exactly gratifying.
"One thing that I'm genuinely curious about that I've never heard addressed is whether the large increase of people identifying as left-handed could be related to the same factors that are causing ..."
I believe the period from 1900 to around 2100 will be looked at as this horrible era where we filled our own ecosystem with an almost unimaginable amount of "toxic" chemicals.
Truth is, particularly the US, the only thing we really test consumer products for is lead and mercury. These are the two things we test basically everything for. Other than that it's pretty much don't ask don't tell (and don't test), unless there is a specific piece of legislation that forces such a test. It's starting to change. But the US model is basically, "Do whatever you want. We'll let liability shape policy." So you create a product, put it out and have it do unimaginable damage, then pay for the health and environmental damage you did, and then create legislation around what others should do going forward.
I get the economic reasons for this. But I think we went too far, too fast, and too hard.
We don't even do that very well, for example see all the heavy metals that have been allowed (and are still allowed) in baby food.
Or not. How often have companies actually had to pay for anything like the actual cost of the damage they have caused to the environment? Are there any cases when they have had to? They sometimes have to compensate a few of the humans involved, but never anything more general than that, and usually nothing approaching the real cost to society or the environment.
I don't know what the answer is here either. The EU is getting much more aggressive about this, but it's already getting to the point that to bring a new product to market strictly within the law essentially costs infinite dollars.
Aviation still uses leaded fuel and we KNOW how bad it is. But the economic consequence of fully eliminating it is still too great. Literally the one chemical that we know with certainty that there is no safe level of exposure to, is still getting distributed through the air all day every day.
It's funny to me the way Prop65 turned out in some ways. When people were told just how bad absolutely everything is, people actually care less. And now the same thing is happening across the EU in a broad range of categories. Everything has at least 3 or 4 warnings on it. Most people just ignore them completely or look for a product with no warnings—which is probably just lying.
Of course, cleaning up various of these messes (forever chemicals, fossil fuels, etc) also costs infinite dollars, and in the meantime they also fuck up the health of the entire planet for both humans and other animals. It still seems a no-brainer to me to take the economic hit and accept slightly slower (but safer) progress. At least then we'd have a better chance of not accidentally ending the world.
Or do some trickery with shell companies, like Johnson&Johnson did, and not have to pay a dime.
The very scary part is how many of these chemicals cannot be "put back in the bottle" so to speak. This generation will be long gone, but these chemicals will not just exist on the planet, but exist virtually everywhere in some measurable amount. And we're not even using these chemicals carefully or wisely, we're just carpet absolutely bombing everyday objects with them because they make life fractionally more convenient.
Nat Geo had a good write up last year: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/pfas-cont...
That’s not true in the least at least for consumer products like cosmetics or anything ingested or rubbed on the body. Go to FDA.gov and read what it takes to get a consumer product approved.
There is a list of GRAS “generally regarded as safe”. Outside that you can’t use it.
This is an emergency, which would probably require we do a revolution on use commercial packaging and plastic. But I don't have much faith, given how entrenched this industry is. Right now, industry is pushing BPA-free packaging, but I strongly suspect BPA-free plastics have similar endocrine effects, we just haven't studied them long enough.
Based on what? BPA is the monomer which makes up polycarbonate plastic, and it's a simple molecule which has been known to be an estrogen analogue for nearly 100 years. Other kinds of plastics besides polycarbonate are made from much different kinds of monomers which have no structural similarity to BPA, so why should we assume that the risk carries over? The mechanism that makes BPA dangerous has nothing to do with the fact that it can be turned into a plastic.
The group of chemicals known as phthalates are added to a huge range of plastics we use at home every day and there is a ton of evidence suggesting that these chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They seem to all have very similar effects WRT endocrine disruption, often substituted for one another when one is found to be bad. This leads to the whack-a-mole effect described by a sibling comment.
Products can be listed as "BPA free" but still have these endocrine disrupting chemicals in them.
Yes we are down to discussing tea bag brands now but as you are saying, it's an emergency :-(
In bulk tea is not only significantly cheaper (not as bad as the tea capsule mark-up, which is in a league oo its own), but also waste is reduced to nothing (only the tea itself, which is perfectly organic).
Rinsing a reusible tea holder doesn't take more time than it takes to dispose off the paper tied to the end separately.
Why do people wildly overstate their case, and thereby weaken it? This is obviously false: tea bags, like disposable silverware, may be harmful but they are not useless!
These days if you are against something then anything bad said about it is true, anything good said about it is false or questionable. This is a (bad) lawyer's attitude, a very easy algorithm to execute, and one that is transparent and punished by any judge worth their salt.
Surely an oxymoron?
(I don't really drink tea fwiw; if I did I probably would be the type to get into it with loose leaves sourced from somewhere I believed to be better than anything available in bags (not even because of the plastic or whatever in bags).)
Where do I put my feet?
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0601/8783/6659/files/Evolu...
Link is from the FAQ page on aeropress.com.
I can't find the reference now but at one point they discussed why they don't offer an aeropress in stainless steel or glass, and it's basically because of safety (metal and glass transmit heat much more than plastic). Additionally with glass, even pyrex, there is a risk of breakage.
I don't know if it's really solved anything, but I switched to loose leaf teas with a stainless steel "tea ball" for individual cups. Now I can instead wonder what metals the global supply chain decided to actually use in that product. ;-)
I just run the water for 10 seconds or so (feel for it to get colder) before I drink.
Ah god, this is gonna be a "those dumb Romans used lead pipes" moment for our civilization isn't it?
We do have quite a bit of lead pipe though.
Trade mag mentions it: https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/14071043/the-perfect...
Most PVC is not rated for potable water. In many localities (like nyc) it's a code violaton to use PVC on anything. I am a professional plumber.
Btw, fun fact for you non-plumbers, pex as we know it was invented by a hardcore nazi.
What are you planning on doing?
I stopped using the Dr Bronner's liquid soap and switched to the their bar soap. For a while I was using the same soap for my hair and then I was doing a "rinse" (apple cider vinegar + some oils) but I got lazy and stopped. I might pick that back up again.
https://info.drbronner.com/all-one-blog/2017/03/definitive-g...
No, this is hope. Converting the entire biomass of earth into homo sapiens is not the goal.
https://theconversation.com/amp/male-fertility-how-everyday-...
(For the record: I don't hate humans. I just think the current supply is more than adequate, and that in the long run it would not be a bad thing if there were fewer then 8 billion of us alive at the same time.)
I will never understand how so many educated people have such an anti-humanist view of the world.
Humans are awesome, intelligence is awesome. More humans means more amazing things. We are capable as a species of incredible things, and we have the ability to save our planet as well as continuing to grow. We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds, we cannot solve climate change, nuclear fusion, quantum computers, the great questions of physics without MORE smart people.
Examples of high fertility rates combined with poverty are often correlated with dictatorships and corruption, in my opinion they are cultural.
Some humans are awesome. Other humans not so much.
> intelligence is awesome.
It is indeed, but intelligence is pretty unevenly distributed among humans.
> More humans means more amazing things.
It also means more stress on the planet's ecosystems. There are awesome things on earth besides humans, and one of the problems with humans is that too few of us seem to understand this.
> we have the ability to save our planet
In theory. The jury is very much out on whether we can actually do it. Personally, given what has been done to address climate change so far, I'll give long odds against.
> We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds
And who says that these are good things? If we can't even manage to bring this planet to a sustainable steady-state what makes you think we'll have better luck elsewhere?
> without MORE smart people.
More smart people is not the same thing as more people.
This all gets very philosophical, but seriously, optimism is much better than pessimism here.
> There are awesome things on earth besides humans
Like what? Nature is cool, we shouldn't destroy it, but nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us. Nothing else on this planet can ponder and understand the world like we can, this is a good thing that the universe should have more of. A meteor (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) could hit this planet at any time, in fact it's pretty likely that it will happen again. And on a long enough timeline, the sun will die and ALL life and ALL nature will die. In the interim what should we do? Should we just sit around on this planet and wait it out trying to preserve things the way they were when humans first evolved? What's the point?
I prefer to take the humanist approach, I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe and that we can and will do great things with more people.
You could leave a comment on my blog. Or write a guest post. Here are some possible attachment points:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2022/11/ron-descends-from-mountai...
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/06/on-morality-of-kitten-to...
Or if none of those are suitable I could write up something new but that will take a few days.
> I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe
I like to think that too. But the evidence is strongly against it.
WRONG
Your optimism is one thing, but this human supremacist stuff is just wrong. Do you think humans are a separate form of life,evolutionarily distinct from the animal kingdom or something?
This is definitionally wrong. Sentient merely means "having sensations" or even the weaker having "senses". Perhaps you mean "sapient", with reasoning, self-knowledge, and an "internal life".
This too would be wrong, but not as obviously so. When we actually try to look and measure other animals fairly, we generally find that in measures of cognitive capability, there are animals that are not that different from humans. Many animals pass the mirror test. There are birds with complex vocal languages. Both apes and birds have been recorded spreading adaptions in food preparation within a cohort and down generations (the two astounding cases are dealing with the toxic backs of cane-toads in Australia -- learning to flip them over and only eat through the stomach (corvids) and picking them up and washing them (ibises)).
You also have the opposite problem, where things we think we're good at, even ones some would say define us as a species, are actually pretty poorly done by many of us. GPT-2, which is clearly not sapient, and only capable of writing a terrible, meandering essay, still does better than many high-school students, or even college students. And we now have much better examples, that still clearly aren't sapient.
Yes, this is what I meant. What I really meant to say was "nothing else is truly sentient on this planet in the same way that humans are."
And to further elaborate what I'm really trying to get at is what Carl Sagan said "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself". No other creature is capable of it in the same way we are.
Yes I understand that consciousness is a continuum and that some species are more sentient than others (humans are obviously the furthest along this continuum though I would say).
Obviously I am biased since I am a human, but I really do think that the human ability internally monologue, to reason about our own thoughts, build complicated mental models and make decisions about them, is unique in the animal kingdom, possibly the universe depending on your parameters to the drake equation.
Psychologiy is a fidgedty beast and in a socicety that is fed by automated media bots and optimized for the "most bang for the buck".
While we long for educated and helpfull people, we have only recently actually began to accept nerds.
Iron pans, store in glass, butter, lard. If you spill stuff on a couch just live with it. Buy leather. Too many things are made because people are lazy. If you have kids don't have nice stuff, it's very easy.
An unexpected upshot is that in a functional household you can let them play like actual children, without the cloying anxiety and constant shrieks of "For Gods sake Tristan and Tarquin, not on the Louis Vuitton !!"
(Myself I prefer the approach of "have nice stuff, just don't sweat it when kids damage it - it's still just stuff".)
Also, your point doesn't work in context of GP's comment taken as whole, i.e. of reverting back to products used 50 years ago: a big value plastics bring as a material family is safety - when you replace your plastics with glass and metals, your home doesn't turn into a "functional household you can let them play like actual children" - it turns into a hazardous environment where children can maim themselves with every other object they touch.
Like, the other day my 14 m.o. accidentally dropped the bottle she was drinking from straight onto her foot, and cried for a minute. If that bottle was made of glass, we'd have to take her to a hospital for an x-ray.
https://www.ecetoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ECETOC-TR-...
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Windex.html
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/2-Butoxyethanol.h...
Trying to avoid this stuff is a bit like Night of the Living Dead -- it's everywhere.
I want to have my foods and beverages untouched by plastics, but how realistic is this currently?
I want to buy bread that's not wrapped in plastic. Is the alternative really to make your own? Even then, can you ensure the ingredients you're sourcing for your own bread starter for example, also not contained in plastic?
Perhaps it isn't feasible to eliminate all plastics in your life, but it begs the question what is good enough to reverse this and it probably starts with what you're consuming.
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 regularly [d]
6. Alcohol [e]
7. Age [f]
8. Stress [g]
9. Soy products or other natural products containing phytoestrogens [h]
I edited the comment to add point 8 and 9.
Funnily enough these goes for both genders regarding fertility. If you are considering having a child, it takes approximately 7 months for sperm to fully develop so better to change lifestyle sooner rather than later.
a. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987 b. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5482951/ c. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35606632/ d. https://rep.bioscientifica.com/view/journals/rep/153/2/157.x... e. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28029592/ f. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253726/ g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6260894/ h. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18650557/
> Semen parameters did not seem affected by caffeine intake, at least caffeine from coffee, tea and cocoa drinks, in most studies. Conversely, other contributions suggested a negative effect of cola-containing beverages and caffeine-containing soft drinks on semen volume, count and concentration.
If tea and coffee don't cause an effect, but cola and soft drinks do, doesn't that imply it's sugar, not caffeine?
Anyways, I still think sedentary lifestyles and stress play a larger role than plastics, but those are harder to isolate and control for researchers.
See this link -> https://interestingengineering.com/science/new-viral-video-r...
And this one about BPA which is quite cringeworthy from Coca-Cola -> https://www.coca-cola.ca/faqs/coca-cola-faqs-health/do-coca-...
> 2. As regards sperm DNA defects, caffeine intake seemed associated with aneuploidy and DNA breaks, but not with other markers of DNA damage > 3. Finally, male coffee drinking was associated to prolonged time to pregnancy in some, but not all, studies.
And then goes on to conclude:
> The literature suggests that caffeine intake, possibly through sperm DNA damage, may negatively affect male reproductive function.
The whole abstract points at weak/inconclusive results, but we're definitely talking about caffeine here, not sugar.
When partner attempts romantic activity, tell them you need 5 more minutes of Pokémon and the problem is solved completely.
So drinking containers should generally be ceramic, glass, or stainless steel?
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 PEX now, since it's stupid-easy and fast to install, which means it's very cheap), in the hot water heater if they're any hot water mixed in (ever start with a hot tap for water you're gonna boil?), if you've got a filter system that's almost certainly full of plastic, and so on.
You'd also have to avoid canned goods of all kinds, not just bottled/canned drinks. Store-bought canned foods have plastic liners, which all but completely solved problems with canned-good spoilage that we used to have, but does mean ~all canned goods are sitting in plastic, not metal, effectively. Glass-canned might be better but are usually more expensive and there's still plastic on the inside of the lids (how much that matters, I do not know—I'd expect very little, but sometimes these things are surprising, for all I know those inside-the-lids bits use exceptionally awful plastic or something).
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...
Nowadays if you have a hot water cylinder it's impossible for anything to get in there(although there is still a chance of bacteria growing inside the tank, but any modern cylinder will periodically heat itself to very high temperature to kill any pathogens)
The solution was a header tank in the attic. This stored water from the supply and fed it down to the hot water cylinder, providing some pressure.
The problem is the header tanks weren't a sealed system so animals could make their way in. In particular when using rodent control poison as this makes them seek water. Generally it'd be noticed pretty quickly, but not immediately.
So the hot water was generally safe for washing but shouldn't be used for drinking or cooking.
With modern closed systems (from the 70s onwards really) this isn't an issue.
The water department for the City of Denver still recommends not to use hot water:
> Hot water systems like tanks and boilers contain metallic parts that corrode as time goes by, contaminating the water. Hot water also dissolves contaminants in pipes faster than cold water.
* https://www.denverwater.org/tap/psa-dont-drink-or-cook-with-...
Also Vancouver (BC):
> Confused, I decided to send the question over to Metro Vancouver, which provides water to most of the 2 million residents in the Vancouver region. Bill Morrell, Metro’s media relations guy, quickly got me this answer from Bob Jones, their water quality expert. The bottom line: Use cold water for boiling.
* https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/why-you-shouldnt-u...
EPA:
> 2. USE ONLY COLD WATER FOR COOKING AND DRINKING. Do not cook with, or drink water from the hot water tap. Hot water can dissolve more lead more quickly than cold water. If you need hot water, draw water from the cold tap and then heat it.
* https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/20...
Depending on your system this might have no impact, my hot and cold water come from the same place and the hot water is heated 1m away from my sink by an electrical heater
Also good in cold climates as they can stretch if the water expands after freezing: they'll shrink back to the original size (esp. PEX-A/Uponor) which may help reduce the chances of the house being flooded.
Once copper bursts that hole is permanent.
[0] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/drinkware/products/tita... There are many. This is my favorite.
Does BPA-free plastic improve anything? What about containers of non-prepared food? I can see not eating directly from any, but I think it's pretty hard in the developed world to rid ourselves of plastics entirely in the storage of foodstuffs.
Also, do we know whether the changes in sperm quality you mention affect congenital childhood maladies? (I realize this is probably beyond your field somewhat.)
Silicone tends to not have endocrine disruptors because it doesn't need plasticizers.
And sperm quality mostly affect fertility. The egg and the body if the woman is incredibly effective at selecting quality sperm and rejecting bad sperm. There are multiple guidance systems for sperm which selects for good quality [b].
a. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/ind... b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_guidance
Am I right?
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...
Phthalates are monomers (aka not plastics) that are added to plastics to change physical properties of a plastic, such as flexibility, durability, make them more transparent, etc. They’re in fact derived from alcohols to my memory, and have no relationship to plastic. But they are also called plasticizers because they make plastics behave more “plastic” (in the adjective sense not the chemical sense). They are also suspected of being endocrine disruptors. But they’re not “plastic ingredients” - their use is optional and there exist alternatives.
It is in fact an important distinction. There are other plasticizers that are not biologically active that can be used in place. Or, plasticizers don’t need to be used at all. Both of these options make the plastics benign.
It’s an important distinction because plastic isn’t the problem at all, it’s the regulatory framework around plastic additives, none of which are strictly necessary and there are almost always safer alternatives. Plus it’s important to distinguish because it’s simply false to say plastics are a an endocrine disruptor when they aren’t, even if it’s convenient to get your point across.
I consider glass, stainless steel, and cast iron safe, and try to avoid almost anything non stick or plastic for cooking/food storage.
I would focus energy on advocating for regulation unless you smelt your own metals.
Edit: I’d be much more afraid of heavy metals from low quality steel, glass, and iron than modern plastic additives. Food grade plastics are heavily regulated, but metals and glass not really outside of a medical setting.
Plasticizers are clearly not well regulated yet, "BPA free" stuff just uses BPS which is just as bad.
Which is an example of regulation of additives to plastics. The plastic itself (PTFE) isn’t the problem, it’s the additives.
I’d point out interestingly PTFE is what Goretex is made out of. You heat PTFE then jerk it hard and it foams into a fabric.
Yes and what additives are being added to the PTFE in your non stick pan now? Do you know? Are they proven safe or merely not banned yet?
You can't avoid a plasticizer and still use i.e. PVC for the vast majority of its consumer use cases, which is what you are alluding to (I think) but you also can't just use the same molds and design with a different plastic. Of something's designed for UV resistance, you can't use the same design with an environmentally-friendly plastic. Like, it would have to be designed to be painted or metallized or something. At this point it's a different product: the products as currently made must be outlawed. No more aluminum cans with soda. No more lightweight waterproof jackets.
But, yes, the additives we use were picked for practical reasons and only later learned to be unsafe.
Phthalates are generally the most concerning plasticizer but they’re being phased out in favor of safer alternatives, and even safer alternatives are being intensely researched. According to this website [0] non phthalates account for 20% of all plasticizer today an expected to grow 4% in 2022.
What I find strange is the assertion that my cheap Chinese steel water bottle is somehow safer than a food grade PET water bottle from a reputable manufacturer.
[0] https://www.ceresana.com/en/market-studies/chemicals/plastic...
To be fair, DNA absolutely disrupts all kinds of biological processes - that's why viruses do anything, for example. And random nonsense DNA that you'd see if someone was using it as a plastic would probably uncover new and exciting failure modes that existing biological systems haven't had to deal with before because nothing natural produces pure DNA in absurd enough quantities to make plastic bottles out of.
That’s why mRNA (BioNTech & Moderna) and DNA (J&J) vaccines took so long to develop!
That's quite true, but it's true precisely because it's horrifically disruptive. (And the immune system has had more time to evolve protections against that disruption than it has for previously unheard of synthetic polymers.)
(Although to be clear, the new and exciting failure modes probably wouldn't involve the synthetic DNA actually getting inside of cells. (Sheer quantity might be sufficient to shove it's way through a phospholipid bilayer, but probably not.))
Wait until you learn about ink contamination from food nets and cardboard boxes.
So eating and drinking from plastics lowers sperm quality in women too?
> 7. Age [f]
wait wat
Financially, or in terms of career and other life goals, are other matters.
Financially it would have been more difficult, but by no means impossible. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have taken the opportunity for a complete career change, which would have made me miserable.
So if you hit professional/romantic stability in your 20s, I'd strongly encourage you to have kids as soon as possible.
There's a very good interview on the topic here: https://youtu.be/V02z9mqTWzg
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.
Yeah, I've heard people say this, but I can tell a big difference between people who eat a lot of fruit and people who eat a lot of processed sugar.
It's right up there with saying eating an avocado is going to make you fat because of all the calories it has so you should eat a hamburger with half the calories instead.
The fresh sweet fruits have a relatively low sugar content, so when eating them you will usually have enough before eating too much sugar, e.g. if you eat a half of kilogram (a pound) of fresh fruits each day that is still OK.
When pure sugar is added to food, most people, and especially most industrial producers, add far too much sugar, so it becomes very easy to eat too much sugar each day, while eating just a small amount of sweetened food, which does not cause satiety.
The only difference between sweet fruits and sweetened food is in the quantity of sugar, not in its quality.
If one eats, for example, 2 kilograms of sweet fruits each day, then that would still cause health problems eventually, even without any added sugar, like in the geese traditionally fed with figs, to make foie gras. The effect of eating food with too much sugar, which destroys the liver, has been well known for thousands of years, even before pure sugar became known in Europe.
If sweetened food is eaten in a very small quantity per day, it does not have any other effect than eating sweet fruits.
I personally use a hard (i.e. not squeezable) plastic bottle, that I fill with cold/cool water just before use. As long as the water has not been sitting in the bottle for days or in the sun or in a hot car, etc. I don't think there is enough potential chemical leeching to worry about.
They don't break.
I do have some glass bottles as well for occasional use by guests, but when on the go, the popular metal water bottles seem best.
That's paracetamol for the rest of the world in case you were confused like I was.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=paracetamol,%2Fm%...
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.
Though cheese intake has been associated with lower sperm concentration, dairy food intake has also been associated with abnormal sperm shape and movement, so this suggests that dairy intake may be implicated in direct testicular damage, and not just a potential suppression of sperm production due to the estrogen."
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dairy-estrogen-and-male-fer...
"Estrogen hormones can be thousands of times more estrogenic than typical endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Dietary exposure to natural sex steroids (in meat, dairy, and eggs) is “therefore highly relevant in the discussion of the impact of estrogens on human development and health.” And chicken estrogen is identical to human estrogen—they’re the same molecule."
https://nutritionfacts.org/2016/09/13/estrogen-animal-produc...
"Foods of animal origin in general naturally contain hormones, but cow’s milk may be of particular concern. The hormones naturally found in even organic cow’s milk may be playing a role in the studies that found a relationship between milk and dairy products with human illnesses, such as teenagers’ acne; prostate, breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers, many chronic diseases that are common in Western societies, as well as male reproductive disorders. Milk consumption has even been associated with an increased risk of early puberty in girls, and endometrial cancer in postmenopausal women, but hormonal levels in food could be particularly dangerous in the case of vulnerable populations, such as young children or pregnant women. "
"Pregnant cows excrete significantly higher levels of sex steroids into their milk than non-pregnant cows. The subsequent consumption of such dairy products may mean an unnecessary risk, but one that could be easily avoided. But it’s not just dairy. Although dairy products are an important source of hormones, other products of animal origin must be considered as well.
All edible tissues of animal origin contain estrogen. This may explain why, in a study of over a thousand women eating plant-based diets, vegan women have a twinning rate that is one fifth that of vegetarians and omnivores."
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/why-do-vegan-women-have-5x-...
Soy seems to fall well within the parameters of “this is fine”, but people readily take any example of it effecting our physiology as evidence of it being harmful. In reality, the evidence of it promoting health overall is extensive and strong.
It could be a component of a plant-based diet for example, which is shown to lead to lower BMI (great for sperm and overall health outcomes). It may reduce sperm concentration to a small degree in large volumes, but the chances are good (statistically speaking) that swapping out something worse in your diet for soy would be a net positive.
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.
This and seed oils get hit with the exact same playbook, then disregard significant chunks of the world that have zero issues with them.
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
I can see why that would make you wonder. However, a few years ago, the French TV did a take on soy and products containing derivates [0] (French only, unfortunately). It warned about possible effects on the endocrine system.
In relation to your point, there are two notable things:
1. It focused mainly on effects in females (never heard of a "soygirl" meme)
2. French TV is not affiliated with the alt-right (or any right) in any way, shape, or form. It has a reputation of being quite left-leaning. And that's by French standards.
[0] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/alimentation/perturbateurs...
I’m asking sincerely. It seems to me like they’re better than some alternatives if only to reduce saturated fat intake, but generally speaking, if any refined fat is avoided it’s probably to your benefit.
I often wonder if people think seed oils are bad because they eat way too much of it in general. Kind of like, if you take a shot of windex every morning you shouldn’t be surprised when you become ill, but instead people expect it to make them healthy (not actually comparing canola with windex).
Canola oil in particular seems most interesting. Its nutrient composition is more impressive than olive oil.
As for your theory, seed oils only make up 7% of US diet calories. Saturated fat makes up more than twice that. Replacing saturated fat with canola seems like an uncontroversial outcome improvement.
I’m certainly in favour of exchanging saturated fat for canola. I believe it was Finland where they made a big push to use canola rather than butter and the health outcomes seemed significant. There were confounding factors, but nonetheless, it was clear that a reduction in saturated fats yielded better life expectancy and lower rates of heart disease. The results were actually in line with what prior research indicated. Finland went from a lowest life expectancy in the world to one of the highest over decades, likely in part because of that transition away from dairy fats.
In that sense I think canola is amazing. I personally avoid both (of course it’s impossible to do so 100% of the time), but I fully support people choosing relatively healthier options.
https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/12/less-cancer-in-vegan-m...
"You know, there are men who don’t want to drink soy milk because they have an irrational fear of phytoestrogens—even though soy does not have feminizing effects on men. Yet they’re perfectly willing to drink cow’s milk, which has actual estrogen estrogens in it! Within one hour of the milk hitting their intestines, estrogen levels go significantly up, and testosterone levels go significantly down."
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dairy-sexual-precocity/
"If you take men on a high-protein diet—”meat, fish, poultry, egg white[s]”—and switch them to a high-carb diet of “bread, vegetables, fruit, and [sugary junk,]” their cortisol levels drop about a quarter within ten days. At the same time, their testosterone levels shoot up by about the same amount. High-protein diets suppress testosterone. That’s why if you take men eating plant-based diets, and have them start eating meat every day, their testosterone levels go down, and actually some estrogens go up.
That’s why bodybuilders can get such low testosterone levels. It’s not the steroids they’re taking. If you look at natural bodybuilders, who don’t use steroids, 75% drop in testosterone levels in the months leading up to a competition. Testosterone levels cut by more than half; enough to drop a guy into an abnormally low range. It’s ironic that they’re eating protein to look manly on the outside, but it makes them less and less manly on the inside. And, from an obesity standpoint, in general, a drop in testosterone levels may increase the risk of gaining weight—gaining body fat."
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-effect-of-animal-protei...
They were ... but I think the opposite is true.
I remember reading that vegans had higher levels of testosterone when not controlling for body weight, as vegans tend to be less obese than non-vegans. Can't find the source, so pinch of salt here. Makes sense though.
0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32468110/ 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374537/pdf/83-...
This is particularly important when correcting misimpressions. If your comment is neutral, the neutral reader can absorb the new information fairly easily. But if you're hostile (as with "ah yes, that, definitely that"), then you're also signaling a pre-existing battle. The neutral reader gets confused by these mixed signals and feels caught in crossfire, which is not a state that's good for learning.
The upside of battle language is that it rallies any readers who are already on your side, but this is not a good move in the HN game. We want curious conversation here, not escalating intensity or repetition of already hardened positions. The value of curious conversation can perhaps be measured by how much the participants, including the silent readers, move in the process.
There are many principles, which we're discovering together, around curious conversation. I went into this one in detail because I think it's interesting.
Btw, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been—for example, a "worthless, flame-inducing" one—the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
While it feels good to post, it doesn't really help the quality of discussion.
Eat meat, increase risk of heart disease. Eat soy, decrease fertility.
Life is weird to me. Humans have one of the longest lifespans among mammals, yet we seem to start breaking down not all that far into it. We don't tend to consider 35 "old", as we regularly live 80+ years, and even if you consider the "generally well functioning" span of your life to be your years up to 60 or so, 35 is barely past half way.
Oh well.
Either way, soy vs. meat is not the dichotomy it's sometimes presented as in political narratives. You can eliminate both and still have a huge number of healthy world foods to choose from. The Mediterranean I had recently was delicious and soy and meat free.
[0]: https://www.jwatch.org/jw200808070000002/2008/08/07/do-soy-f...
>7. Age
I find this to be the hardest one to avoid!
How do we avoid this? So no Costco plastic water bottles, ever.
Can you explain this more? I was under the impression it took something like 60days for sperm to generate in the body.
Like most things - eliminating the highest points of contact likely would suffice.
Daily habits are the ones that matter.
Are you drinking from a plastic water bottle everyday? Is your water filter plastic? Are you drinking coffee from a keurig or similar? Are you storing food in plastic containers? Are you heating food in plastic containers? Are you using plastic utencils? Are you using plastic lined pans? Are you buying food wrapped in plastic?
Etc etc.
It's a good starting place...then get your sperm tested, it's not prohibitively expensive.
> Because we can identify existing, relatively inexpensive monomers and additives that do not exhibit EA, even when stressed, we believe that plastics having comparable physical properties but that do not release chemicals having detectable EA could be produced at minimal additional cost.
The only question that I have left: Why aren't we doing this already???
Well, I'm trying my best...
But at a population level, which of those are actually driving meaningful fertility decline?
Can you suggest any reputable sources for keeping up to date with these best practices, from a consumer PoV?
Why is this so rarely discussed?
Kid is beautiful, stubborn, independently-minded, cute, all of it. Would not trade her for the world.
If you're having difficulty conceiving, please consider IVF. We tried for 3 years the natural way with no dice.
No idea if IUI helped or not, but we got a great kid out of it.
In many parts of the world, it's either way less expensive, or even covered by health insurance (at least a few tries).
Costs a good $10k in Sweden and Denmark as well. Don't know about the rest of Europe.
https://resolve.org/learn/financial-resources-for-family-bui...
What is the cost of living in the places of the world where $900 USD is average income of its populace.
From which I would ask: in those parts of the world, where does and income of $900 USD put someone in terms of poverty or prosperity. What is their social mobility?
Then I would ask: do the people living in these parts of the world feel the same urge to be parents as people living in rich countries like the US? Are the more social pressures in rich countries that make parenthood a desirable goal?
Is there a correlation between a country's wealth and conception rate ?
It was data from Switzerland though. But still 1 million USD in Switzerland is still a large amount and much 50 to 100 times higher than IVF and the same ratio would probably applies in many countries.
Bottom line is if you can't swallow the IVF price, you'd better not have kids in the first place because your kid will cost you much more than that every single year.
Calculation involves direct costs (upwards of 200k per kid) + indirect costs (bigger housing, owning bigger cars, more items, moving closer to good schools or quiet/safer places, etc).
Still I stand by the idea that if you can't swallow the IVF price you will be in a bad situation in the long term.
Source: Have 3 kids
This sounds obvious, but apparently isn’t to a lot of younger people. 38 is considered quite old to start having children (yes it happens, but it’s called a “geriatric pregnancy” for a reason), and I’m sure it contributed to the difficulties conceiving.
A lot of young folks have been convinced that child birth can be put off more or less indefinitely while you pursue a career, but the longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes. Just another piece in the “gee, why are birth rates declining?” puzzle.
Young folks haven't been convinced of shit, it's just literally not an option. Most young people are barely scraping by, can't buy a home, can't rent a medium sized apartment, have terrible health care, unreliable or unpredictable scheduling, etc etc.
"Oh we made do in earlier times" Yes and a lot of the younger generations feel those scars every day, they feel the anxiety from not having enough money in the household, and develop scarcity mindsets that they will fight for the rest of their lives. Of course they don't want to do that to their own kids.
Let alone even being in a relationship at all, one that's stable enough that you genuinely believe you will be together for at least 20 years.
Young adults aren't putting off kids "to pursue a career", we are trying desperately to survive in a world that was picked clean by previous generations and kneecapped before we got a chance at it.
Back then, IVF Drs. were measured on their success rate so they wanted to put in three blastocysts (fertilized eggs). With fears of triplets in my head, I talked my spouse down to two. My twins are adults now and totally awesome :~)
You can also cause the ovaries to release more eggs during a menstrual cycle to increase the likelihood of fertilizing one of them. This is IUF.
Although these issues can prop up at any age, the statistical chance of something going wrong keeps going up. Moreover, there’s the constant fear with every miscarriage that we’re getting even older and even more likely to run into bigger problems.
I’m honestly surprised by how little people talk about these issues.
There's been some changes to make having kids less of a challenge in recent years - at least in Europe. But it still seems like there's a long way to go, especially in terms of corporate cultures that, in my experience, don't really know what to do with young parents.
What do they not know? I’ve been mostly treated fairly (not exactly a young parent though).
My (now) wife and I got pregnant in our senior year of college. That summer I had the good fortune to land my first software dev internship.
At the end of the summer, I was to be given an offer letter to come on as a full time employee after I finished school. I asked in that meeting if I could just continue to work and was told "uh yeah, that's fine I guess". Major victory for me at the time.
I did not share that I was soon to be a father until a few weeks before the baby was due. I was afraid that this situation would negatively color their perceptions of me and my work. But eventually the time came.
I pulled my tech lead aside and asked if I would be able to take a few days off for the birth. He said of course, but, at the time, I was still an hourly employee. My first son was born on Tuesday, I took unpaid time off for the rest of the week, then returned to the office less than a week after my son was born, the following Monday. I really had no other choice - I had been working for about 5 months at the time, and certainly couldn't afford to take any more hit to my paycheck.
About a month later, I asked HR if I had any kind of PTO accrued to take some time off for Christmas. This wound up being how I became a salaried employee - they felt bad that I didn't have PTO and said basically "oh, well, you're full time now anyway, we'll just convert you to salary."
I want to be clear that there was no malice or anything involved in any of these situations, and as a matter of fact, the company was very supportive and provided an absolutely wonderful first job. But still, there was just no procedure or infrastructure in place to support a 23 year old father. Everything that was done to help me through my internship and eventually full time employment was in some sense a just-in-time hack, done by kind people who knew and cared about me.
Had my career started at Accenture or some other gigantic corporate machine, I assume none of those things would have happened for me, even if the HR people were similarly benevolent. Even with all my good fortune, being a parent within the first few months of my professional career was difficult.
Nowadays, 6 weeks of parental leave seems to be pretty standard for professional jobs, and I imagine that benefit would extend even to someone at the entry level (maybe not an intern, but FTEs). But this is a pretty recent development. When my second child was born, I took a week off.
Later that year, the company implemented a single week of paternal leave for new parents , which you would just receive as an extra 5 days of PTO. A very kind and good technical manager, without my asking, went to bat for me and got me the week of PTO refunded, effectively grandfathering me into the new benefit. No one had to do that for me, it didn't even occur to me to ask - but I have remembered that act of care from him for a long time.
So, all told, I had a pretty good level of company support as a young parent. But it's quite easy for me to imagine that any of these strokes of fortune wouldn't have occurred for many others in similar situations.
Had you started at Accenture it wouldn't have been any worse, but you probably would not have gone weeks (months?) as a full-time unsalaried employee with no PTO.
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 quite shocking. I'm ignorant of any data around paternal age and sperm count (assume it goes down...no idea the rate), but the docs do tend to focus on maternal age quite a bit regarding possible defects and fertility.
Nonetheless we were able to conceive in our late 30s without help or any trouble. Our baby is super healthy. Apparently we lucked out.
This used to be after 30 not that long ago around here
Same here, without 'trying' either (as in, we were not actively trying to get pregnant). It was surprising for us to hear the term "geriatric pregnancy" as well, and the ob/gyn seemed to utter out loud a lot of the worst assumptions about what could happen in the pregnancy. She also seemed somewhat surprised and judgmental that our baby wasn't conceived using IVF, which was a bit off-putting but she was otherwise a great doctor.
Worst thing that happened during the pregnancy was some sort of bladder issue caused by the baby being seated in her mom's pelvic floor or something. Not really a complication for the fetus, just for her mom being unable to pee without a catheter. I suspect this was more of an mechanical/anatomical effect that would have occurred regardless of age, but I wouldn't know. The baby also had a bit of an elevated respiratory rate when born, but she's fine now.
That said, my impression of the whole process was that this plays out quite differently for everyone. Ours was surprisingly easy, especially the labor part. I'm left wondering how well they've controlled for factors like the physical fitness of the mother (and father, perhaps), any genetic factors, etc. when trying to figure out how likely fertility issues, birth defects, or other problems occur based on age of the parents. Is there not also a generally higher correlation to poorer physical health as people age?
People need to get a grip on their mortality, man.
- 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.
This is how civilization propagates. The idea that only the wealthiest can afford to have kids by living in pure isolation and hiring teams of nannies and specialists is contradicted by the practice of opening one's eyes, looking around, and observing much poorer people having kids just fine.
But it requires making sacrifices. Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
Yes it is, because those friends and relatives also have to work in order to afford housing, healthcare, etc... grandparents that are happily retired, living off their savings and happy to donate their time is not close to a reality for many people.
> observing much poorer people having kids just fine
Define "just fine". I'm responding to the OP saying that having kids is "not expensive". It is. The fact that people make do, struggle and get by does not alter that fact, it just means they're doing it anyway. 1 in 6 children in the US lives in a food insecure home, that's not particularly "fine".
> Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
O...kay? I'm not sure a perspective that's this disconnected from personal lives is all that helpful. "Yes, raising a child in America in 2022 is difficult but don't worry, society will die and a new one will rise"... what's my reaction supposed to be there?
I think the comment means is that you can't have the cake and eat it too. Whether or not you want to make sacrifices in order to have kids, those choices will have consequences. Especially when sufficient number of people are doing it at the same time. The claim seems to be that the societies which prioritize sacrifices in order to raise children will outlives the ones that choose otherwise. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows.
I rather think it does. If Jane Doe can make do for her 3 children at 21 year old on a $15k/year, what right do you ($100k+) have to say that children are expensive.
But sure, if we wish to create a fictional story about a 21 year old raising 3 children on $15k a year I guess we can refute anything.
Part of having kids is wanting your kids to have a life that's as good as, or better, than your current life. You want to give them all of the possible opportunities they can have in addition to instilling them with the values you deem important.
When I was in a position to potentially have a family, I realized that despite my good-on-paper job, my partner and I would not be able to afford any semblance of a good life if we stayed where we were living, and if we moved, I would never be able to see my family - all I would do is work and commute. I had to say no and it led to the dissolution of our relationship.
I don't have family around me, I don't have the option of having family around me, and it makes me angry that you say that I just need to "open my eyes" and see how the poor people do it.
Take a deep breath and reflect on what you said, please.
Homes are much larger now than in 1955. Cars are being purchased with far more (expensive) features, and they are driven for fewer miles before being "upgraded". We eat out much more. Even when we eat in, we eat more luxurious meals. We buy Frappuccinos daily, we buy clothing much more frequently, we impulse shop significantly more, we utilize medical services much more frequently, we take far more, and more luxurious vacations, we rack up ludicrous levels of student debt for degrees that have no hope of servicing said debt, etc, etc, etc.
We are wealthier today than at any point in human history. The myth that all homes must be two-income is predicated on the outrageous lifestyles we choose, NOT due to anything inherent in "society" or "the economy".
Our insane consumerist appetite is what's preventing one household member from staying home, nothing else.
> We are wealthier today than at any point in human history.
Wealth disparity is also higher today than since records were started. You can't cite overall wealth without factoring that in.
My neighbourhood has a church which holds a weekly food bank, giving out a bag of food to anyone that needs one. The line goes far down the street every week. Do these people have "outrageous" lifestyles? Do you think they take luxurious vacations and sip frappuchinos? Not to mention:
> Homes are much larger now than in 1955.
Okay, how about... affordability? If you're going to claim housing is more affordable than it was in 1955 I'm going to need to see a citation.
- frankly fraps, daily, are a magnitude of order smaller than childcare. You could deprive yourself of a frap every day for literally years, and you still couldn't afford even 6 mo of daycare.
- we need to buy clothing more frequently because our clothing quality is shit, and the good clothing quality has increased in expense
- if you think adult humans consume medical services too often you're in for a fucking shock of your life when it comes to babies, which being pregnant is a consumption of medical services
- even small homes are much less affordable than in 1955 because the price of land has drastically increased compared to 1955
- student debt is taken on because we know for a fact that college graduates statistically outearn people without college degrees, outliers aside, and the cost of schooling has ballooned for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the previous generation had voted to withdraw funding for schooling
One household member staying home is also supremely dangerous for that one household member at home, which wasn't a problem in 1955 raping your wife was legal and women couldn't even own fucking bank accounts so it wasn't like women had great options besides staying home! If staying home was so good how come women immediately got the fuck out of the house as soon as it was available to them?
Homes are not larger necessarily because of our "insane consumerist appetite." They are larger because:
1. Housing is an investment vehicle 2. Housing valuations are primarily driven by SQFT/SQM (when you rule out location) 3. The baseline costs of building (permits, utility connections, etc) are not driven by size and make up a huge % of the cost to build. 4. Zoning laws prohibit smaller builds and multi-family in many areas.
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.
It’s unpleasant to live with 5 people on 20sqm, but if people can do it in Africa we can certainly do it in the US.
I'm getting myself, my wife, and my two kids to BMX practice (yes, with bikes) in a compact sedan.
What are people filling all that space with? Do you pack like you're crossing the Sahara every time you leave the house?
I came back and added this:
If houses were still built like they used to be, with walls and separation, it'd be easier to fit more people and stuff into fewer square feet, but even a roomy new home feels like there's always somebody with you.
I'd love to move into something small and inexpensive, but my 2 bedroom town home will have to do for the time being. Works just fine for us.
Apparently I had forgotten that you can have more than two kids for a moment. I don’t know anybody who does, at this point, just read about them on the Internet.
That's just another way to say they're inherently expensive. If they weren't, why are you adjusting your expectations?
I do think we exaggerate greatly how expensive kids are, for the most part the "exchange" is in time and not money. However, they are still a noticeable cost especially in countries with not great support systems.
I agree. If you can have one person stay home kids are pretty cheap. My wife won't stay home, but if we could swap salaries I'd do it myself in a heartbeat.
Everything else (sports, school, toys, etc.) is expectation.
[1] https://seb.se/privat/livet/att-skaffa-barn/sa-paverkar-ett-...
The main exception I can think is family support; having younger grandparents and great grandparents could be an advantage, I guess?
I'm not sure I'd look at a society where people have lots of children so they can put them to work and say "yeah, this is the way society should be!"
When I was born in 1991 and my sister in 1995, a simple police officer and a nurse in half-time could provide for two children with ease, in one of what was even back then one of the most expensive cities in Germany. Today, me (IT worker) and my s/o (public health administration) can barely afford a flat and two cats.
Fuck that shit, we need rent controls, higher wages and higher taxes on the rich. Then people like me are not forced to wait until 35 that they can start having children.
Energy, on the other hand, not so.
Interestingly, genetic mutations from the mother are roughly constant regardless of her age. Paternal genetic mutations rise with age. IIRC a 38 year old man's sperm has double the number of mutations a 28 year old man has.
> Ireland's average age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.47 for men where they had once been about 21 and 25, respectively, and only about 10% of adults remained unmarried;[22] in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7;[23][24] in the decades after the Great Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men and as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage.
Doesn't really contradict what I said, although the age gap between bride and groom was fairly variable (but no country that I'm aware of has a pattern of older bride, younger groom).
It's a choice in the same sense that I've chosen not to buy a Ferrari because I can't afford one.
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.
Quite a lot of them died in childbirth.
An example of this is that freezing your eggs costs upwards of $30k, and is still viewed as something only very select late 30's successful women do.
Isn't that also very unreliable ? When we went to IVF clinic they told us that freezing the eggs has much lower chance of them being usable compared to fertilized eggs.
AFAIK it has been shown many times that "career woman" is absolutely not a trait men find attractive.
So girls grow up with a career-oriented mindset, and don't do any careful thinking about what they want, or think about kids/family as something they will do "later" or "when I'm ready" and before they know it they find themselves at 35 years old and unable to get pregnant.
Skin elasticity and athleticism decreases with age, and that translates into worse tearing, and more difficult births, longer recovery, and more trouble keeping up with a baby after all that.
Then, on top of all that, your parents are entering their sunset years rather where you have to help them rather than having grandparents young enough to help you with your kids.
It's also linked to things like low birth weight. I sure wish my wife & I had started earlier.
And then if they wait a while I could be pushing 70 before my grandkids arrive. Great-grandkids might be a relic of a time gone by...
They seem to be the case for me. My five are 20-30. I see no avenue for grandkids where it takes 3-4 incomes to afford minimal living expenses.
Great-grandma would 60, and hell, with some luck, great-great-grandma might have been kicking around still at 80!
From a selfish perspective, I was too young to really understand what I was taking on, and it's been difficult at times. I missed out on many things. Not much of my adult life has been focused solely on my needs.
However from a family perspective, it has worked out quite well. I worked some difficult jobs at first but eventually got my degree, started a career, left to cofound a startup, bought a house. Kids are doing well.
People think you have to do all that before you have kids, but that's not true. When you're already young, kinda dumb and kinda poor then you can make it work.
I'm now 37 and my youngest is 10, so I'm not running around chasing kids anymore. I've got enough energy to help them with school. I like being a young dad now.
Honestly, I think for them it just wasn't that odd in their community. I grew up in a more suburban area and the baby boom was definitely a few years later comparatively speaking.
I have several aunts and uncles who are great-grandparents and in the 60-70 year old range.
I was born when my mother was 17. I had my first daughter when I was 25 (and therefore her grandmother was 42). I’m 38 today.
In an urban economy kids are largely dead weight and expensive for two decades. The middle class dual income family isn’t typically looking for 3+ kids anymore.
It’s possible for the poorest people to have more kids than anyone while economic pressures also lower birth rates across the board.
Tangentially, we spent some time looking at adoption and the total cost going through an agency I think would’ve been about the same.
I sort of understand why, but I still think it’s a bit counterproductive.
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 differently. Don’t know if it’d happen, but I don’t want to try.
now? good luck adopting without a mortgage downpayment, a clean history, good credit, references, yada yada
If you can't afford IVF or want to do it another way, there are things you can try to do before you start trying to avoid surprises - the main goal is to try to assess your status so you can align expecatations. It's frustrating to 'get started' and think 'it should take about X months' and then not seeing it happen (huh sounds familiar to product work?).
First, we always think it's the women's fault (or at least society defaults to that nowadays for sure). Men can go to a lab and get your sperm tested and check your testosterone levels. There are actionables to improve this in >6 months (not sure if less).
My wife did all sorts of stuff: checked hormone levels, managed her endo with excercise/diet/stress-management, got her period into one of those tracking apps to the point it actually predicted when ovulation happened (corroborated with home test kits).
In summary, I'm not trying to deal out a recipe here - just making a point that having a lower-stress attempt at getting pregnant can take a while but something can be done if you want to avoid cost of IVF or misalignment of expectations when 'trying' (we started ~preping - wife more so than me - 2 years in advance bc my wife had endo).
Only past 40 do you go into ‘really need to check’ territory.
Post 35, most couples should have a serious talk about kids. There’s a healthy chance that you’ll run into some problems either conceiving or carrying the fetus. Every aborted attempt can cost you months or more - a luxury you might not have if you’re touching 40.
Drugs for that were simple and very mild (and cheap!) and within 2 months we were pregnant for the first child. For the second child it was just 1 month! This was all naturally conceived after a very long period of nothing happening.
IVF seemed very invasive with potentially low success rates but conversely high risk of twins etc if it did work. I'd recommend getting the immunology investigated if people are suggesting IVF for you - for us it was utterly straight forward and simple once the diagnosis was made and the drugs prescribed. Google for Dr Shehata in the UK.
Most hygiene products get away with listing diethyl phthalate as 'Parfum'.
What we need is not savvy consumers what we need is regulators to get serious.
Industry plainly lists potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, and sodium nitrite, which are known carcinogens.
On top of that, the packaging matters: PET is a phtalate which is an endocrine disruptor.
In practice, people like their alcoholic drinks and don't understand why that by itself is enough to require the Californian proposition 65 "substances at this location are known to cause cancer" sticker.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...
Especially with mold, zero is very very difficult to attain.
But fairly, limited:
> Articles containing substances of very high concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List at a concentration above 0.1% weight by weight (w/w)
They also have an app that can scan UPC codes.
I'd want a carve out for home "manufacturers" that sell less than the US median wage per year in product. They should be able to just display the QR codes cut out from the packages of their ingredients rather than creating their own QR code infrastructure.
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.
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
I tire of being the fool buying expensive tasteless natural organic foods and spices!
And when it isn't - both the "not just a river in Egypt" and "blame some handy & culturally appropriate boogeyman" strategies are popular and low-effort. And usually enjoy widespread social support.
Your comment was heavily upvoted.
Please drop these off-topic distractions from your HN comments, especially bits about upvoting and downvoting, which are such a common source of meta-noise that the site guidelines specifically exclude it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
People do want that, which is why organic food is rising in popularity, why vegan cosmetics are a thing... the problem is politicians are bribed by big industry influence to not regulate too hard.
They did it with sustainability, with sweat shops, with food, with cleaning products. It's ridiculous.
It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.
I think it's unfair to characterize Swan's take as trying to 'offload all responsibility to "consumers"'. Presumably the "get rid of these chemicals in our environments" doesn't just intend "our" to only mean some hyper-vigilant subset of the population. One can advocate for removing these from the marketplace while simultaneously having the stance that for now, in the world we actually live in, people can take some steps to limit their exposure. People are always going to ask "but what can I do _now_ to protect myself and my family?" and it's not unreasonable for an expert in the field to try to have an answer.
And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.
Endocrine disruptors are airborne and globally ubiquitous in the form of micro-plastics. All drinking water in the world is contaminated with it. [1]
I'm really not meaning to be dramatic on this, but we've completely missed the boat on this one while we were arguing about climate change, and it's much too late to do anything about it now.[2]
I'll not be here to see either way, and it's unlikely anyone else currently alive will unless Ray Kurzweil was right this whole time, but IMHO (I.e. take this with the pinch of salt a random Internet comment warrants) it's likely humanity as a species only has a few hundred years left at most.
This isn't meant to be doom-mongering, it's just that while we worry about some dramatic cataclysmic event like a nuclear war, a pandemic or a meteor strike, the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.
It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300 [3] - I just don't see that the science backs up this claim, especially given recent understandings of fertility decline.
[https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents...]
[https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/bpa-plastics-harmful/]
[https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...]
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.
In this case there is mounting evidence against phthalates and bisphenols as endocrine disruptors. This is the stuff getting into your blood stream through ingestion or skin absorption mostly from plastic containers, hygiene products, etc.
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 fight the one you know is bad, even if it's not as engaging as thinking about your own sperm.
My point is that people at large generally don’t care enough to be really bothered by climate change, so there’s no budget in the limited attention we as a species are willing to set aside for inconvenient truths to consider much else.
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.
>Same thing I heard for decades about AGW.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.
People can deny the science, but C02 concentration is the mechanism for global climate eras and we've known that for almost 200 years [1]. I don't care who believes in science because that has no impact on whether it is correct or not (only you, my fellow scientist, can determine that for yourself).
There is no agreed-upon mechanism for how microplastics harm humans, but again to the point of science, if you can point me to proof, I'd love to see it.
Long story short, you are very likely making a false comparison between those two topics.
>We don’t have to worry about someones grandchildren starving in 2060 if they aren’t going to be born in the first place.
Sure, and again, show me the proof/model that this is going to lead to the end of mankind. I's love to see it.
>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.
We have a 1,000,000x better chance of convincing them that Trump is an immortal demigod, doesn't mean we should do it.
Again, we should dedicate effort to things that we know matter even if it requires effort.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S163107131...
In any normal universe, the onus of proof would be on you to prove dumping it into our environment is safe.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where your world-view in Congressionally safe. Enjoy.
So yes?
And again, I'm not saying it's good/safe, it's just in a resource-limited world the only problem is global warming.
You didn't include a link to support the claim that humans only have "a few hundred years left at most". I think this is extremely unlikely to be true. What is your recommended reading?
“It's worth noting that this is not a mainstream view, and that the UN projects a level population out to 2300”
I’ll clarify above regardless.
The slowdown in population growth has been a topic of world leaders for quite some time. This isn't a topic of interest because world leaders are somehow concerned about the cause (e.g. chemicals in the environment). In fact, the cause is well known and due to fairly straight forward anthropologic factors. As quality of life improves, population growth declines. This happens in nature as well. Populations under stress tend to reproduce more. World leaders are interested in modeling/understanding this as it has macroeconomic effects (e.g. Japan's decade long struggles with stock market decline). This is also why the US and the west in general has went so heavy on quantitative easing for the past decade. They are trying to stave off deflation. Unfortunately, COVID and the associated supply shocks caused that plan to go off the rails a bit...
Finally, I'm not sure what climate change policy has to do with any of this.
> A bidirectional relationship between testosterone and obesity underpins this association indicated by the hypogonadal-obesity cycle and evidence weight loss can lead to increased testosterone levels.
It has nothing to do with being savvy.
Lately I've been seeing straws made from a compostable plant based polyester. It's unclear whether they are still using problematic plasticizers in them.
That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?
Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.
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 poorly trained medical professional who has just delivered the news to you in much the same way he would tell you the time.
Since I had an amazingly supportive and clever wife, she researched various treatments and came upon a process called microdissection testicular sperm extraction (mTESE) which I believe was pioneered in the states and brought to the UK.
One mTESE procedure later (approx £5k privately) where they were happily able to extract 8 vials of viable sperm, followed by a course of free IVF (in some UK places you get 1 free round, but can be up to 3) - 5 viable blastocysts were grown, 2 inserted - and 9 months later a happy healthy baby girl was born.
I guess the summary is, guys: if you're having issues conceiving - don't always assume its the female, and get yourself checked out asap before its too late for easy conception - success rates drop off a cliff after age 38.
Even if you're firing blanks, there is hope
"I'm going to have to stop you right there"
I'm just kidding around, but that could really use a better name.
To be completely clear: Taking testosterone will actually worsen fertility. TRT will severely reduce fertility.
Lifestyle changes that improve testosterone (diet, exercise, physical activity of any kind) are correlated with increased fertility though.
How does one do that exactly?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07397...
Now I fee like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Moving while pumping dumb bells is one the greatest exercises ever designed.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/dont-j...
Here is one more article on this.
Don't just lift, lift and move.
If it was valid for showing what you think it shows I would think my doctor, a urologist who attends medical conferences, would know about it.
What my urologist said is also backed up by a book for laypeople I read on men's health written by a urologist named Aaron Spitz called "The Penis Book". I just double checked and it says "Contrary to popular belief, lifting weights does not boost your testosterone in a meaningful way."
While I am not a doctor it's my understanding people who do this for a living know individual studies are unreliable. Scott Alexander wrote on his blog "I think a useful epistemic habit is to be very skeptical of individual studies, and skeptical but not too skeptical of large randomized trials, good meta-analyses, and general medical consensus when supported by an evidence base."
But frankly, I doubt it's worth my time to read the study. Either you posted the study without having reviewed the literature, in which case you don't appear to be genuinely curious about this topic, or you linked to the study after reviewing the literature, in which case you should already be familiar with the conflicting evidence and shouldn't be asking me to present it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6406961/#!po=9....
Testosterone (17β-Hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one) is the main sex hormone in males. Maintaining and enhancing testosterone level in men is an incessant target for many researchers. Examples of such research approaches is to utilize specific types of food or dietary supplements as a safe and easily reached means. Here, specifically, since 1967 until now, many research studies have revealed the effect of onion on testosterone; however, this link has yet to be collectively reviewed or summarized. To accomplish this contribution, we searched the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases for full articles or abstracts (published in English language) from April 1967 through December 2018 using the keywords “onion” versus “testosterone”. In addition, a number of related published articles from the same databases were included to improve the integrity of the discussion, and hence the edge of the future directions. In summary, there is an evidence that onions enhance testosterone level in males. The mechanisms by which this occurs is mainly by increasing the production of luteinizing hormone, enhancing the antioxidant defense mechanism in the tests, neutralizing the damaging effects of the generated free radicals, ameliorating insulin resistance, promoting nitric oxide production, and altering the activity of adenosine 5′-monophosphate -activated protein kinase. However, this effect requires further approval in humans, mainly by conducting clinical trials. Keywords: onion, testosterone, luteinizing hormone, oxidative stress, antioxidants
Sunlight or LLLT both work, and the latter has several studies showing it helps with sperm directly from what I remember. I did it when we were trying to conceive.
Isn't this contradicting? What were your test/free-test levels?
Not that it is bad or dangerous. It just points to the OP being at the stage where their hormones needs to be medicinally managed.
I'd be keen to what normal levels are and what you were instructed to do to get them to normal levels?
Do you believe you were already as healthy as can be? Those seem like reasonable suggestions. If you were already very fit, the doctor's suggestion might have been discouraging. If you weren't, sounds like there's a lot that can be done.
A sedentary lifestyle with poor nutrition can have a big impact on your health.
EDIT: unfit = zero resistance training, zero cardio, and more "food products" than "real" food.
> Research has not shown a clear relationship between abnormal sperm shape and tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine use, though some studies suggest that smoking can impair fertility.
https://www.reproductivefacts.org/news-and-publications/pati...
The vitamins suggested are Vitamin C and L-Carnitine, correct?
The delta between likelihood of attending college between males and females is higher now than it was before title IX was enforced. It's simply shifted in the other direction where females are far more likely to go to university than males.
Males are far less likely to graduate high school. They are far more likely to commit suicide and use drugs.
Nobody cares. There are tons of programs like "girls code" but nobody bothers to volunteer for programs like "boys graduate".
I have both a son and a daughter and it's obvious which one the school system is designed to cater to versus the one who is essentially flawed by design.
Our society and academia are fixated on inequalities amongst the top top tier of high status humans. As if the fact that a disproportionate number of Fortune 500 CEOs are males means anything to the 99.999% of males who will never be remotely that status.
It's just very odd that we have decided to divide humans into categories we care about based on identity.
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/
Essentially, women want someone who is their equal or “higher status”. With big inequality, men at the bottom can’t get women, while most women compete for the small group of men at the top.
In species with highly promiscuous females, sperm counts tend to go up as a response to competition among males (and their cellular representatives). However, in societies that have birth control as the norm, pregnancy is primarily a result of conscious choice (stable relationship, financial status, etc). Consequently, sperm count is under drastically less selection pressure because you have multiple shots on goal without much reproductive consequences, so to speak.
Even today millions of people are marrying contrary to selection gradients (arranged marriages, marrying relatives, too young/old , excluding other religions etc etc.). Do these people have lower/higher sperm counts?
Modern urban cities provide access to a much more diverse gene pool which allows individuals to select across a much wider range of characteristics.
That sounds like a contradiction
> “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 below 15 million/mL—considered low—had a 53 percent greater risk of being hospitalized for any reason over the course of 36 years than those with more robust sperm concentrations between 51 and 100 million/mL. This effect persisted even after the researchers controlled for body weight, smoking, and other factors.
Sounds to me like that supports the chemicals theory.
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.
Citation very much needed.
Women nowadays accept males indiscriminately? Reproduction success is the same for everybody across the board? That's news to me and I very much doubt the veracity of such a bold claim. Natural selection is very much alive.
They even have a search engine that allows you to search for products [2] or ingredients. If don't know what's in your products, I encourage you to start here to find out more about the ingredients.
[0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2019.00147... [1]: https://www.axios.com/2022/02/17/lgbtq-generation-z-gallup
Just read this section and you'll immediately realize how depressingly grave this situation is. We're living in a world that is so massively synthetic that it's basically impossible to avoid these endocrine disruptors.
They're in your floors. They're in your shower curtains. They in your food. They're in your sunscreen. They're in the literal dust that floats in your house.
What can you do?
In all seriousness this is a mainstream-ish opinion in some religious circles.
It’s true. Christians are the most likely group to have kids. The most likely Christians are Mormons, then Catholics, and Evangelicals are tied for second.
The group least likely to have kids are agnostics, with atheists being very slightly more likely.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/male-infertil...
Not that I think this is what's going on, but I think rejecting it outright is too hasty.
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.
Fun part is that I have some crazy (non-scietifically backed) theories that they are the cause of behavioral changes in humans which became more prominent in our society in the last 10-20 years. Unfortunately this is unresearched territory, as the only important article I came across were related to animals thus far [3][4]
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/22/micropla...
Of course the availability of pornographic material has increased, but previous generations seemed to do fine with sears catalogues so I'm not sure that is a big factor.
The author goes into detail about the causes (mostly phthalates, chemicals added to flexible plastics), presents good science to back it up, and overall is just very thorough. I found it compelling and well written.
Another interesting tidbit presented in the book: the increase in the number of trans people is very likely also correlated with the decrease in sperm counts (due to phthalate exposure). She approaches this subject gingerly, making sure to state that there is nothing wrong with being trans; I thought it was well presented and thoughtful.
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/Count-Down-Threatening-Reproductive-D...
There are no studies showing a clear link between trans identities and phthlate. Correlation is not causation. It's dangerous to push the idea that minorities are caused by chemicals. It is pure speculation to suggest that it could affect the way a person behaves and responds to societal pressures and norms.
Okay, so there is a decent amount of scientific evidence suggesting there could be a link. I mentioned in my comment that she treats the subject very gingerly, rightly so, because people will respond the way you are likely to respond.
However, saying that it is dangerous is a very good way to shut down the conversation completely, or demonize those trying to gather an honest understanding of reality. Consider the case that there really is a link. Is it better to wall off the conversation completely instead of investigating? Is it possible to discuss the topic at all? ever?
I mean, read the book, it is backed by real science it is not political at all, not some alt-right hateful thing.
That's the thing -- there isn't. At best, it's a working theory that is equal to any other theory.
Saying that something is dangerous means that we should err on the side of caution, it does not mean that we should not discuss it. Plenty of scientific topics are dangerous and require a close cooperation with an ethics board to advance.
To name a few theories that are ongoing: genetics, endocrine disruptors (doesn't single phtalates), childhood experience, parasites, neurodevelopmental disorders, relationship with autism spectrum, etc.
None of the above is winning the race. The current leading theory is that the gender identity, including cisgender identities, is complex and a mix of genetic, biological, environmental, and cultural factors.
The WHO describes a disease as "any harmful deviation from the normal structural or functional state of an organism, generally associated with certain signs and symptoms and differing in nature from physical injury".
The trans identity is not a disease, it is not something to be fixed. In the same way that homosexuality is not a disease. Both have been on a road of depathologization, they are not harmful but regular variations of the human experience.
I'll close with a question: how can phtalates be the cause of gender incongruence and gender diversity when communities that falls under that umbrella exist since before the use of plastics? See: "Hijra", "Mukhannath", "Mahu", "Two-spirit", "Fa'afafine", "Muxe", "Bangala", "Mamluk", "Xanith", etc.
Gender dysphoria is a condition in which a person experiences distress, anxiety, and/or discomfort due to a discrepancy between their gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth. This can include feeling like one’s body does not match one’s gender identity, feeling disconnected from one’s body, or feeling that one’s gender identity is not accepted or respected by others. People with gender dysphoria may experience a range of emotions, including depression, anxiety, and anger. They may also experience physical symptoms such as insomnia, fatigue, and changes in appetite. Treatment for gender dysphoria may include counseling, hormone therapy, and other medical interventions.
But if it is true it could be dangerous to them for us not to discuss the possibility. If they are people with a medical problem rather than a perfectly naturally occurring identity then we may not be giving them the treatments that will help them most while causing them the least harm. What if there were treatments that would mitigate or reverse the effects of environmental exposure and allow them to feel normal with the gender expression typical of their sex?
Being transgender is not a medical problem.
Testosterone is the new canine tooth.
May explain a large portion of this shift. I wonder if they normalized for bodyweight in this study
Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
Extinction, seriously? Why is it necessary to be so hyperbolic with writing these days. Humanity has increased 8x in the last 200 years and we have plenty of artificial means to have children. I seriously doubt low sperm count is going to lead to our extinction.
Peak population is likely imminent.
Not sure what I did, I'm early 30s, I run/hike and I'm vegan (eat mostly soy for protein). I don't really avoid plastic containers, etc.
While the article does not rule out chemical contributions, this strongly suggests a lifestyle effect since these regions have been moving out of the poverty trap for over 30 years. Perhaps that is also what makes the sperm decline seem to accelerate. So behind yet another environmental scare might actually be good news: Wealth also comes with a higher rate of obesity and the tendency to do office work where a male would be sitting on a chair all day (increasing the temperature the scrotum is exposed to).
We need basic cooking classes in high school and have governments pushing only stainless steel and iron cookware.
Plus, you can put cast iron pots & pans in the oven, over a modest open flame (like a campfire), etc..
Testing each month was brutal. Youre so excited to do a pregnancy test, but if you test too soon, you end up in this awful limbo where you still have hope, but realistically it's not likely. Towards the end we would only test once 14 days post ovulation.
Also, I didn't realize how high miscarriage rates are (~30%)!
We're in our early 30s and wish we started sooner because it will be pretty tight to have more than 3 kids
"Hey killer asteroid, this is earth"
"What's up earth?"
"You can hold off, I think the humans are actually going to take care of themselves pretty soon"
"Cool, I'll do another orbit for a million years"
But assisted reproduction is extremely profitable and always has been, some powdered rhino horn to IVF; altering industries and markets is expensive and uncertain, and politicians are for sale to the highest bidder. Just 10 large donors spent $540 million on the recent US midterm elections. The fact that some prominent campaigns resulted in a loss does not mean they wasted their money, any more than a financial loss in business or gambling necessitates the end of a career.
https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/3720141-here-are-the...
To the extent that fiscal gain is the dominant organizing principle of human society, financial wealth is going to continue compounding one way or another to the detriment of other measures of wellbeing.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S230505001...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
„Prenatal Exposure to Progesterone Affects Sexual Orientation in Humans“
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-016-0923-z
Progesterone can be given if the pregnant woman is older. So maybe the attemp to safe this risky pregnancies of older women by artificial hormones as side effects causes lower fertility of the offsprings. Nature is smart.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pLW2tMx4Kw5qaeAcxj0Lj?si=q...
This response sounds like real science for sure.
A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!
Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?
> In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies and assumptions because it categorized data as “Western” sperm counts or “Other” sperm counts.
> Further, the claims of decline were based on a “species optimum” of Anglophone developed nations of the 1970s, which the researchers argued was scientifically unsound. The GenderSci Lab team warned that this kind of Eurocentric focus has been used by alt-right, white supremacist, and men’s rights activists to argue that the health and fertility of men in Western nations is being threatened, particularly by feminist and anti-racist movements.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...
When a professor of linguistics decides it is appropriate to write a paper criticizing a study about falling sperm counts, I don’t think that is a safe bet.
As one of my friends said, "Positions of power are still predominantly held by men, but the average man is lagging behind the average woman". Not sure if this is necessarily true, but sometimes it feels true. It's also unfortunately a rather un-PC opinion to share.
Men don't have a single federally funded organization positively helping them compared to 1000s for women.
Men/boys don't have bodily autonomy in US. They are forced to fight in wars and are genitally mutilated at birth against their will.
DV laws are anti male.
Custody laws are anti fathers.
Rape laws are gendered.
All the typical major indicators are favorable to women instead of men. Ex: age expectancy, education, drug addicts, suicides, homeless, police shootings, prison inmates...
(assumption) men will be employed (therefore) child support is their responsibility.
(assumption) men are strong independent (therefore) there is no need for assistance.
(assumption) men are made for war (therefore) men are to fight war.
(assumption) men are stronger, more aggressive [see war], etc (therefore) women [being weaker] must be the victims.
(assumption) fathers are severe and disciplinary (therefore) mothers are nurturing and better suited to child rearing.
(assumption) sexual intercourse is an act desired by and initiated by men who are defined by their ability to penetrate (therefore) women can only be penetrated [see also aggressiveness] and men who are penetrated are lowered in status to be nearer the category of woman.
Let me give you some examples. White masters thought they were stronger than black slaves yet slaves had to do all the dull & dangerous work. Same with the colonial masters they thought their underlings were weak and pathetic so they doubled down on oppression and plundered even more wealth through additional taxation and other means.
All the laws were out rightly favoring the oppressors in every case except magically when it comes to patriarchy. Imagine if Nazi Germany worked like patriarchy. Aryans were the all supreme, the strongest and the most independent race so they would've had almost all laws in favor of Jews right? Nope instead they gassed millions of Jews.
If we leave that issue up to Feminism, feminists, and their long tradition of embracing critical theory, we will have to endure this evil for a whole lot longer.
It will take a large, ultimately male movement to displace it. I simply do not buy that the traditional notion of "patriarchy" is even the most important component of why it continues to exist today.
Given how it massively impacts a mans ability to feel pleasure during sex, it seems like "patriarchy" would have removed it long ago.
What if some of the parts of the bible, or other religious texts, such as this one, weren't designed to be "patriarchal" but were instead created by people who hate pleasure, hate nature, and hate the sensual world? I claim this group of pleasure haters is shockingly gender neutral
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-...
Boys/men in general are exposed to a far higher likelihood of worst-case outcomes in a variety of ways, and there seems to be little societal attention to improving that. If women had the incarceration rates, the "successful" suicide rates, or the lagging lifespan that men have, it'd be all we'd hear about. Instead we figure that's just how men are, so, whatever.
I've got two girls and a boy and I'm a lot more worried about the boy's future than the girls', for sure. Seems a much finer line he'll need to walk to avoid a downward spiral, with fewer off-ramps available from such a spiral. Like, I reckon he's 75% of our risk of one of the three having a very-bad outcome, without even seeing any especially bad problems with him yet.
Girls on average get higher grades. The modern education system is by and large assembly line busywork, or child daycare. From my personal experience the grade gap should be attributed to the average female being more willing to play the systems game, while the average male calls bullshit
This is just anecdote, but for me, I'm inclined to believe 20 data points I can personally observe.
I'm not sure exactly how new this is. Even decades ago, my experience of growing up male is that to a fair degree it's like being thrown off the dock. "Hope you learn to swim before you drown!" The idea that boys are privileged over girls seems like a cruel joke.
It’s going to be a real adjustment for you to accept a lot of people are without sufficient this or that in our society and you’re not really going to bat for them.
You have freedom to choose without coercion. Nothing makes your sensibilities sacrosanct to anyone else.
As a young American man myself, I am constantly being told that my problems either don't matter or aren't real. I don't need anybody to go to bat for me, but how about just acknowledging that young American men do indeed face real problems instead of saying "we don't need Americans, actually."
"In addition, they argued that the design of the 2017 study relied on racist and colonial hierarchies"
I get that everyone has their biases, but this sounds like it's up there with the feminist approaches to rocket science that claim rockets are shaped the way they are for Freudian reasons. The only specific claim your linked article is making against the actual studies/data is that there is not nearly as much data for Asian, African, and South American countries as there is for Europe and North America. Which is a great point, we need more data, but it doesn't really undermine or debunk any of the other claims being made.
At least they are open about the fact that they have determined the conclusion beforehand.
So, just count everyone and diminish the geographical factor in a problem. OK, let's ignore the problem until everyone is affected. Seems pretty un-legit.
This is not a "it's getting worse" thing...this is unambiguously a good thing. China has too many people in it, and the earth cannot sustain 8 billion people
In short, historical data has good reasons to assume it is not reliable, and there are inexplicable geographic divergences which seem correlated now strongly with the number of studies then any other factor: i.e we simply aren't using large enough or comparable sample sizes, and what looks like decline is regression towards the true mean.
Of note: the decline still does not show an average below the levels required to be regarded as fertile, and it also does not show a reduction in observably fertile men (those who have fathered children).
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/fears-over-fa...
Even more notably has been the lack of curiosity from the media and academia.
They simply shrug and move on, as if the root cause of this isn't something we should look into as potentially causing other problems that are even worse.
Edit:
The downvotes without any comment refuting this highlight the issue. This is a topic that should elicit more curiosity than it does, and we should ask ourselves why it doesn't.
I worked in intel/defense for over 10 years, and part of our post Iraq WMD training was looking for signs of bias/motivated reasoning that are a sign of the group think that allowed for a war to be started based on false pretenses. One of the biggest indicators:
"A lack of curiosity about a phenomenon/event/factor where it should be expected."
Who is "they"?
There are plenty of people who are so desperate about anthropogenic global warming that they're willing to forgo having children and proclaim that the disastrous decline in fertility rates in places like Korea (see recent HN thread) are actually good and necessary because we need fewer humans on this earth.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/bjorn-lomborg/false-alarm/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg
Ehh.
If we were actually on a positive trajectory with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, I might agree with you. But we're not. Things are bad and the trends are only getting worse. Many places will become uninhabitable; the residents will emigrate elsewhere; the places being migrated to will react by electing right-wing nationalists; some resource or border conflict will result in war. It's gonna be bad. I'm not going to feed more lives into that meat grinder.
https://lexfridman.com/climate-change-debate/
People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
See especially pages 16-17 of the Summary Report for policy-makers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
We're well on track to blow past 2C of warming, where every single risk/impact category as at the top of the scale ("Very High").
A popsci summary, if you prefer: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/ipcc-report-the-next...
> People have been confidently predicting doom for millennia, yet it keeps on not happening. Humans are pretty resilient.
I'm definitely not predicting extinction, however massive climate-driven impacts are unavoidable, and large-scale war seems an almost inevitable consequence of those impacts. Large-scale war has definitely happened before, quite a few times.
He is an "apocalyptic environmentalist" in the sense that he believes climate change is going to be such a catastrophic event that human existence will be miserable. When I was a kid, he was an evangelical Christian who believed the end times were coming any day. He had a nasty divorce, a mid-life crisis, met a woman who worked at PETA, became a radical vegan, and then, surprise surprise, once again embraced a new form of apocalypse to replace the End Times one: climate apocalypse.
He's a mathematically illiterate narcissist, a psychological subtype who is known to be the most prone to apocalyptic ideologies.
Every generation in history has had a significant minority who believed that the end of the world is coming. Congratulation, you're one of them in this generation.
Climate change is real. Excess CO2 caused warming is going to create major challenges for the planet. Humanity will go on, we will innovate our way out of it, and like every Malthusian cult throughout history, you and your fellow apocalypse believers will be proven wrong until you find a new reason to ruin everyone's dinners with negativity.
The churches my dad had me in when I was a kid taught me how deranged people can be, and how good it makes them feel to be part of a heroic tribe trying to warn everyone the world is ending. I know what it looks like, I've seen it Christians, I've seen it in hippies, and I see it in yuppies now too.
Can you point to me where I said the apocalypse is coming?
> Humanity will go on
I agree.
> we will innovate our way out of it
Too late for that, the impacts are here and more are coming. The question is whether we will be able to deal with the upcoming climate refugee crisis without war. It seems unlikely to me.
> ruin everyone's dinners with negativity
FWIW this isn't like, a major facet of my personality. I'm just explaining in a thread about having kids why I chose not to have kids.
Really? Most people acknowledge that it's very bad.
Hypothesis: the cause in both cases is likely industrial contaminants considered essential to the running of modern civilization, so nobody wants to, or is encouraged not to, look too hard.
The science on this altitude effect has been pretty thoroughly conducted, with potential correlating factors accounted for in multivariate regression models.
Denver and its suburbs are FILLED with people who are as unhealthy and inactive as the rest of the country. Even in these places, in the poorest neighborhoods, they are less obese.
I have an identical twin brother who lives in Portland, and since I've moved here I've stayed about 10-15 lbs lighter than him. It's a single, anecdotal data point, and completely unscientific, but he swears he eats healthier than me lol.
Notably higher altitude alone seems highly correlated with lower obesity and diabetes rates regardless of physical activity. Again, this points to environmental factors.
[0] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
It's definitely not a topic that's examined enough.
If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
No? Genetics is the best predictor of obesity, but as with drugs any contaminant would have varying degrees of effect on the population, including sometimes a paradoxical effect.
> If there were people getting fat eating broccoli, potatoes, chicken, and salad I would buy the contamination argument, but when you look at what people who have trouble managing their weight actually eat it is never simple foods like that.
And a whole lot of people are not getting fat at all eating foods like and barely exercising. Why do some people have to pay attention to what they eat and others don't? Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
> Why has the percentage of the population that is obese increasing?
Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat. Genetics seems to play a role in that some people can eat junk and feel full but most can't.
> Most likely explanation is that they are eating foods that aren't satiating and that are high calorie, foods that weren't common in the past. Like I said earlier, people who are eating simple foods like the ones I listed don't get fat.
And as I said I don't think this stands up to scrutiny, and I said why already. Additional: obesity is increasing in wild animal populations too.
On a personal level, I have eaten diets of only foods like you've mentioned and I would still have gone well over my calorie limit if I had done so until sated. As far as I can tell 'satiating foods' is a term with no real science behind it. Believe me, if I was aware of something aside from hardcore stimulants that would actually keep my appetite in check I'd have been eating it for the past 15 years instead of suffering.
The interesing thing is, in case of underweight, the lipostat might not just cause reduced hunger and increased body temperature for example. It might also affect self-image and cause you to feel you are too fat. This is still speculation of course, and I can imagine that it makes people uncomfortable, since we like to believe our self is in control of our body and not the other way around. But it is entirely possible that "socially transmissible" or seemingly "cultural" disorders are intertwined in a complex way. (What if you need certain widespread contaminants, or microbiome deficiencies, plus trauma experience or unhealty body images in media to cause anorexia.)
"This thing that humans have done for eons without medical assistance now requires it and that's totally fine. Nothing to see here."
Really?
You can extrapolate this on pretty much all human existence.
I don't use synthetic dishwashing liquid, because it's completely unnecessary. Anything that separates water from everything else is not going to do good things in your digestive tract. Other effects... who knows?
I don't drink tap water, which in my country has about twenty disinfectants in it. What do disinfectants do? They are poisons which kill micro-organisms. The idea is that they're strong enough to harm them but weak enough for us to handle. But are they? What about our gut microflora and such?
I don't use synthetic chemical surface cleaners or anything else like that. There are natural options, DIY options, and it generally works out cheaper than purchasing the mass produced synthetic garbage.
And yes, I've been tested, and have super-sperm. Kid is on the way too.
Like oil?
The modern retirement system is merely an additional layer of indirection over the traditional system of kids taking care of their elderly parents.
If later they learn something unpleasant about nursing homes, or pension plans, or something else relevant to their expected quality of life at their old age, then that might tip the scale towards having children, even though it is only one of many reasons.
The last reason that tipped the scales towards a decision is not necessarily the only one or even the most important.
Similarly, if I go into vegetative state I hope someone will use my organs for some good cause, not try to keep me alive by any way possible.
If your answer is that you are not planning on counting on it for the future then a lot of people will ask why not stop paying into it and keep the money taxed for yourself? It is a significant tax. You CAN actually stop paying into it and then make yourself ineligible for payments out which includes spousal benefits being cancelled. You CAN conscientiously object, it is a provision of the SSA law.
If a lot of young people saw that, they would withdraw from it and put the trust right now into a deficit which would adversely affect the people withdrawing from it right now.
I think there is a non zero probability of this happening regardless for different, uglier political reasons but it doesn't make a lot of sense for people to be forced to pay into something with no promise of ever getting something back.
At a societal level, is an imbalanced population pyramid a problem? Yes, and many countries are solving this by opening up immigration options.
Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.
Unless they are getting immigrants from off world, that is at best a game of musical chairs. Birth rates are plummeting globally.
Sure, you can still find nice big numbers in places like Niger in sub-saharan Africa, but even they are starting a sharp decline. And they are starting with a low base. Their entire national population is only the size of the greater NYC area.
People often say you shouldn't have kids for your own retirement. In the ultimately hypocrisy, they often mean kids will be for everybody's retirement (when they're forced to pay social security taxes as adults).
The economic incentive is to let others have kids and shoulder disproportionately the costs, while you can free ride and "not have negative consequences." Immigration doesn't solve this problem at the system level as removing children from foreign tax pool into our domestic pool shifts benefits from one elderly person to another.
The question is then who will care for these people when they get old? Other people's children? So other people should have children, put the effort to raise and educate them for your benefit? This is a very egotistic view.
Also neither is yourself getting children or other people getting some a guarantee for a dignified existence in a future nursery home nor is such utilitarian thinking a good basis for deciding on whether or not to bring someone into the world.
Humans will eventually go the way of the Dodo - and that's okay. Because we are not special. Not at all.
I remember visiting for the first time my great grandmother when I was 6 years old. She was 99. When she saw her great grandson topless with shorts (hey it was the tropics) she reached forward and gave me a massive purple nurple and laughed. She was still shopping daily and moving around.
So I'm not really sure what scare mongering tactics in favour of parenting you are trying to propagate here.
Don't have kids just because you are expecting them to take care of you in old age. That's just cruel.
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.
In the future when people have real options this is less likely to be an issue.
Assuming you at some point want to be alive when no longer young this is something to be alarmed by, as there simply aren’t going to be enough work-capable people around to keep the machinery of society functioning while still supporting those who have aged-out of the working aged population, unless your plan is to Logan’s Run anyone that shows signs of senescence (which probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time).
From my perspective (I'm in my 50s) things have been spiraling out of control for a while now. Do we really need a couple of dozen flavors of Mountain Dew? Must I be inundated with advertisements for crap I'll never buy even when going to extraordinary lengths to minimize them? Do we all need a three bedroom house with a three car garage? Do I really need a 200 game backlog on steam?
To be fair, and I’ve said this elsewhere, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see consistent declines in real estate prices over the next five decades anyway - solely because of the steady tide of newly-vacant houses coming to market due to the collapsing replacement rate - so I doubt the constant construction of new and bigger houses can continue anyway.
SMH
It sounds pretty fucking apocalyptic, but OTOH I have only seen a couple of random articles about this. I want to learn more, for sure.
Example of the protective covers:
Pornhub is living proof that the world overproduces sperm by - a single, unpopular video probably wastes more sperm than would be necessary to cause overpopulation
this is a nothingburger
The past 20 years of research have indicated entire classes of chemicals that should be immediately banned, and yet the government continues to allow the use of these chemicals.
We are being poisoned without our consent. This is our generation's taxation without representation.
So is the flu or COVID or the common cold, but they are inconveniences which can last for 20 days or more.
If a vaccine were to become availible then the inconvenience would be limited to the day of the shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRgNOyCnbqg
Maybe there's a correlation?
From what I hear our friends story is not unusual and many in our age bracket 20-30 year olds are struggling to have children.
Don't really know what my point is except it is interesting and I am wondering what the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is.
Anecdotally, my wife's sister and her husband have been trying for almost a year? And they've had one miscarriage and nothing else.
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...
But also, if it’s chemically related it might hit first world countries harder than third world countries. Imagine what would happen if all aid was cut to Africa.
Most other problems on earth will be solved by more technology.
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
During the "issues" phase my count was tested and was considered good...problem is/was on my wife's side...all to say conception issues aren't all down to sperm counts (not that you implied that, just wanted it out there).
Friends in late 20's to early 30's have had a lot of trouble conceiving, i.e. they needed to do IVF.
Not sure what's going on with that, and this is purely anecdotal, but I've been hearing people having troubles having kids a lot it seems.
What’s your secret? Is it the microdosing?
I'll keep in mind how comments like that come off in the future.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tennessee-republicans-abortio...
Wow... I would have thought you were referring to people that were older.
I wonder what the common denominator is there, or if your experience is an outlier. It's obviously noteworthy enough to share. Maybe people that conceive without issue aren't commenting on it as much?
(Source: conversations with IVF team)
hmm... yeah, this would be an interesting biomarker for those in their twenties. It could be valuable later in life.
I was surprised to learn women are born with 1-2 million eggs. By 20 years old, they only have 200k-300k left. They lose more every year.
After learning about the side effects of birth control, it's concerning that it's the default recommendation for young women, and that they're on it all the time. I understand why. I don't know what a reasonable alternative would be. Abstinence isn't a reasonable alternative.
Your examples are not comparable to abstaining from sex.
It would be like saying "don't eat any food" and "don't use locomotion to move from point A to point B."
> I just disagree that eating, sleeping, or sex are "core" desires.
I may not be understanding this. Eating and sleeping are obviously requirements for anyone's life, and sex is required for the continuation of all life.
But all of them appear to be "core" desires to us because they are immediate, potent forces. But just because these appetites are strong doesn't make them necessary. Everyone has to eat something but (in the general case) "you don't have to eat that *right now*" is true. Same with sleep - you don't need to sleep as much as you think you do (and you probably should be sleeping some times when you don't feel like it). So we come to sex. Is sex necessary for the continuation of the human race? Yes. Is it necessary for you to have sex at all? No. (Again, in the general case).
You are conflating species and individual survival. Sex is required for the continuation of the species, but not for the survival of an individual in that species.
Even amongst the newest married couples, most are expecting within the first year.
I understand we have different beliefs and such but since we're all in the same environment, how do we explain the simultaneous existence of the seemingly normal-to-hyper fertile?
Surely there is more than just 'its environmental'
Interesting you mention that the group I am referring to and myself are all members of religion generally associated with large families as well.
I should also clarify all of them have at least 2 kids at this point. Which is another interesting data point of many of them didn't have difficulty with their first couple of kids but now are struggling.
I wish them the best of luck.
I will say, the first couple of kids make it harder to conceive the rest. Logistically speaking... And also , men's and women's stress levels with young children cannot be good for fertility
That's the difference. Couples that plan explicitly typically don't plan their firstborn before 30.
It helps that she is not very career-minded, I have the opportunity to work from home, and I'm working a role where I earn well and never need to do overtime.
You may also have the age issue - starting at 20 is a lot different than starting at 30.
Most professional couples don't even marry until 30s, and even if married sooner, don't try for kids until later.
My wife and I struggled, yet my wifes sister keeps having kids. Difference was wife's sister started early, whereas wife and I were married at 35.
Tried for 6 years (age 25-31). Finally considered adoption and then got pregnant and lost the first baby in a miscarriage. Had a healthy second baby at 32. Now have a third healthy baby at 34.
I think a lot of factors combine, but will state that we moved an average of once per year until age 30, so subconsciously we probably didn’t feel settled. It’s a very complex topic with too many variables to effectively model. And even when pregnancy occurs miscarriage rates are high.
I’ll note that young couples with kids are much more obvious in church (they make noise) and more likely to be at masses with other families. Young couples without kids often go to the later masses (in cities sometimes 9 PM).
The difference is that religious couples should always be open to life so in a sense they are always "trying" as contraceptives are not allowed (except for NFP) hence their chances go up. Further they are encouraged to married sooner than later sense they should abstain from sex until then.
It makes sense that younger couples having lots of sex without contraception will end up having more children than their counterparts.
One friend and his wife gave up alcohol, caffeine and meat, it seemed like there was just a ton of stress they had put on getting pregnant for 6 months. It wasn't until after they took a break from trying that they got pregnant one night after drinking.
I think modern medicine somewhat ignores how powerful the human mind is. It is possible that my friend wasn't actually performing as well as he thought he was, also possible that the wife had 'calculated' the exact day that conception should happen. Instead of listening to her body, evolutionarily it would be advantageous for women to be horny while most fertile in the cycle.
Probably just took them a long time and they happened to conceive after making those changes.
Certainly they tried many methods over time, and with a low% chance per attempt, they'll conceive after a bunch of 'interventions'.
one of these is definitely not like the others...
An all-meat diet I would bet is the best to conceive, because it's the best for hormonal health, judging by the countless anecdotes (e.g. women regaining their cycles after many years) I'm seeing.
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out, it's still shocking to me that people still believe that meat is detrimental to health.
My own anecdotes tell me that eating meat vastly decreases your fertility rate. Some anecdotes add that it's because of the animal hormones you consume, others state that it's because meat-eating is associated with other health conditions which interfere with conception (obesity, high cholesterol, cancer), and yet other anecdotes don't assign a cause to the increased fertility from leaving out meat.
As anecdotes, these are all of course, incredibly scientific.
This thread is full of anecdotes so I'm just the messenger of some I know of. I don't care about science when our bodies are burning because of the terrible advice some of the "science" has been giving us.
- dietary cholesterol is good and cholesterol is not the problem, triglyceride/cholesterol ratio is
- hormones from meat... that's just not having a sense of scale, don't know how to put it, of course everything is going to have some tiny amount of hormones, even the vegans' beloved soy
Only slightly taken out of context, but telling I think.
Anecdotally (again), all the healthiest people I know get lots of exercise, eat a reasonable amount of carbs from wholemeal/wholegrain and vegetable sources, some fat and some protein. This is the "official" recommended diet by most authorities, and has a lot going for it, apart from being boringly conventional (so therefore unattractive to people who are excited by these threads).
The unhealthy people I know jump from diet to diet in an attempt to take a shortcut to fitness, singing the praises of the most recent one (...but if the last one was so great, why did you have to change it again?)
There are problems with the carnivore diet, including lack of fibre, micronutrients, red meat association with colorectal cancer, and so on. In addition it's bad for the environment and would be unsustainable if we all switched to it.
I always wonder how do these people get to Hacker News? This is a somewhat sophisticated audience but nonetheless we always have these meat-obsessed comments on tangential topics.
The gist of the post you originally replied to was that some people stopped doing things presumably unhealthy, and couldn't conceive. One of those things was eating meat. Then they started doing those things again, and, presumably due to reduced stress, their fertility improved (OP hints they suspect correlation, in this case, is from causation).
If anything, this almost suggests it was healthier for these people, in this situation, to eat meat. Same with resuming alcohol and caffeine. The added stress from avoiding those things may have been worse for them. No claim of meat being net unhealthy was made in that post.
But I'll make it now, since we're here and you haven't stopped. There are many studies showing excessive meat consumption has negative health effects.
I'm not saying it's always healthier for everyone to cut out meat entirely, just that the average diet includes a decidedly unhealthy amount of meat. There's nothing "outdated" about this claim, it's based on heaps of modern research. Your anecdotes don't mean anything, and are no doubt cherry-picked. I know lots of people who claim adding meat back to their diet (or adding more meat to their diet) has improved their well-being also. And if I had an axe to grind with the suggestion that I eat less meat, I might regurgitate those anecdotes too.
FWIW I also know plenty of people who feel healthier when they eat less meat, but again, I don't consider anecdotes useful in this conversation.
The fact that it has happened for a long time is not evidence that it is good or beneficial.
I don't think it's all that new to be honest, else these ceremonies wouldn't exist.
We had a friend who had been trying for 8 years to have a kid, told us she was just about giving up and thinking of adoption. We asked if she used the ovulation sticks - “what are they??” We gave her the rest of ours and a couple of months later she was pregnant, now has a baby. So yeah, these things don’t seem to be as well known as they should be, and can be a massive help.
https://www.amazon.com/YO-Android-Description-Compatibility-...
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.
The average American (to say nothing of the rest of the world) is absolutely abysmal at keeping count of their sugar intake.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/02/medic...
We can control sugar in the food supply, though. It would do quite a bit if we'd just stop shoving it where it doesn't belong.
Control the dietary factors.
(Edited to avoid religious flamewars)
Male Fertility and Diet https://nutritionfacts.org/video/male-fertility-and-diet/
Dairy Estrogen and Male Fertility https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dairy-estrogen-and-male-fer...
Chicken Consumption & the Feminization of Male Genitalia https://nutritionfacts.org/video/chicken-consumption-and-the...
Xenoestrogens and Sperm Counts https://nutritionfacts.org/video/xenoestrogens-sperm-counts/
Foods That Affect Testosterone Levels https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/05/16/foods-that-affect-test...
Dietary Pollutants May Affect Testosterone Levels https://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-pollutants-may-affe...
Best Foods to Improve Sexual Function https://nutritionfacts.org/video/best-foods-to-improve-sexua...
Even if covid vaccines did have an impact on fertility (and I'm not aware of any data to support this), the data we have clearly shows something else going on.
I've heard a lot of theories about what is causing this, the most common being plastics, increased sugar consumption, more people worldwide being overweight/obese, more people worldwide being sedentary/less physically active, exposure to various harmful chemicals, and more. I'd assume it's probably a combination of several factors, but similar to plummeting male testosterone (which likely has similar and potentially related causes) I don't see this as likely to get anywhere near the amount of attention and funding from various governments and organizations around the world as it would if it were affecting female health.
I'm very curious how large a factor this is. Personally, once I realized how much plastic I used - from water bottles to food containers - I became very concerned and stopped using it.
More intuitive explanations make sense to me, like unhealthy, non-active and stress filled lifestyles.
Which is understandable in the end, male expendability is a thing. As long as it doesn't affect literally all males, it's a health issue and a social problem, but it's not a "humanity will cease to exist" problem; the men who are less affected can father more children.
If reproduction was limited because women's infertility exploded, it would be a different issue. The ones who are fertile can't simply bear 50 babies in a year to make up for it.
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/03/09/womens-health-research-fda-tr...
[2] https://www.everydayhealth.com/womens-health/womens-health-w...
[3] https://theconversation.com/gender-bias-in-medicine-and-medi...
[4] https://www.northwell.edu/katz-institute-for-womens-health/a...
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/08/24/the-surprising...
But whether sperm counts are falling or not we need more funding towards artificial reproduction and extracorporal pregnancies, it s such a non-brainer for our fragile and unique species.
Seems like a pretty extreme solution to the problem of declining birth rates. Perhaps we’d be better served by encouraging people to reproduce through financial incentives and, frankly, positive propaganda.
Part of the problem is that young folks feel like raising children is financially burdensome (fine), but IMO a bigger part of the problem is the presence of negative propaganda (having kids is destroying the earth, having kids sucks, wouldn’t you rather chase your career and party with friends every night?, etc.)
I think that goes back to decades of negative propaganda.
or maybe it’s one of 10,000 other chemicals that people with vested financial interests in assuming they are safe went “there’s no reported health concerns for this brand new chemical and usage so let’s go hog wild!!” And are now omnipresent in daily life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582534
I wonder if it gets as many upvotes? Or if hacker news prefers to get its fertility analysis from theoretical physicists.
Right now it's averaging 2 upvotes a minute. It was pretty obvious at the time you wrote your post that this will indeed get more upvotes
EDIT: thanks for fixing the link