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Comment by Inviz | Hacker News Reader

I had a test recently and I have 0% "normal" sperms, when 4%-14% is the normal range. Pretty radical. The doctor said to take vitamins, to get testosterone to normal level, and to excercise. In other words not much to do

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Your sperm does reset ever 75 days. Depending on the problem, it may be fixable. Exercise and raising testosterone will have a meaningful effect. Also check the various products you are using for endocrine disruptors and also you can go organic in terms of food (avoids pesticides, which are suspected of playing a role.)

I am not a man, but this reminds me of a time years ago when I started to have allergic reactions to things several times a day. My allergist put me on a strict elimination diet of triggers. I could only use unscented products for bathing and laundry, organic food only, and I even had to get rid of my teflon pans and use only stainless steel or cast iron. It sucked but it did seem to help, maybe you could try something like that too.

I got rid of my teflon, but I switched to galvanized copper. Its easy to clean.

What's the brand you bought?

I really didn't consider brand. I thought it would be easy enough to determine a copper pan versus a teflon or iron pan that branding wouldn't offer any advantages.

I had some relatively severe allergic reactions to (apparently) enzymes in laundry detergent, once we stopped that it went away, and doesn't seem to come back even with minor enzyme encounters.

Is there any anecdotes or data about the impact of sitting too much? And screen time?

Well if you spend too much time sitting and don't reduce your calorie intake to match, you get fat. Being fat generally does bad things to your health, and one known example of that is that being fat reduces your fertility.

Being fat correlates with reduced fertility. It may ultimately be caused by whatever thing that results in reduced fertility, but there is no evidence of being fat causing reduced fertility.

Organic foods still use pesticides, sometimes even chemically identical ones to non organic, just sourced via allowed methods.

> Exercise and raising testosterone will have a meaningful effect.

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.

That seems like quite a lot to do. What I get from that advice is a recommendation to effectively change all of your lifestyle.

I'd argue TRT (to raise testosterone) is a pretty drastic recommendation.

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'm not sure that's what they were recommended. If you fix your diet, get to a healthy weight, and start weight lifting, all of the research I've seen suggests that will positively affect your free testosterone. That's what I thought the doc meant given the surrounding advice, but I could read their comment either way now that you've mentioned TRT.

No doctor would ever recommend TRT for increasing sperm as it literally shuts down sperm production (LH, FSH are near zero on TRT).

Do you mean morphology? Supposedly, it can be improved using the following:

> 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?

> get testosterone to normal level

I'd be keen to what normal levels are and what you were instructed to do to get them to normal levels?

Am I reading this right that the average person has 86-96% abnormal sperm?

Also interested... seems insanely high

If normal is 86-96% “abnormal,” it would seem abnormal is normal and normal is abnormal. ;)

English certainly has a bad habit of conflating good/bad with common/uncommon.

...doesn't that mean that those ("abnormal" ones) are the normal ones and the "normal" ones are the abnormal ones?

That's what I gathered. The report had a set of different potential abnormalities , by intersecting them all the number gets kind of low. Here's a photo of the report if you're curious https://imgur.com/a/LtG2KVb

Ah, that just sounds like "no one is average" and that anecdote about pilots.

>to get testosterone to normal level,

How does one do that exactly?

Lose weight, eat less sugar, be more physically active/work out, and avoid endocrine disruptors like xenoestrogens. The last one is probably the hardest to do since a lot of plastics etc. contain them.

Getting plenty of deep sleep is crucial too. Sleep deprivation is murder on test levels.

Temperature, too. Production is external to provide a lower than body temperature habitat. Wrong clothes and seat heating are a bad idea.

Less soy?

No, you'd need to be chugging multiple jugs of soy milk a day for that to (maybe) matter. Better would be to lift, eat better, sleep, etc.

You’ll be surprised. Some vegan friendly foods which are delicious are packed with more than 1x your daily value in a single serving. So if you eat two a day for instance the levels of estrogen you’re pumping in are quite significant and very very easy to do.

It seems that at least in rabbits[1] a diet consisting of nothing but soybeans had no effect on fertility.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07397...

Am I reading this right? The soy diet decreased libido, sperm concentration, and testosterone, but the soy diet increased sperm quality?

That seems to be the case. Hard to know what to make of it other than to say that at least for rabbits soy isn't hurting fertility.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383165/

Lifting heavy objects seems to be the best way. Start where you are at, or below. Lift every other day. Increasing should be relatively easy in the beginning.

Just have to remember to put them back down too

Thanks for the tip, I was wondering why I was getting weird looks from people seeing me walk with the barbell on the street.

Now I fee like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

Must have been a huge weight off your chest when you stopped benchpressing

https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/heavyh...

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.

There's several ways. Get enough sleep, eat healthy fats, quit alcohol, lift weights, reduce body fat to a healthy level (but not too much) increase vitamin/mineral intake if you are deficient. Or go on TRT.

Many TRT regimens are counter to healthy sperm. Drugs like anastrozole or clomid are sometimes used along with HCG depending on the circumstances.

HCG might have some risks as far as prions and Clomid makes most people that need testosterone feel like crap. It’s a shame we don’t have better options.

It's a risk/reward situation. I hope we find better options, but it seems like a really delicate situation. The studies in this area always seem really small, but the problem seems much bigger. I think people attribute failure to the other partner to such a great extent that people try for long enough that some healthy enough sperm do their job. It takes people a long time to seek help when it's really easy to check the sperm.

Pretty sure all hCG these days is recombinant.

Oh no, at least as of a few years ago the recombinant HCG was super expensive. My insurance paid for $3000 of it and then stopped, which I believe was about 3 months for me.

My doctor says lifting weights doesn't increase testosterone. It would be nice if it were true but it seems to largely be a myth. (I believe testosterone goes up slightly immediately after lifting weights but it has no real impact as it shortly goes back down.)

Yeah it is a true thing but the nuance is it is a very short lived increase which has none of the effects people imagine it will have.

Okay. Then don't lift weights and go back in your corner.

This study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9660159/) found long-term increases in testosterone in men from lifting weights

The study almost certainly was either poorly designed, a statistical abnormality, doesn't show what you think it does, and/or failed to replicate.

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."

do you have conflicting evidence, specific issues in this study, or just 'trust me bro, my doctor told me so'?

I didn't read the study because I only saw an abstract at that link.

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.

Healthy lifestyle and excercise... but I also got an injection prescribed by the doctor as mine was very low (below healthy range both regular and free test). She said that I may have more will for physical excercise after that, so it may help me to get to a point when I can maintain proper levels myself.

Eat more (raw? this is unclear from the studies) onions?

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

Get tested and find a course of action that aligns to your goals. An endocrinologist, or urologist with specialization in male infertility are critical in the context of the original post (male-factor infertility.) Many TRT regimens are not helpful for achieving healthy sperm and can impose significant recovery times.

Use your body. A sedentary lifestyle and poor diet makes it difficult on top of all the plastics that we consume.

Don't worry Chuck Norris, you have so much testosterone they were thinking of renaming it after you.

People have mentioned other things and I believe Joe Rogan mentioned this and got flack for it, but treating you testicles to light therapy can actually do quite a bit.

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.

Thanks for sharing, I think I’ll check myself too now.

> to get testosterone to normal level > In other words not much to do

Isn't this contradicting? What were your test/free-test levels?

Well, there's not much to do in a sense of a one weird trick. No easy way out here. Mine was 290/190 at the age of 33. Not zero, but a lot of people are alarmed way before reaching that low

> In other words not much to do

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.

Can they still fertilize the egg? What % of people came from abnormal sperm?

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