Sperm Counts down 50% - were the Hippies right? (middle east, CNN, Levin)

[RP2C]

Skinny jeans, too much soy, a couple of generations of more casual drug-use, and women selecting less-manly men as partners might be to blame. - Those are complete guesses with absolutely nothing to back them up.

[huckster]

I know the entire point of this question is bogus. UOTE=Freak80;48982966]Not really a problem when the world has 7 or 8 billion people and counting.[/quote]

[ABQConvict]

This is a tragedy. Another example of the West moving ahead while the 3rd world multiplies itself into overpopulatiom, famine, and strife.

[lkb0714]

Originally Posted by stan4

Well.

You only need one.

Maybe it's progress as testicles just become more efficient.

Lololol. Efficient!

People are actually going to believe this one.

[shanv3]

Originally Posted by craigiri

No joke. The most recent study seems to be good science and a reduction of 52% in fertility over just 40 years means that "Western Man" will likely die out sooner rather than later.

Sperm counts of Western men are plummeting, analysis finds - CNN.com

Researchers suspect, and I concur, that this is somehow related to industrialization...the combination of substances we are all exposed to and ingest in various ways. This would include food, food containers (plastics of various sorts), air, water and other similar factors.

So, the debate question or topic would be whether, based on such results, you believe that those who have been "crying in the wilderness" for decades about environment, food and other poisons we have integrated into our society and culture - are slowly going to be the end of us???

Note - life span has stayed the same or increased due to medical intervention - so these things don't always kill us early, but rather cause hormonal and DNA changes that destroy our normal reproductive cycles.

Part of the world which were not fully industrialized 40 years ago do NOT have this drop in sperm counts.

So, your take...your guesses as to why? Or, do you not believe the science?

Conservation is key.

[lkb0714]

I know it is trendy to blame food or cell phones or whatever but it is much more likely to be due to interactions of the hundreds if not thousands of different chemicals that are endocrine disrupters that we are exposed to everyday. Individual products will have measurable levels below EPA or whatever level has been established as "safe" but compounding, synergistic interactions are not part of that determination of safe levels.

Everything from flame retardants in children's pajamas (which are then washed with everyone's clothes), phthalates in workout clothes, non stick pans, and a thousand other things all expose us on a daily basis. This is likely to be an ongoing problem.

[hotzcatz]

Originally Posted by ss20ts

And people are still breeding like rabbits. <SNIP>

Well, I DO breed rabbits and not even the rabbits have been breeding like rabbits.

I have a database on these rabbits that goes back to 2009. The database has the usual sort of data- which ones were bred, when, when the litters were expected, how many in the litter, etc. At the beginning of this year, I'd noticed that the herd size was much smaller than I'd like. I checked the database to see when the last litter had been born. It had been over a year with no baby rabbits. For a whole year to go by and not have a litter show up when multiple females had been bred each month is just not right. I'd been talking to someone else in town who also raises rabbits and she was having the same problem.

For those of you who don't keep rabbits, their fertility is well founded. A female rabbit is not fertile for about four days out of the month. The rest of the time, she can conceive so they're fertile more often than when they aren't. Once they've mated, it's about 32 days until you get a litter of baby rabbits and she can be bred again the day she gives birth. Not that it's healthy because it's hard on the female rabbit to raise a litter of babies while being pregnant with the next litter, but it's possible. After four weeks the baby rabbits are pretty much weaned and after about five or six months, they're old enough to have babies of their own. And even with this level of fertility - we had gone a whole year without a litter of baby rabbits.

On one of the garden forums, I'd read that it was now allowed for alfalfa fields to be sprayed before harvest to 'ripen' them. Then, that sprayed alfalfa is then made into animal feed. On the garden forum, they said there was enough herbicide left on the alfalfa that there was still enough residue on it to kill off your garden if you used manure from animals that had been eating the alfalfa. Ripening fields with herbicide? And then making it into feed?

We were both using the same feed for our bunnies, and both of our rabbit herds weren't having babies. She sent an email to the feed manufacturer asking if the alfalfa they used had been sprayed before harvest. They replied with something about how they relied on the farmers to follow the USDA guidelines (if not USDA, then whoever the governing body is who is supposed to oversee this sort of thing). So basically, the feed manufacturer doesn't know nor do they want to know.

After reading about the possible herbicide contamination in the feed, I switched the bunnies over to organic alfalfa pellets. Guess what? Now there are baby bunnies again.

So from what I can tell what with the little data I've got here, whatever spray that is used to 'ripen' the alfalfa fields, it could have been enough to induce infertility in rabbits. I'm still gathering data and it will be interesting to see how things go when the babies that were born when the moms were eating the organic feed (but had earlier consumed the other feed) are old enough to have litters of their own. Perhaps they will have larger litters? There's more litters due in a week or so, it will be interesting to see if they appear like they are supposed to although these are still with rabbits that had been eating the previous feeds. I don't know if there's lingering effects or not.

Apparently, this spray was approved for use on alfalfa fields in 2011. I'm figuring not all the farmers would have started using that farming method immediately, but probably a lot of them are by now. If there are folks out there breeding horses, cows or some of the other alfalfa eating animals that are also having fertility problems it will probably take longer to notice since they don't usually get bred more than once a year or so.

[Steve McDonald]

The main reason that sperm-count has dropped so much, is the amount of soybeans that has entered our food-chain, since World War II. Even cattle and poultry feed contains it. Soybeans have an abundance of phyto-estrogens, that disrupt the hormone levels in both men and women. I've made a special effort to keep soybeans out of my diet for many years, but it's difficult. If soy is in the feed of cattle, the phyto-estrogens will pass on into their milk. Soybeans are one of the big money-crops in the world, so I don't expect much to be done about this problem.

For example, most brands of waterpack tuna have a soy-based broth added, to offset bitterness in the taste. Fortunately, I've identified one brand that quit using it a few years ago and uses a broth made of peas and carrots, instead. Of course, soy is allergenic for some people and that may be the reason for that change. Some brands of tuna have a warning label about the soy content, but others do not.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by JONOV

In my completely non researched, non scientific opinion, I think it largely comes to two factors:

1) Obesity. Pretty Simple correlation as I understand it.

2) Estrogen type compounds in our water. I have read in a handful of places that female hormones from "The Pill" and most other forms of contraception, are passed in the urine, and aren't removed or treated or tested for in our water. Atrizine, a common fertilizer, does the same thing. Also, hormones from dairy herds probably have something to do with it.

I get irked when people dismissively say, "there are more chemicals today" or "its all the chemicals in our food." If you try and nail them down they squirm and point at words that they can't pronounce but don't have any idea what it actually means. "Chemicals in our food" and "Toxins in our body" are the 21st century equivalent of "Evil Spirits" and "Female Hysteria." There is something innate in Humans that causes us to be fearful of something bad attacking our well being.

Our parents and grandparents suffered from far worse air and water quality than we did, especially if they were in cities.

There's a LOT of misinformation about that floating around. Waste water ("grey water") is NOT recycled into drinking water. There are no hormones in drinking water. I actually saw that in a film that was being screened, and the film-maker was there, so I told him that part needed to be removed from the film, as it was not true. I don't know how this myth got started. The suggestion, presented as fact, that we're drinking grey water is outrageous.

There are other sources of hormones, mainly in food like meats from animals fed hormones. There are no hormones in drinking water, unless they've somehow leached into an underground aquifer.

[Unsettomati]

This thread is a clearing house of baseless, crackpot theories.