So this trend has been going on for a while now, I looked a bit into it about 5 years ago here's what I found:
- 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.
I've heard on a few podcasts that this is how European countries do this. We need to stop letting for-profit companies gamble with the health and longevity of the species in the interest of profits.
You are right that this is a much better approach. The problem is Europe also has low sperm counts and are also being exposed to endocrine disruptors in the same way as the rest of the world. So whatever whitelist approach they are using does not seem to be saving them from this problem.
There's however a huge difference in what's being actually prescribed and what's not. Anti-Depressants and strong pain medication isn't as easy to get as in the us as in Germany.
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.
> My bet is within 20 years we'll see it as the more immediate problem than global warming.
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.
In both cases, a substantial part of this pool depends on the modern institutions and global supply chains for survival, which are existentially threatened by both climate change and population reduction.
Which could be an issue by itself, as whatever mutation confers resistance to it could have side effects, unless it's some enhanced degradation of toxins or something.
But what if it's some other random thing that also gives people heart attacks?
Spot on. There is substantial amount of companies/people profiteering from climate change fearmongering, so we may expect the trend not to go down very fast
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.
What you describing is your personal perception, based (like most of us) on what is circulating in media.
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.
> Objectively, “climate change” was happening on this planet allegedly since it was born 4.6 billion years ago. It’s a natural course of thing
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.
And that’s true. What can you do to avoid “demographic crisis”? Thinking you (or we as a society) can change course of things is very flattering, however flowed it is.
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.
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.
As someone who is too lazy to do their own research on this topic....did you happen to find which products generally contain the most endocrine disruptors?
My partner and I recently embarked on a journey to replace as many products in our lives that contain endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC's) as we could. It's _really_ hard.
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).
Good grief, just trying to find products that are unscented is a nightmare. So many say "unscented" on the front, then have "parfum" or something in the ingredients.
"Unscented" is basically a lie. Most things that are "unscented" actually have masking agents to cover the scent of the product. You want to look for things that have "no added scent" on the label.
Even some papers are lined with BPA, or similar products. The reactant acid in thermal paper is often bisphenol A (BPA). A good reason to go without getting a receipt.
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.
"etc" in my comment was meant to be other types of chemicals people don't necessarily like. Example: many deodorants that are phthalate-free are also free of aluminum, because people likely to be concerned about phthalates are also likely to be concerned about aluminum, even though aluminum is not an EDC (some people are worried about it being a carcinogen I think). I was just saying here that products with "X-free" are correlated with also being phthalate-free.
But yeah, specifically the thing to look for is "phthalate-free".
They'll be in basically all of the plastic around you - since the chemicals do a good job at plasticizing (making plastic less brittle).
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]
The problem with going for BPA free products is that they tend to use alternatives that probably have the same issue as BPA they just haven't been tested to the same degree yet.
note that the evidence for phytoestrogens being endocrine disruptors is exceptionally weak. it's essentially 1 study from the 1940s on sheep that has since been contradicted by a number of human studies.
If I recall correctly, the best way to avoid immediate exposure to this class of chemical was to avoid heat your food inside plastic containers (typically in a microwave) as this can mobilise some of the more volatile endocrine-disrupting compounds into your meal.
Through history, only a mass of people have forced a change. That's not possible until you start changing first. And when people around you notice, educate them. It will take time, eventually it will happen.
One thing that I'm genuinely curious about that I've never heard addressed is whether the large increase of people identifying as trans(trans women in particular) could be related to the same factors that are causing lowered sperm counts and testosterone in men. There are massive amounts of compounds in our environment that are endocrine disrupters or mimic sex hormones like estrogen. Like maybe many persons assumed to be trans could be people affected by the same environmental contaminants or other factors that are behind those and that's why they end up feeling different than typical for their sex? Maybe they would even benefit more from hormone treatments in the opposite direction than the "gender affirming" treatments. How do we know we need to affirm their gender feelings instead of treat their medical problems? I haven't heard anyone in any public forum try to explain in good faith why or why not explanations other than what they feel being completely natural might be the case.
> the large increase of people identifying as trans(trans women in particular)
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
Additionally, as trans people are more accepted the rate of the increasing population of trans people is slowing. This suggests that it’s stabilizing and that the population would normally always have a % of trans people if it weren’t for oppression (like left handed ness rapidly increased in the generation we stopped punishing people with left handedness and then it leveled off)
Currently it is impossible to know whether the increasing numbers of people identifying as trans is due to less fear of punishment as you say, or due to hormonal disruption. The only way I've thought of is long term studies of endocrine disruption quantification in pregnant mothers and their children, correlated with transexualism.
> 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.
You could say the same about child abuse. That doesn’t make it not disgusting or unimportant. If you have to hide the things you are doing to children from the parents, you’re doing a bad thing.
The notion that it’s a school’s place to usurp the parent’s choices of how to raise the kid is the problem here. If the majority of the parents oppose that, the school shouldn’t do it. It’s a public school, it should serve the interests and desires of the public.
> You'd expect to see a sharp increase in cis men presenting with ED and gynecomastia and such.
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
It might be the case that endocrine disruptors may be increasing the likelihood a person is trans, but what you are proposing is almost certainly incorrect and would not work. Using sex-aligned hormones to cause a person to become cisgender is sometimes tried and does not appear to be effective, and I am not aware of any evidence that transgender people's pre-transition hormone levels are substantially lower than their cisgender peers. Also, this theory would suggest that eunuchs, self-identified men who voluntarily undergo gonad removal, would generally come to identify as women, but this is not the case; Similarly for men who have their testosterone suppressed as part of cancer treatment.
> Also, this theory would suggest that eunuchs, self-identified men who voluntarily undergo gonad removal, would generally come to identify as women, but this is not the case
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.
If true, it would likely be much more complicated than simply hormone levels. Many trans people have their hormones tested before HRT[1] to establish a baseline and then again after starting to dial in the correct dosage. If it were that simple, baseline testing would reveal it en mass.
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.
< Using sex-aligned hormones to cause a person to become cisgender is sometimes tried and does not appear to be effective
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".
> Also, this theory would suggest that eunuchs, self-identified men who voluntarily undergo gonad removal, would generally come to identify as women, but this is not the case; Similarly for men who have their testosterone suppressed as part of cancer treatment.
Could that be explained by the unfortunate lack of trans acceptance?
I think the simpler explanation is that young kids are doing something they see as trendy, popular, and supported to such an absurd degree that you immediately get internet points and patted on the back for doing literally nothing.
This is not the first time I have seen a question like this asked on HN. It's generally really controversial to ask it because trans individuals are fighting for recognition, rights and humane treatment at the most basic level, so it generally gets taken as a means to be dismissive and attack their cause rather than helpful and suggesting a possible alternative path for at least some trans individuals.
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.
You are opposed to people reading whatever they so desire privately, talking to people in smaller groups where controversy has a tendency to be less problematic and where one may have more hope of being understood and engaged on the points one intended to make instead of on points other people imagined you made that never crossed your mind, asking questions on HN under circumstances where there is less likelihood of strong pushback merely for asking?
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 wasn't talking about censoring or shunning anything.
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.
If it's controversial why should it be relegated to back pages?
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.
If it's controversial why should it be relegated to back pages?
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.
If you ever need an example of “chilling”, just reread that last paragraph. HN front page is a great place to discuss these issues; there are lots of thoughtful and intelligent minds to iterate on an answer.
No. Trans people have existed for quite a long time. It just happens that the "West" has become more accepting of them, and since it is the "West" that gets most of the media attention it's looking like a new thing with them coming out.
These things are not mutually exclusive. I don't see any evidence that would justify a high degree of confidence that the person you're replying to is wrong.
Nobody has said that the population is exploding or that there is an evil toxin. The evidence here is for a proliferation of endocrine disrupting compounds. Given that gender expression is affected by hormones, I don't see how the claim is extraordinary.
Why is the "West" in quotes? Typically authors use that to refer to a phrase they're replying to, but parent comment doesn't mention that.
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.
To be fair, so is your dismissive statement in calling it nonsense. Maybe expand on that? I for one have thought the same thing many times and am finding the conversation here quite interesting.
"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 ..."
Whenever I read about things like decreasing sperm counts or increases in cancer I always think of the same phrase, "Everything is chemicals." It just really doesn't surprise me knowing how little evaluation is done on chemicals and materials throughout the supply chain.
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.
> 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.
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.
So you create a product, put it out and have it do unimaginable damage, then pay for the health and environmental damage you did
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.
Oh, I know. Compensation is the best case scenario. Much more likely is that the entity ultimately responsible doesn't even exist by the time the issue is discovered.
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.
it's already getting to the point that to bring a new product to market strictly within the law essentially costs infinite dollars
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.
Truth is, particularly the US, the only thing we really test consumer products for is lead and mercury.
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.
It's funny how fast and well life expectancy improved in that era. Sure sperms are getting less in numbers but at least people don't follow sceptics with narrow mind for centuries so we actually see improvements. Sorry but, people with this mindset would still make us live in caves, literally.
The thesis of the book 'Countdown' is that this is largely due to widespread plastic and other endocrine disrupting chemicals. I believe this is one of the most important risks to humanity, after climate change, and global war. So far, I've taken some lifestyle changes to combat this:
1) Threw out all of my teflon cooking pans
2) Refuse to consume food in heated plastics
3) Throw out teabags (they have plastics). Use loose leaf tea
4) Will soon be throwing out liquid body wash and moisturizers, and replace with simpler oils
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.
> I strongly suspect BPA-free plastics have similar endocrine effects
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.
This exact thing is discussed in detail in the book OP referenced, it's excellent BTW.
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.
Just use glass. I never understood plastic containers. Basically just use shit that existed 50 years ago for food.
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.
> 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 !!"
Yea, I just laugh when my friends have all this nice stuff then they start having kids. I have a modest house with basic stuff. Walls were drawn all over, I just paint them. Furniture has paint, markers, things get spilt on it. Daughter thought it was cool to use permanent marker from a drawer on hardwood floors. Didn't come off, will probably have to resurface eventually, but literally who cares. Who am I trying impress? I look at these things as memories and try to fix what I can.
I would like to share that plain original Windex will take permanent marker out of many upholstery fabrics (and some carpets) if applied with a scrub brush and plenty of elbow grease, followed by a washcloth. I would try it on the floors, too, possibly also a Magic Eraser sponge.
Wouldn't wearing a mask while cleaning, and not drinking the stuff avoid that being a problem? Don't have to give kids a bottle of it to sniff while they're making the mess in the first place!
Which is also a disincentive (however small) for having kids - just as you finally start being able to afford something nice, you have to wait until your kids are ~15+ years old. Only then, you have a small window of opportunity, some 10 years maybe, before your offspring spawns children of their own...
(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.
Glass is expensive to make (and recycle!), heavy, physically larger (since your container is, now, say, 0.250" thick instead of 0.025"), and much more likely to break during shipping, and presents an injury risk when broken.
But the paper the butter/lard is packaged in contains PFAS/plastics, or you can use something else... packaged in plastic! The entire supply chain is polluted in the name of efficiency/cost (reduction of spoilage, less weight etc) and most people live in the most populated places where it's not possible to source diary directly from the animal in to a glass receptacle. A personal change to use glass is something I'm doing and many might want to consider, but so much of the problem is systematic. "Just use glass" is good, but insufficient.
Regarding tea bags, sometimes I see plastic tea bags which are crazy, as they must have a weak structure/large surface and the hot water surely washes out a lot of plastic. I am assuming the normal paper tea bags I get in Germany with a metal clip should be plastic free though, or am I missing something?
Yes we are down to discussing tea bag brands now but as you are saying, it's an emergency :-(
I bet $10 this is actually covered in a very thin layer of plastic because it's what seems to happen to some metal products in the food space (see e.g. "aluminum" cans).
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.
(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).)
Better check your plumbing because I hate to say it, PEX is everywhere and it's yet to be shown if there are long term effects on having plastic plumbing everywhere. My kitchen water tastes like plastic all the time.
PEX is fine. Water that sat in a PEX pipe is chemically indistinguishable from water held in a test tube, unlike what happens with water in PVC piping. Another indicator of fine-ness is that PE and PP tubing is used extensively in chemical process plants where high purity is required.
I'm fascinated by this. I think the desire to make the necessary lifestyle changes is there, but I question the practicality.
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.
If you are lucky enough to have a local small bakery near you, then they might use paper bags (mine does), or you can take your own bag. If you only have supermarkets, you can buy things like baguettes, Italian loaves, and sourdough from the deli area inside many supermarkets, and those sometimes come in paper bags, but you have to check whether the paper bag is lined with plastic.
Plastics are so cheap and the paper industry has spent many decades learning how to make different composite blends of paper and plastic to get different characteristics. I had a friend who spent time in that industry and liked to point out how plastics could be in most paper-like products you would see every day. He also emphasized how "actual" paper can be unhealthy due to bleaching and other processing steps that leave byproducts.
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. ;-)
> Will soon be throwing out liquid body wash and moisturizers, and replace with simpler oils
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.
I've been using Aleppo Soap for about two years now. It's a bar soap that's a mix of simply olive oil, laurel oil and soda. It's actually worked wonders for skin problems on my back as well, so I swear by it now. The smell of laurel oil is a bit weird at first but I've grown to really like it. Alternative would be Castile Soap which is the same but without the laurel oil.
Along the same lines as tea-bags, is it possible k-cups have an effect? The keurig machine is already plastic, so does using a reusable cup buy you any benefit?
k-cups get quite warm when in use so I'd avoid it for daily use. Try a french press with a glass container instead. I also threw away my Aeropress for similar reasons.
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.
Forget teabags, what about the bazillion microplastics that we inhale/ingest every day from clothing and carpeting? Especially nice when your coworker's idea of cleaning up their dusty PC is by using canned air on it indoors...
Air filter machine? At least that's what I run a fairly robust unit - it seems to be working. Can't vouch it's grabbing all the microplastics or even that's not blowing out extra. haha. But it is getting a lot of dust out.
That may be, but that is not what TFA was about. It was about human sperm counts dropping, and that is absolutely not an emergency. Humans are in no danger of going extinct.
There are no corners to hide in. The entire planet is infested with homo sapiens.
(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.
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.
There's so much to unpack here, I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth, but I can't dig into all of the points in this format.
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.
> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us
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.
> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us.
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?
There's clearly a qualitative difference between humans and our closest relatives. There's some axis on which humans are an outlier for life on earth. I mean, we're not worried about any other animal rising up and taking over, for one.
Except you only need to look at a large number of countries with high populations (and often those with high fertility rates) and see little correlation with ability to achieve what you call "amazing things".
A billion people with good access to necessary resources is going to achieve more than 10 billion living in poverty because we've largely trashed our planet's ability to support us.
A counterpoint: some of the biggest and best advances in the developed world occurred during or after a time of high fertility. The boomer generation is a good example. I'm not a boomer (I'm < 30), they get a lot of hate, but that generation basically invented the entirety of the modern world, without which we wouldn't even have the tools to understand climate change. If you want to achieve great things you need people to exist and do the work.
Examples of high fertility rates combined with poverty are often correlated with dictatorships and corruption, in my opinion they are cultural.
I did my Master Degree in Organic Chemistry where we tried to develop a male contraceptive pill. I spend a lot of time studying sperm so here is a short list of thing to avoid regarding sperm quality (not ranked):
1. Eating and drinking from plastics (This includes aluminum cans which are plastic lined) [a]
2. Heating food in ANY type of plastic [a]
3. Caffein intake [b]
4. Sugar intake [c]
5. NOT exercising 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.
With all of these it's a matter of quantity. For instance, bullet point 9 about soy makes me question this list. It turns out that phytoestrogens are much less potent than real estrogen, and the only people that were found to have measurable effects from soy was through a study of older men that ate massive amounts of soy every day in Japan. There is real estrogen in cow's milk, which would have a much stronger effect than soy, yet no one speaks about this. Hops in beer also has more phytoestrogens than soy.
Yes, the data around soy is incredibly underwhelming. A plant like hops does contain more, and more potent, phytoestrogens which many people consume more often than they consume soy. As you mention, milk contains mammalian estrogen which research indicates has notable impact on women’s health in particular (earlier onset of puberty, higher breast and ovarian cancer risk, etc).
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.
It does, but like everything absorbed through the digestive system it gets extensive first-pass metabolism through the liver before entering the rest of the circulatory system.
Oral estrogen comes in 2mg tablets, but this results a few in µg of estrogen circulating. Estrogen also comes in transdermal patches where one 100µg patch will last three days for approximately the same dose as 4mg of oral ostrogen daily.
"Estrogens are also contained in meat and eggs, but the major sources are milk and dairy products. By drinking a glass of milk, a child’s intake of estradiol is 4000 times the intake of xenoestrogens, in terms of hormone activity. See, modern genetically-improved dairy cows can lactate throughout their pregnancy; the problem is that that’s when the estrogen levels can jump as much as 30-fold.
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."
"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."
"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."
Anecdotally I know someone that had their ovaries removed as a child and did not know because their high soy diet provided enough estrogen that they had regular menstruation
I think I'm missing something. On the Results in study [b], they say
> 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?
There is an ongoing discussion on the effect of caffein on sperm quality. There are articles which describes a possible route for DNA damage to the sperm from caffein https://www.cureus.com/articles/109365-effect-of-stress-and-.... From personal (lab) experience there is a clear difference to the smell of sperm from a coffee to a non coffee drinker, so it ends up there somehow. Whether it truly has an effect is still being discussed.
He didn't specify difference between de-caf coffee vs regular - only coffee vs non-coffee - so might be something other than caffeine that effects smell?
Coffee contains a large number of aromatic components that could be transferred to the semen. Just the way methyl mercaptan from asparagus can be transferred to your urine.
Could be correlated to issue 1 with plastic containers. In the US, soda generally comes in aluminum cans or 2L plastic bottles, whereas coffee and tea aren't.
Anyways, I still think sedentary lifestyles and stress play a larger role than plastics, but those are harder to isolate and control for researchers.
Well, the two sentences following your quote read:
> 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.
Ah yes, that study of 99 (predominantly overweight) men from an infertility clinic that definitely shows soy affects sperm count.
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 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.
It may be more educational to contest one that most readers might not realize is problematic (I didn't bat an eye) than one that is obviously flamebait.
I've done that at least 40,000 times. This isn't a linear ordering!
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.
Thanks for the reminder, while I might not agree on an individual level where the line between calling out misinformation and partisan-bad-faith-point-scoring lies I think despite the repeated edits I was over the line here.
While it feels good to post, it doesn't really help the quality of discussion.
Yeah, like I get people maybe being wary of soy. There's a lot of mistruths and half understood myths out there. In addition to various contradictory findings from studies [0].
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.
> 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).
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.
I haven’t found anything compelling about seed oils being awful, but I haven’t found anything indicating that we should actually eat them, though. Have you?
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.
Wow, I was unaware of the 7% figure. And thanks for this article too, it’ll make for good reading later.
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.
Anecdotally, while living in Finland for a number of years I found that most households I knew would mix margarine and butter together 50/50, and that was the only form they used outside of cooking and baking.
Perhaps the correlation is the other way around. Men with less testosterone (and therefore a lower sperm count) consume more products with soy, which is common in a vegan diet.
Not saying this is the case, just pointing out where this could be coming from.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? The only studies I could find show no such correlation[0][1].
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.
"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."
"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."
This was my understanding as well (I'm a big fan of nutrition facts), but I think I misunderstood the parent. I thought they were saying the opposite – that a vegan diet would lead to lower testosterone.
Comments like this from commenters like this are why I love HN.
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.)
BPA is merely one of many endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plastics. Oftentimes BPA is replaced by BPS or BPF to get that coveted "BPA-free!" label, ignoring the fact that the replacements are JUST AS BAD^1. It's a minefield.
Silicone tends to not have endocrine disruptors because it doesn't need plasticizers.
All plastics are endocrine disruptors [a], though the an easy filter is softer = worse. If anything food related is in contact with plastic there will be plastic in the food. The pH and temperature of the food have a big impact on plastic leaching.
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].
Plastic is generally defined by its mechanical and thermal properties and a dominance of polymers. There’s are lots and lots of different chemicals used as plastics today and they have wildly different chemical properties. It seems incredible to state that “all plastics” are endocrine disruptors. Many plastics are essentially chemically inert in a biological sense. In some ways DNA itself can be seen as a plastic being a biopolymer if it were handled properly and in enough quantity. As an uneducated layman my intuition, and the links you provide, is that the additives and monomers added to plastic to modulate their mechanical and chemical behaviors are most likely to be the chemically reactive part that can be disruptive to our biology. I didn’t find a reference to a single plastic in your references. This applies to the leaching comment as well - I suspect you mean ph and temp increase the leaching of the additives from the plastic.
plasticizers are a component of plastic, characterizing one ingredient in plastic as an 'additive' in order to shift the blame from plastic to plastic ingredients doesn't change the basic fact that plastics are endocrine disruptors because they leach plasticizer into food.
Just because plasticizer has the word in its name doesn’t make it plastic. Nylon, PLA, PET, ABS, these are plastics. As far as I can tell they are not endocrine disruptors, and they are polymers - aka plastics. They require no other “ingredients” and can be used in an unadulterated form for many applications.
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.
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.
Goretex is made from PTFE which is pretty safe at normal environmental temperatures.
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.
Right but in the absence of regulation, I would treat with suspicion e.g. fast food in any plastic container (or waterproofed "paper" container which usually means a plastic layer too).
I consider glass, stainless steel, and cast iron safe, and try to avoid almost anything non stick or plastic for cooking/food storage.
PTFE (nonstick coating marketed under Teflon) is safe unless you inhale a lot of its fumes by heating it to over 500F. And by a lot I mean cases of fume fever show up with people welding lots of ptfe. You are probably thinking of Perfluorooctanoic acid, which is carcinogenic but most exposure happens from fabric coatings. It was banned in the US in 2013 and none of it is manufactured or used in the US currently.
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.
In the absence of regulation I see no reason to believe that metal is stainless steel, that glass is unadulterated, or that iron doesn’t have toxic metals mixed in.
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.
Not all plastics contain plasticizers, so I would say that fnordpiglet is correct. For example, low density polyethylene (commonly used for jugs holding milk and water) is flexible without addition of any plasticizers. For this reason it is also used in laboratory equipment where plasticizer contamination would interfere with experiments:
Low density polyethylene (LDPE) is a high molecular weight polyolefin material. Like all polyolefins, LDPE is nontoxic, non-contaminating and exhibits a high degree of break resistance.
The polymerization of polyethylene results in an essentially straight chain, high molecular weight hydrocarbon. The polyethylenes are classified according to the relative degree of branching (side chain formation) in their molecular structures, which can be controlled with selective catalysts. LDPE has more side branching than HDPE resulting in a less-dense 3-D structure. As a result, LDPE is naturally very flexible without the addition of plasticizers and melts at a relatively low temperature (85°C).
> In some ways DNA itself can be seen as a plastic being a biopolymer if it were handled properly and in enough quantity.
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.
> For obvious reasons, genetic material is very hard to get into a cell. The immune/digestive system fights it!
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.))
I'd want to know that drinks aren't full of that stuff regardless of the end-user container material, before worrying about it. They're surely exposed to tons of plastics in the manufacturing process, including at times when various components are heated.
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).
> ever start with a hot tap for water you're gonna boil?
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...
That's due to old-fashioned plumbing. Wayyy back in the day when water networks were fairly new they often couldn't provide the water pressure we have now, especially in hilly areas. It was fine for cold water, but not enough to pressurise a hot water tank.
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.
Where I am from we are having centrally-heated water, so we were told that hot tap water has anti-scaling chemicals unlike cold tap water which has only excessive chlorine.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Worth mentioning that hot water is also better at dissolving things than cold, which is why aquarists should avoid putting anything from the hot water tap into their aquariums. It can introduce copper which is bad for my shrimp.
In old houses if you had a hot water storage tank in the attic it was usually just covered with styrofoam or a metal or wooden slab, it wasn't uncommon for an occasional insect or yes, a small rodent to fall in and die in there. It's one of the reasons why most houses in the UK had separate cold and hot water taps - cold water was considered safe to drink, hot not so much.
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)
> (they're pretty much all PEX now, since it's stupid-easy and fast to install, which means it's very cheap)
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.
> ever start with a hot tap for water you're gonna boil?
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
Or titanium[0]. Neat fact about anodizing titanium: the colors are the result of the thickness of the resulting oxide layer and how it refracts different wavelengths of light[1].
Switch to PS5 + Mountain Dew. 30 minutes before sex, microwave a cookie in tupperware and drink a beer. For added protection, download the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
This more or less reads like any health instruction (except for the soy products). Would you have a quantity as to how one can change plastic intake by following these recommendations? How strict does one need to be? - I mean basically everything you buy is wrapped in plastic...
This isn't based on anything except for intuition, take it or leave it :).
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.
I cannot recommend highly enough having a set of glass bottles[1] at home. Fill them at the tap (or wherever), refrigerate them, take them to the gym, in the car, serve to guests. Point is to have many, keep a rotation going. Has greatly reduced reliance on plastic.
Gyms often ban glass bottles because of the hazard they create when dropped/shattered.
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.
In my state it is illegal to use a glass milk bottle for anything other than milk from the dairy that the bottle is from. The law is from many years ago, and so there are a lot old bottles from now-defunct dairies that legally cannot be used even though everyone does.
Perhaps, but as death almost certainly assures a sperm count of zero (and some weird looks if you try collecting a sample), aging is probably preferable if you're trying to reproduce.
We (38) had our first child this year, and if there's one thing I wish I had done, it's had kids earlier. Probably in my late 20s. We didn't have any complications during pregnancy but it would have given me 10 more years to see my boy grow and would be physically easier on my wife.
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.
Yes. In terms of best outcomes, you should have kids in your early 20s. Gametes are at their best, mother's body is young but fully developed and has the best chance at carrying the pregnancy to term without complications.
Financially, or in terms of career and other life goals, are other matters.
Agree 100%. I don't eat foods with added processed sugars. I treat sugar like a spice, just throw a pinch in with a few recipes. Sugar is in just about everything in the supermarkets, and is screwing up the entire population.
It is surprising to me that consuming dairy products is not on that list. After all milk is produced by lactating animals (whose lactation is sometimes induced by feeding the animal artificial estrogen). It seems like a fairly direct vector to me.
Worth noting is that sperm concentration was the only notable impact of soy consumption, leaving other measured aspects of sperm health unaffected (notably sperm motility, a critical factor in assessing sperm health).
Growing up we never microwaved food in tupperware, but we do it daily now. None of me or my siblings (8 of us) had any sort of mental issues (and it wasn't a matter of not being diagnosed), but all of our children have so many mental issues (depression, anxiety, pulling hair out, ADHD, etc.) that we have asked each other if it could possibly be something in the environment - even though all of us live in different states/cities. Maybe we all reheat food in tuperware and eat/drink from plastics.
Thanks for sharing, these studies are extremely interesting!
> 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???
Just a small note: I noticed that I read your disclaimer that it's not in ranked order, and then went on curious to see what is the #1 cause, and had to remind myself that no it's not ranked. It might help stupid readers like me to use dashes or similar for lists when the order isn't particular, rather than numbering the items!
From what I understand, there is somewhat of a threshold in terms of how much fructose can be digested in your gut vs requiring your liver to get involved. It depends on a lot of factors (body size obviously, your overall calorie intake, some genetic factors, etc), but in general of you're only consuming a few grams of fructose and it's buffered by fiber, you're probably not exceeding that threshold. Fruit fits that bill, unless you're being weird and consuming a whole lot of sugary fruit.
There is no real difference between eating food to which refined sugar has been added and eating sweet fruits. The sugar is not bound to anything and it is released in the fruit juice when the fruit is chewed, so it is not digested more slowly than when eating a sweetened cake with the same proportion of sugar (but the cakes are frequently made much sweeter than the fresh fruits).
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.
> There is no real difference between eating food to which refined sugar has been added and eating sweet fruits.
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.
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.
The soy study is far from conclusive - it showed an inverse association between soy intake and sperm concentration, but mainly in "overweight and obese men," and "total sperm count, ejaculate volume, sperm motility, [and] sperm morphology" remained the same. NEJM Journal Watch stated the findings were inconclusive and recommended against suggesting dietary changes [0].
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.
Half of the west eat and live as if they were attempting a slow suicide. Take care of your body and you'll be healthy well into your 60s, unless you're afflicted by outlier events but you can't do anything about these, maximise what you can, fate will do the rest
I get the results I'd expect: acetaminophen is the vast leader in the US and Canada only, while paracetamol totally dominates essentially everywhere else and is by far the more searched term globally.
In an episode of Succession, Logan was drinking a smoothie that contained Maca Root, Almonds, and Walnuts apparently to boost his Sperm count/chances of having a kid according to Willa.
Your list is more of "Dont's". Are there "Dos", based on diet or certain foods that increase the count significantly?
What a list like this misses is some sense of proportionality. We don't need to stress over everything that causes fluctuations on sperm count. The science is not there yet, but personally I am going to bet >50% of the reason for decreased sperms count is because of high protein diets (which correlate to lower testosterone) and high BMI.
My wife and I have a beautiful daughter about to turn 2. But she wouldn't have existed if it weren't for IVF (in vitro fertilization). Had to stab her stomach with needles for a while to make hormones to mass produce eggs and then they took my sperm to put into her eggs and see which ones took. Five viable pairings happened. Three were put into her and out came the one kid. Other two are in cryo for future use, and hopefully we can try them too one day soon. I was hesitant about IVF when I was younger, but now I recommend it to anyone who's having difficulty conceiving. The doctor showed us my sperm in a petri dish. They were tiny in number and so lazy to move compared to a video that the doctor indicated to be more healthy sperm. Whatever lifestyle changes I need to make to make my sperm better, not sure it can be done overnight and my wife was 38 at the time of conception.
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.
Another lesson from your story (similar to many of my friends’) is to just have kids younger. It sounds like you started at around 35 — if people started at 30, even, fertility is higher.
Yep, I can confirm this based on personal experience with a gynecologist telling my wife that at 35 the pregnancy is considered a "geriatric pregnancy" (apparently some docs now call it "AMA"...advanced maternal age).
This shocked both of us, frankly. We were aware of what the actuarial tables will tell you regarding birth defect rates related to maternal age, but hearing the term geriatric in your mid-thirties is 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.
My mother-in-law who is in her 60s thinks she's "too young" to be called grandma. She's being a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I routinely hear people say, "oh he was so young" after some 65-year-old celebrity dies of a heart attack. Increasingly, I just have no idea what's going on in people's heads when they think about age. Sixty is not "young." Thirty-five is not "young" with respect to fertility.
People need to get a grip on their mortality, man.
And yet, we have presidential candidates in their 80s and Americans seriously don't prefer younger candidates to win their primaries for whatever reason. Something is really messed up there.
>Yep, I can confirm this based on personal experience with a gynecologist telling my wife that at 35 the pregnancy is considered a "geriatric pregnancy" (apparently some docs now call it "AMA"...advanced maternal age).
This used to be after 30 not that long ago around here
> Nonetheless we were able to conceive in our late 30s without help or any trouble. Our baby is super healthy. Apparently we lucked out.
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?
We have a societal problem when the rational individual choice (to provide your children the best head start) is to wait until your fertility declines to have children.
This really doesn't make any sense. We are not poorer than our ancestors and they figured it out. People have convinced themselves that the requirements for having children are far beyond what they actually are.
In fact, I think it's precisely our wealth that scares people about the prospect. You're going to have to trade away some of that wealth to have children and people are understandably nervous about that.
While true, the desire to push everyone into heavy productivity mode from ages 18-55 are a societal problem, there is also a financial (and educational) problem where solutions to combat the aging fertility problem are often locked behind procedures that cost more than a year's salary for majority of people.
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.
Even if you make egg freezing cheap, it will still have an abysmal success rate (particularly if a woman waits until her 30s to have the eggs freezed), and should rationally be viewed as a hail Mary of last resort. This should not be viewed as the default rational path towards pregnancy, even if it were free. A society which is structured to encourage this path is setting people up for serious disappointment.
>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.
There is also a lot of pressure on women to "have a career" which contributes to them waiting to marry and have kids. It's not really possible to optimize both being a mother and having a career, it's all tradeoffs and those who choose motherhood and a more domestic life are made to feel like they have sacrificed or lost out on something.
And who exactly is putting this pressure on women? Most men would choose a healthy, fertile woman over a career oriented one. I do think it's women that are taking on the pressure themselves in their quest to have it all.
Well I'm not a woman, so I don't have direct experience. But I think that young girls, for example, are frequently told in school and at home that they can be anything they want, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. and that is great, but I think very little is said about being a mother and their biological clock and the tradeoffs that entails, or if it is addressed it is sort of glossed over with a "you can have it all" message.
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.
It seems fairly natural that a couple in most societies (current and historical) would be better able to provide for their children the older they are.
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!"
In western countries historically men were typically a bit older than their wife but the wife usually was fairly young still. Definitely way younger than now. I think the average maternal age in the US is close to 30 now. This was a rational arrangement since women had fewer economic opportunities. Now women can do basically everything men can do so they choose to defer pregnancy, which has its own consequences that people are now learning to manage and deal with through IVF, egg freezing, etc.
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.
I mean, maternal genetic mutations aren't strictly age related. However, damage from toxins, other environmental factors, and developmental issues related to hormone levels generally track with age. I wouldn't be surprised to find out paternal fertility issues are truly the same, but that age is a an easy proxy.
> In Yorkshire in the 14th and 15th centuries, the age range for most brides was between 18 and 22 years and the age of the grooms was similar; rural Yorkshire women tended to marry in their late teens to early twenties while their urban counterparts married in their early to middle twenties. In the 15th century, the average Italian bride was 18 and married a groom 10–12 years her senior. An unmarried Tuscan woman 21 years of age would be seen as past marriageable age, the benchmark for which was 19 years, and easily 97 percent of Florentine women were married by the age of 25 years while 21 years was the average age of a contemporary English bride.
> 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).
On that last point, isn't that because all eggs are produced in-utero and stored for later use (no new eggs can be produced), whereas sperm is manufactured on demand?
Had those times when your back seized up and you couldn't even lie down properly? :) Been there, done that. If only I had developed better exercise habits when younger. Well, better late than never, though that late sometimes feels like never.
> It seems fairly natural that a couple in most societies (current and historical) would be better able to provide for their children the older they are.
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.
actually you need more market based rent.
remove restrictions that incentivize people not to build housing.
tax the rich on land value - which means not have empty lots
build a lot of houses
encourage a dynamic market that rewards labor
and boom you've achieved low rents, high wages
I was under the impression that programming and IT is very undervalued in Germany, like you're basically earning slightly above average in most cases. At least that's what I gather from two friends who live there.
It is an average employment and I'd not even say it's undervalued. We simply don't have the insane amount of VC money that fuels the equally insane US wages in the tech sector - which has both benefits and problems.
It seems to me the rational individual choice (speaking of the planning of the timing of kids, before having them) would be to not have kids at all? Kids take resources away from the individuals who have them.
That would suggest that, in fact, it is not the rational choice. People are too precious about having kids. And when I say "people" I mean me. I waited until I was 40. That was stupid. I should have started sooner. Everything would have been fine.
I mean, a lot of people may not have the financial option to have had kids younger. Like, the last 15 years have included two "completely upend your life" level crises, along with a lot of smaller crises that could have swept up someone.
I dunno how you can say that. When children are young you have two options:
- both parents work, you pay for childcare
- one parent drops out of the workforce, takes care of children at home
neither of these is cheap. Decades ago it was realistic for one parent's salary to cover the whole family but these days salary stagnation and increased costs of e.g. housing makes it much more difficult.
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.
I'm going to seriously disagree with your depiction:
- 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?
I'm sorry but this is profoundly out of touch with the way a lot of people live. "We" is doing a huge amount of reaching in absolutely everything you're saying.
> 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.
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.
That's assuming you live alone or have no nearby friends/relatives who can watch your child. Most of the world somehow has kids without spending huge sums, because they have children when they are much younger and rely on nearby family to help, just as you will gladly help your children, etc.
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.
> That's assuming you live alone or have no nearby friends/relatives who can watch your child.
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?
> Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
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.
> The fact that people make do, struggle and get by does not alter that fact
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.
Did you stop reading before the “food insecure” part? That someone manages to successfully keep a child alive to adulthood does not mean that child has been well provided for.
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.
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.
I never understand perspectives like these. The OP's statement was "having children is not expensive". How does "people had it worse a thousand years ago" relate to that? Surely by that logic we can't take issue with any facet of modern life?
No, you misunderstood. If somebody says, "I have only $10, I can't afford to do X" then the existence of millions of people who did X on $6 is directly relevant. It's not an abstract appeal to, "perk up, people used to have it worse!" It's a refutation of an explicit claim.
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.
> for the most part the "exchange" is in time and not money.
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.
We estimated that it costs 1.5 million to raise our kids just based on opportunity cost. If we factored in increased health insurance rates, and all the other expenses around having multiple children including needing to own a bigger car and house, factor out the tax credits in the US, it's more like 2.25 million. This is for a very moderate salary estimation for the non-working spouse.
I'm always confused about the bigger car thing, and I think it's marketing hard at work.
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.
Or a second car and driver, which is inefficient at best.
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.
Even in super socialized Sweden the first child costs around 180 000 USD (2021) [1] for the median example family. Second child is probably less expensive.
I started at 24 - certainly regret nothing, but I also can't say it was the smoothest path :D Trying to provide and care while being new to the job market was quite a ride.
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.
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.
None of this is specific to being a parent, and I'm not sure being a young parent (as opposed to middle-aged or elderly) requires any sort of special consideration.
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.
Had I started at Accenture my guess is that my internship would have ended at its predefined end date. But that's the fun of the counterfactual game, we can make up any potential outcome we like. Thanks for sharing your opinion!
Fertility isn't the only consideration with having children when you're old.
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.
I got married at 20 and had my first child at 22. I'll likely be a grandparent in my 40s.
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.
I'm 41 and my boys are 4 and 8. It's wild to even consider I could have been a grandfather by now if my life choices had been different. Wouldn't be such a bad thing though, at 40 you're still pretty young so I could've had my freedom back by now. As it is I'll be 55 by the time they're out of the house and probably won't be able to pick mountain biking back up...
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...
I find it surprising that this is something that has to be imagined. I run into real world examples of this all the time. It isn't the norm, but it sure isn't something that requires imagination to see all around us.
I can imagine (and know many people like this). It's pretty common in non-Western or poorer countries where people had kids earlier due mainly to economic reasons (and also lack of availability of birth control).
Yeah, it'd be fuckin' great because the grandparents could help out a lot more, get active quality time with their grandkids when they're old enough to remember it instead of being that furniture-like senile person stuck in a chair of whom they have few fond memories, and so on.
I broke this trend in my family. When I met my then-partner's parents in undergrad, they were of similar age to my grandparents. Didn't bother us, but I think they were surprised.
This was very common in my extended family in rural North Carolina. Most of my cousins didn't attend college, partnered up quickly, and started families. Not always in that precise order . . .
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 agree. We shouldn’t pressure people to make children early, but make sure they understand the consequences of delaying. I’m surrounded by couples of 30-35 year old that are struggling to have children. They had no idea it would be so hard.
I’m 35, wife is 34. We’ve had no problems conceiving but it hasn’t been smooth sailing post conception at all. Had one molar pregnancy, one missed miscarriage of a Mono/Di twin, and we’re now onto our third term.
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.
For that to be viable people need to A: not leave academia with 5-15y of debt as a matter of course and B: housing suitable for young families needs to, I don't know, actually exist where the decent jobs are. Until those changes happen kids aren't going to be a popular choice before one (or more likely both) parents have a well established career and significant amounts of money in the bank.
This common explanation never made sense. Lower income is correlated with higher fertility within the US, within every country, across the world, and (seemingly) throughout history.
Most of history is subsistence farming economies. More people means more labor. It’s a pretty good ROI. And of course, lack of contraception. Plus with kids dying you need several to reliably end up with a few when you’re old.
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.
The fertility rate today in the United States is inversely correlated with income. The effects are not minor, either. As far as I'm aware, there's not much subsistence farming going on in the United States.
Kids require more investment today in the first world. 400 years ago you just kind of taught your child your craft, your religion, and your culture and that was their education. Extremely few people went to any sort of school. Raising a child was different. Now there's a level of sensitivity and attention that's necessary to ensure emotional and developmental stability that's much greater than in the past. Kids must be educated through to at least college, sometimes even beyond. There's a globalized economy which children will be competing in, and everything that gives them an advantage makes a difference
LOL, didn't get married until later, wouldn't have been possible for me back then. Takes two to tango. Which is of course another societal question. Why are people finding it difficult to partner up and settle down earlier in life? I know what my reasons were, I was idiotic, picky, shy, you name it. https://xkcd.com/439/
A long time ago, my spouse and I moved to Massachusetts because they mandated that Insurance companies must cover IVF. I got a job at a small startup, but just as we were getting started with IVF, they got acquired by a California megacorp. I thought I'd have to quit, but it turned out that the acquiring company's insurance covered IVF.
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 :~)
I have a medical condition where I have no vas deferens. Sadly, IVF didn't work. I don't say that to ask for sympathy, but to say that my wife went through the same series of needles, etc, without the payoff at the end. (Additionally I had to have a surgery to remove sperm from the testes, which was painful to recover from as you might imagine.) Anyone who embarks on the financial and emotional cost of IVF needs to be fully aware of the possibility that it won't work.
Note that the CDC collects statistics on assisted reproductive technology success rates. Here is the 2019 report: https://www.cdc.gov/art/reports/2019/pdf/2019-Report-ART-Fer... . See especially Figure 3 on page 29 (Percentage of embryo transfers that resulted in live-birth delivery, by patient age and egg or embryo source). There is more data, including from individual clinics, at https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html .
We were looking down the barrel of IVF after everything else didn't work but all sperm and eggs etc looked normal. Turns out that my wife had an immune response (so-called "natural killer cells") that was preventing successful pregnancy.
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.
This is a curious observation which spawns so many new questions in my mind.
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 ?
People in countries with very low incomes tend to have more children. One reason is that children can start helping out the family very young and be working to contribute by their teenage years. Another goal is to gain retirement security. If you have 8 children you’ll have someone to take care of you in old age.
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.
Regular people in Switzerland don’t spend as much either. Regular people in Switzerland will maybe barely make $1M over 20 years, so to suggest that this is how much it costs to raise a single child, even in such a wealthy and developed county as Switzerland, is absurd.
OK I stand corrected I found the study. Half a million for 2 kids, the first one representing the most of it (380k).
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.
Glad it worked out! My daughter is 8mo now and we had concerns going into the 'getting pregnant' phase.
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).
As an addendum, for us IUI (intrauterine insemination) was a complete waste of money. My sperm counts were largely fine and it might make sense if you believe it’s your primary issue - for unexplained infertility I don’t believe it makes sense.
We tried IUI to conceive our second child, and after a couple of months of trying, my wife got tired of it, we stopped temporarily, and just then she got pregnant.
No idea if IUI helped or not, but we got a great kid out of it.
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.
>A lot of young folks have been convinced that child birth can be put off more or less indefinitely
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.
Please stop posting flamewar comments and ideological battle comments to HN. You've unfortunately done quite a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Fertility rate is pretty much just correlated with GDP per capita until around $20k ppp, after which it levels out at just below fertility for basically the rest of the graph.
IVF is expensive. Some friends of ours tried it but it didn't work. They were out $30K and finally just made peace with the fact that they weren't going to have kids.
We did IVF and have a wonderful little boy. Would do it again to have our kid, but my goodness, the expense was overwhelming. We had to go into a non-trivial amount of debt to do IVF and I don’t know how anyone makes it work (short of what we did) we tried for 8 years to conceive naturally.
Tangentially, we spent some time looking at adoption and the total cost going through an agency I think would’ve been about the same.
Yes. Adoption is in this strange place of being something that everyone understands the pitfalls of government regulation (custody of a human) but by necessity it must be regulated. Services have filled the space by charging for everything and they have a captive market that has no other choice. The problem is exasperated by the presence of potential adopters who have biases related to age or race of children.
We had some fertility issues as well and while IUI and time worked for the two children we have IVF was looked into. Before the whole thing I didn't understand why people didn't just adopt. But once looking into the sky high costs and uncertainty of adoption I understood why IVF is popular. It is expensive and uncertain as well, but much less so.
Adopting is hard. I've tried to convince my wife that we should adopt because I've always wanted to adopt anyway, but she's scared I'm not taking it seriously enough. She says with adoption, you need to emotionally commit more than you would with your own blood because the natural instinct isn't there. She's scared I can't handle the responsibility and she might be scared of it too. She said we can have the talk again after I prove I can be a good dad with our own blood first. She doesn't want to be the mom that loves and handles everything while the dad doesn't care.
I’m always surprised that they think they’re the only ones that care. Just because it doesn’t show in the same way doesn’t mean I don’t care.
My wife’s care consists of endlessly fuzzing over every little detail of their appearance when going out. Mine consists of ensuring he’s happy and fed.
Personally my issue with adoption is that I do not want to be in a position where I treat my own child and the adopted one differently. Don’t know if it’d happen, but I don’t want to try.
Given I'm still trying to remind myself to regularly vacuum, I don't blame her for her worries about my level of commitment to responsibility. I took months to file our taxes. I'd have a bad opinion of me too. I'm really lucky that she loves me for some reason!
adopting also has about a million more hoops than just having kids, and this is relatively new. My mom's cousin has a 'brother' who they adopted cause his parents died a car in a neighboring house. Well, they were of the similar age and the kid came and lived on the farm with them. I don't know if theres any legal paperwork that was even done. Probably some stamps.
now? good luck adopting without a mortgage downpayment, a clean history, good credit, references, yada yada
If you're in the US, it's possible it can be covered by insurance. My wife and I are in the process of doing IVF. Though it can be very expensive - the injection medications cost a total of $16K. Thankfully, it's covered by my health insurance and I had a $100 co-pay. PGTA screening is not covered by my insurance and to my knowledge costs about $1k. Other parts in the IVF process vary in cost but most is covered by my insurance with a $45 co-pay.
Women have been having kids past 30 since the dawn of humanity. The only difference is that now women tend to be older at the time of their FIRST pregnancy. Before the modern era women would start having kids in their late teens or early 20s and continue doing so until menopause in many causes, so that's up til 45-55. Plenty of women are perfectly capable of having healthy kids past 30 and even past 40.
That's a myth that the medical establishment wants to sell you. Women are fine and have children with no problem, long past that artificial "deadline".
Not 30 certainly, but once you get closer to 40, your chances of running into problems only goes up substantially.
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.
I don't think that is how IVF works, you can't induce an adult female to produce eggs in any medically approved way. Apparently mammals are born with a finite number of eggs that just get used up as they get older.
"egg-having partner" is an extreme far left term that tries to work around the hole they dug for themselves involving transgender ideology, that the vast vast majority of the world does not care for. The non-political term is women or wife or female or anything else along those lines.
There are women, wives, and females who do not have eggs though.
No one dissects children to inspect whether they have egg cells when they're born. Gender is assigned solely based on the doctor's interpretation of their genitalia appearance.
I honestly don't care what words people use though, as long as I can understand the words? Egg-having partner would fit that description to a pedantic degree.
how would you specify which woman you mean in a same sex couple?
i am personally not in need of this term but think its an especially good fit in this specific context.
context being the defining factor, i would usually not appreciate explicitly reducing a person to their reproductive organs like this but in a discussion about reproduction it actually removes ideology from my point of view.
This is my take as well. Terms like "egg-having partner" are inappropriate here because they are used solely to incite flame wars and to demoralize others. They are an impediment to the kind of curious discussion that HN strives for.
> Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments.
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.
Fair, I should have said "Swan's statement in the quote" - the intention was mainly to avoid being misinterpreted as disagreeing with DoingIsLearning anyway, not to dunk on my namesake.
Consumers can't compete on an individual level against giant mega corporations actively obfuscating information from them even if they had lots of free time and weren't overburdened already. And corporations can lobby to even get obvious terms redefined (Assembled in America) so everyone needs to understand lawyer speak to even make sense of the information they do receive.
And that is without even getting into misinformation campaigns.
I think a majority of people do care, but there's not really a way for them to express that in the market. You can't just buy the more expensive product and trust that it's going to be more ethically produced.
It's a societal problem that can't be solved by individual consumers.
Non-regulatory solutions also doesn't empower the market to optimize cost in a productive way (which would cut into profits). In the current economy for the vast majority of products we have two options 1) a cheap option made in horrendous inhumane conditions and 2) a luxury good made in a process that's inherently limited in aim and scope. Globalism basically exports the suffering of the most unregulated markets to the entire planet.
I did not say anything about stupidity. Nobody has the time, energy and even financial means to individually tackle all the issues out there. Putting the burdens on consumers is an excuse used by companies to externalize costs to the buyer, plain and simple.
I agree with you, but I don't know how helpful this will end up being.
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.
As another commenter pointed out, plasticizers are not plastics. It's disingenuous to link health issues with plasticizers to microplastics. Additionally, we should not extrapolate concerns with BPA plastics releasing chemicals when placed under specific stressors (e.g. heat) to all plastics in the environment. There have been no studies I'm aware of that link microplastics to endocrine disruption. Even the first article you linked specifically states that the primary concern with microplastics is likely a physical (not chemical) one.
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.
I'll let the chemistry people comment on this one but phtalates are used as a 'plasticizer' they are not plastic itself as in a micro-plastic bead
I am not sure how much of these plasticizers survives on the microplastic that you refer to. in our water supply or in airborne polyester fibers? Those are major sources of microplastic contamination but I am not sure they are major sources of _plasticizer_ contamination.
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 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.
Only thing I’d add is that at no point was I claiming that climate change was not serious or urgent.
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.
Are you trying to give a masterclass on logical fallacies?
>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.
>the science seems to indicate it's much more likely that humanity will die off with a quiet whimper in a few generations.
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?
Environmental may be one such reason but we should never omit obesity as a cause for any health problem.
> 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.
Yeah trying to avoid toxic chemicals as a consumer is nearly impossible. We've been doing a home renovation and have been attempting to use zero or low VOC products and it's incredibly difficult and expensive. The effort it requires to do the research and sourcing for every product you use in your life is basically impossible for most people.
Blaming individuals is the most successful strategy for keeping status quo while allowing activists to flourish. So go buy metal straws, recycle your plastic, eat less meat, cut up six pack holders, and be "a savvy customer"!
This is a "non-constructive proof". It's trivial to say "regulators need to get serious" but it's non-trivial to actually get that to happen. With the current corrupt+uninformed regulators in place, just pushing them to "regulate more" results in a mix of regulatory capture and/or uninformed regulation made by non-technical experts. How do you propose that actually useful regulation get enacted?
Isn't this just pure BS tho? No "savvy consumer" can really avoid these chemicals. Merely by being outside in a major city or indoors in a modern home or wearing modern synthetic fiber clothing, etc, etc you are likely getting exposed. Short of literally making your own wool clothing in the middle of the woods you can't reasonably escape this stuff.
Why do people even buy "most hygiene products"? They're all bullshit, bad-smelling chemical industry effluent. A gallon of concentrated Just Plain Old Soap® retails for $40 and stands dilutions 10-to-1, is enough for all personal and household uses for an entire family for years.
I can't count how many times I have ordered a mineral water (to avoid chlorine in tap water to which I am sensitive) and received it in a glass contaminated with a PFAS-coated paper straw.
Additionally that water probably came from a plastic bottle.
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.
Consumers can voluntarily reduce their exposure to phthalates AND the industry can be regulated. Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint.
I've been a very health/environmentally conscious consumer for 30 years, but I don't have time to keep up with every possible thing, nor do I want to be exhausting myself trying to urge other consumers to shift their buying choices ever so slightly. Expecting consumers to do everything is market fundamentalism and it's often a meme put around by industry to shirk responsibility. My environmental footprint is already way below average. I'm tired of sacrificing my life on the altar of market economics waiting for everyone else to catch up, while industry pours money in lobbying, PR, and advertising to maintain an increasingly dystopian status quo.
> Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint
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.
I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board. We give companies a lot of leeway when it comes to selling things to put in and on our bodies without us, owners of said bodies, having any way of finding out what the hell is in their products, or where they came from, or how they were processed. It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.
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.
I would be massively in favour of adding a QR Code that details as much as possible (without giving away trade secrets if that is possible) where and how something is sourced and then adding how it was processed. Much like you get a track and trace with a package.
In principal, known toxins (when at anything even close to toxic doses when used normally) should be just not allowed in consumer products in the first place.
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.
The good news is that the FDA sets "acceptable levels"[1] in food, for things like animal feces, insect infestation, mold, rodent hairs and filth, maggots, and so on, beyond which enforcement is mandatory. The bad news is they are nonzero.
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.
Your proposed requirement would have a nice side benefit of making supply chains much easier to trace for other purposes (e.g., why are some shelves bare in my grocery store).
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.
That's a pretty clever idea. I like it! There is limited package space on items, this would allow producers to document a whole lot of info and allow consumers immediate access.
The idea actually comes from when I followed CJ Chivers (expert on weapons and war correspondent) A lot of his work is done by gathering spent munitions on the battlefield and then tracing it back to its source. The life of a weapon and munitions is usually well documented (and can go back decades!)
People have the capacity to learn and scanning a QR code once you’ve seen it done once is pretty straightforward. during covid QR code menus replaced physical menus in NY for most restaurants. People complained (i don’t particularly like them either) then adapted.
Different strokes for different folks and all that but I'm a bit of a picky eater and love being able to unambiguously mark what I don't want on my food on the ordering web apps some restaurants use now. On the other hand those places that have the QR code link to nothing but a PDF menu are just annoying.
Those people wouldn't be able to interpret the data anyway. You forget that most people don't have basic competency in science, and basing decisions on that data would be extremely difficult to start with.
> I get reliably downvoted for suggesting this, but we need vastly better labelling across the board
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
This is of course an ideal, but in our brutal reality corporations owe no moral obligation to the society they are profiting from. They are only driven by capital and brand propagation. Sometimes a moral approach is taken as a compromise, to continue operating in peace, etc. We are left with defending ourselves as best as possible and sometimes the onslaught is too much, as indicated by multitudes of lawsuits and entire legal industries rising out of corporate negligence.
Corporations are human constructs; they exist in whichever reality we create for them. You don't have to give in to their demands. They have to give in to ours.
For non religious people, the ones who don't believe in the invisible hand, regulations could take care of that, although given the current dynamic we're getting further from that by the day
For what it's worth there are people working on this problem! I work for one - https://choosefinch.com/ - which is a Chrome extension that scores products on amazon.com (and other retailers soon!) for, among other things, harmful compounds.
"Ignorance is bliss" is safe, zero-effort, and anxiety-free - until it isn't.
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.
I 100% agree. It blew my mind that vanilla extract is not extracted from vanilla, and they're allowed to label artificial vanilla as vanilla extract because real vanilla extract tastes different, and people are already used to the other flavor matching the name. There are tons of examples and loopholes like this.
I have a friend who gets irrationally angry about stuff like this. “People should just do their own research!” I’d like to think I’m of above average intelligence and I have no idea how I would ever go about verifying the safety of every item I buy for my family. It’s just not feasible. What if, instead, we have a group of people who enforce safety standards and we can place some trust in them to help keep us all safe?
Why not both? Mandating companies maintain a comprehensive list of ingredients, processes, countries of origin, etc, that is readily available to the public does not prevent agencies from also enforcing standards.
> It absolutely baffles me how everyone doesn't want considerably more information and transparency about our foods and cosmetics.
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.
People should be free to draw their own conclusions, as idiotic as those conclusions may sometimes be. But obfuscation only creates more space for conspiratorial thinking. More transparency is the solution, not the problem.
I've never written about this before but thought it might be useful for someone who may be experiencing the same/similar problem and believes there's no real prospect of having children.
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.
There's something to be said about having your balls under a microscope while under general. Plus side I got waited on for a week or so afterwards. Nothing compared to what my other half went through, but at least I have a better battle story than most
I have nothing to add to this, I just wanted to say congratulations to your family and applaud your sharing of this information for whoever else it might help. :-)
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
When it comes to issues that affect one of the genders, the structure of academia tends to basically ignore things unique to men. I think this is because every University researcher has a brigade of gender activists who only care about female issues ready to raise hell.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what you're implying and how you're relating this to my point, so I can't address it in relation to that unless you'd like to elaborate.
Society is structured in a way that marginalizes women (among others) and denies them opportunity, and feminists have fought to enfranchise women economically and politically for more than a hundred years. As this movement picks up steam, people who were privileged under this system (mostly men like myself) can perceive this as "losing" rights. But what we're actually observing is increased parity.
Let's say there are two objects moving parallel to each other, one moving faster than the other. Let's say we impart a force on the lagging object and it starts to catch up. If you're looking from the frame of reference of the leading object, than without anything else to compare to, you might look at this object catching up and perceive yourself to be slowing down. But we know this is an illusion, because we imparted no force to the leading object; it's moving at the same speed.
In the US, you aren't supposed to accept handouts and are expected to work, because work is a virtue. However, it's OK and totally virtuous for someone to give you a job, or maintain a company structure to keep a job around so a person who "needs it" can keep their job, such as positions that tend to be filled by elderly.
So structuring to give out jobs like rewards is not something exclusive to giving them to women, it happens to the elderly and politically connected all the time.
I suspect males tend to have a wider bell curve in income so when you combine the data from both sexes males will dominate the winning end (e.g. CEOs) as well as the bottom end (e.g. prisons). Nobody pays any attention to the bottom of the pyramid so all they see is a distorted view of a few alpha males dominating in the top half of the pyramid.
Years ago, I published a paper suggesting that humans have genomic evidence of strong selection pressure on some sex hormone pathways. So, I am quite curious about whether sperm counts are plummeting solely because of environmental changes (e.g., human created hormone influencing toxins, including "the pill") or also because natural selection in humans has drastically changed with the advent of modern society.
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.
So how do you integrate into your theory the additional fact mentioned in that article that sperm count and male health were associated?
> “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.
Possibly chemicals, but, alternatively, natural selection has been relaxed across the board in the modern societies since agriculture and even more after industrialization. How often do you see males literally fighting over sexual access to a female, which would select for physically healthy males?
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.
> natural selection has been relaxed across the board in the modern societies since agriculture and even more after industrialization
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.
Wasn't Sexual selection even more weird throughout recorded history? Marriage concerns basically was the opposite of SS , where economics and religion trumped natural selection, particularly in the western world we re talking about.
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?
For the vast majority of recorded history people married someone from their village of 200 people or from a nearby village a few miles away. It doesn't matter how weird our mating rituals are when there's not much variability to begin with.
Modern urban cities provide access to a much more diverse gene pool which allows individuals to select across a much wider range of characteristics.
Sexual selection is invoked to explain all sorts of things that seem counter-intuitive at face value. The best know example is peacock feathers, which make males more susceptible to predators and are energetically costly. Thus, a male who has an elaborate display must be healthier and more vigorous than one that does not.
Several years ago, I switched to products that are EWG verified [1], meaning a product's ingredients are safe for humans. Some of the EWG verified products are quite expensive, so it took a while to find a brand that was affordable and safe to use. I've switched everything to that brand (shampoo, conditioner, soap, dishwasher and laundry detergent, cleaners, ...).
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.
I am not being sarcastic or facetious when I ask - Do you feel noticeably better? Better than placebo (understanding of course that such a question is a misnomer, but please address the spirit of the question).
The age at which children enter puberty is also decreasing pretty rapidly, especially for girls [0]. 20% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ, which is nearly twice that of millennials [1]. Clearly something is going on with our collective hormones.
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.
Well I would expect that when you are using something often, then it will go stronger like muscles. So more wanking -> more sperm count. But I am just guessing here.
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.
Has masturbation notably increased over the years?
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.
I mean, VR porn is already pretty nuts, I can imagine that a few generations of technology down the line the desire to explore the universe can be fully supplanted
My bet is on the microplastics that have been found everywhere, from the arctic snow[1] down to the placenta of unborn babies[2]. They are known to be endocrine disruptors, however they only got their media spotlight (as far as I am aware) in the last ~4 years. Thus we're far away from being able to fully understand their effects on the human body.
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]
I wonder how we can even determine what effects microplastics have on the human body when they are so prolific that every human on earth has them. Comparing with humans from the past has many challenges, so I guess the best we can do is comparing people that have more to those with less.
Maybe with longer lifespans, people making conscious choices which partner to have children with, and IVF being an option, there just isn't that much evolutionary pressure on sperm counts. Something that reduces your sperm count by 50% but makes you 10% more attractive could absolutely be an evolutionary advantage in the developed world.
Not that I think this is what's going on, but I think rejecting it outright is too hasty.
IVF and things like caesarians & other prenatal care are surely having an evolutionary effect. Fertility and ability to give healthy live birth used to be the most fundamentally important evolutionary pressures for us (and basically every other species), and now we can opt out of them.
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.
From TFA: "But the transmission of these exposures doesn’t stop there—the epigenetic effects of these exposures may be transmitted from one generation to the next, not just from the mother but possibly from the father too. It may be due to factors in the father’s sperm that disrupt the reproductive development of male fetuses in the womb, Levine notes."
There is an excellent book on this topic called "Countdown". I highly recommend it.
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.
> the increase in the number of trans people is very likely also correlated with the decrease in sperm counts (due to phthalate exposure)
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.
> Okay, so there is a decent amount of scientific evidence suggesting there could be a link.
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.
If it's not a disease, then it shouldn't be treated like one. The hormonal medications, breast surgery and genital surgery should all be stopped immediately.
Being transgender is not a mental disorder or illness, but rather a natural variation of human diversity. Everyone has the right to express their gender identity in a way that is authentic and comfortable for them.
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.
> It's dangerous to push the idea that minorities are caused by chemicals.
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?
There is no outrage in this discussion. Highlithing that certain theories can be harmful to certain demographics is nothing new in science. It simply means that ideas are not discussed in a void and remind us why ethic boards exist.
> “Levels of testosterone have been reported to be declining during the same period of time that the sperm production rates were measured in this meta-analysis.”
I'd be interested in reading more about this. I'm curious if that correlation is due to people with lower bodyfat being more likely to exercise regularly which, in turn, would increase testosterone levels.
Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.
What is greatest marginal effect associated with this decrease? I see a lot of talk about plastics and endocrine disruptors. Maybe they are linked. But let's be real here, bodyweight, shitty diets, and little exercise are probably the main drivers.
It wouldn't be surprising if something is going on. Shanna Swan's research shows that male genitals (penis size and 'taint' size) are more feminine when the baby is exposed to phthalates in the womb as the levels of testosterone are lower and this leads to impaired development.
"Five years ago, a study describing a precipitous decline in sperm counts sparked extreme concerns that humanity was on the path to extinction."
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.
My wife and I did some fertility tests, since we're planning to have kids soonish, and my work insurance covered it. Turns out my sperm count / quality was in the 90% and 96% percentiles respectively.
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.
“men who are overweight tend to have reduced sperm concentration, lower total sperm count, and fewer motile sperm. … The fact that the sperm count decline is also occurring in countries in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia, according to the new meta-analysis, suggests that the lifestyle factors and environmental exposures that are likely to blame are present globally“
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).
there are growing studies about 1) the connection between gut biome damage and obesity and 2) that chemicals in food and products are destroying our gut biome. Putting those two things together, these signals in the article would make sense.
Just another side effect of sugar industry pushing that "fat" is bad. Now no one cooks with butter or lard and use nonstick (Teflon) pans which leaches into food and into water sources when it's produced.
We need basic cooking classes in high school and have governments pushing only stainless steel and iron cookware.
Butter (sometimes other oils when necessary) and cast iron is all I have used for decades now. I jumped on the cast iron train around the age of 18 and have never used anything but cast iron since. In fact, I still use the same cast iron pots/pans I initially acquired 12 years ago. Cast-iron is surprisingly non-stick/easy to clean and damn near indestructible when responsibly used and maintained properly.
Plus, you can put cast iron pots & pans in the oven, over a modest open flame (like a campfire), etc..
Took us 6 months to conceive our first. We the first few months were "natural" attempts but then we moved to using overnight body temp tracking, ovulation tests, and tracking everything in the fertility friend app. Didn't take much effort and really helped to ensure that we were hitting fertility windows.
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
I always wanted to have a family but I'm straight up too mentally ill to. And I reckon any woman that I'd lock down would be more mentally ill than me. I really think we're in a weird transitory period that child bearing is going to look a lot different in the next 10 years, seeing the age of marriage in the west is almost 30 for women, where > 35 is considered a geriatric pregnancy. There's going to have to be solutions if we want healthy offspring.
Ultimately, Levine and Swan say that local and global actions are needed to reduce or get rid of these chemicals in our environments. “We should find ways to prevent further decline and even reverse the trends,” Levine says. “We must avoid being complacent about it and fool ourselves that assisted reproduction is the solution.”
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.
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.
It seems most comments in this thread are about microplastics. What about the poison we breath every day that comes from exhaust pipes of diesel engines as well as tires/brake pads? It's already proven it's terrible for us in various ways. We already went through smoking case which is very similar. There are more and more cars and more and more health problems. It just seems like an obvious suspect to me.
While the trend has been around much longer than Covid, it looks like Covid is going to make it a lot worse! Sperm count is down 53% [1] for people who had covid, and it seems 94% of Americans have had Covid thus far.
If You care, beware of the cheap stuff, cheap artificial alcoholic drinks, cheap wines - sparkling wines. We, men, will consume it happily, like drunken sailors on shore leave. They know it. Now you will say, conspiracy, but I'm talking from my experience with allergic asthma, reacting with asthma exacerbation to some products in these categories, fortunately not every.
I have been very interested in this topic for the last year.
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.
It's tough because marketing like 'BPA free' doesn't actually mean the product is free of endocrine disruptors. There are glass bottles that still have a plastic lid.
I've switched all my cookware to glass or metal (no teflon).
What about wooden things that are painted or glued together (plywood)? Is it better or worse than plastic? It's just about impossible to find soft furniture that isn't covered in plastic fabric.
The estimate is that we’ve peaked. Africa is not having as many children as expected. Asia is slowing down. The West would be collapsing if not for immigration. There is a really good chance of social collapse within the next 10-25 years for various large countries due to population inversion (too few young people relative to old people like China). Not enough tax base to pay for those who are now economically unproductive.
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.
Sedentary: yes. A couple more reasons are clothing (stretch pants) and behavioral (society is on a fight against testosterone manifestations and sperms depend on testosterone).
> “By proposing an alternative approach to sperm count data, we aim to contribute to the burgeoning discussion among reproductive health scientists and other researchers and clinicians about men’s health,” said Boulicault, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT
A Philosophy & Linguistics PhD - just who you should trust to analyze medical results!
I thought you were being hyperbolic but the linked article and study does seem to miss the forest for the trees.
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.
> Surely it's possible to acknowledge the flaws of a measure without devolving into ideological and cultural warfare?
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.
It’s going to be a real adjustment for a lot of these people to grasp that young American men are in really difficult situations socially, academically, and that it’s a key factor to underemployment, violence, etc… the concept of men’s health or men suffering feels like an attack to these people instead of a separate legitimate issue to other social topics they find important
Curious if you have sources for this. I agree wholeheartedly that there are some difficult issues affecting men, socially and academically, but always struggle to back that opinion up with any meaningful facts/figures.
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 have no reproductive rights at all. Women can rape underage boys and these boys are then forced to pay child support to their rapists including back pay for the missed years.
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...
The thing is, all of these issues stem from patriarchal systems.
(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.
The anti-male circumcision movement is overwhelmingly male, despite supposed opposition to male circumcision by feminists.
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
Patriarchy hurts men too is a weak and out rightly laughable argument. Because that's not how oppression works, at all.
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.
Educational attainment is going backwards for boys, while girls are doing great and have far surpassed them. I think they passed them some time back in the very early '00s, IIRC, but it's been a while since I looked at that stuff—this is all mainstream, they've been talking about it in education-academia for quite a while and it's uncontroversial, it's openly discussed among teachers et c., though proposed solutions aside from "try to hire more male teachers" are thin on the ground—bizarrely, "restore all that recess you cut over the last decades, in the name of more butts-in-seats time" doesn't seem to have much traction, and, call me crazy, but if I were in charge, that's the first thing I'd try.
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
Within my extended family and larger social orbit, I've watched maybe 20 kids grow up. The girls are uniformly successful and seem to have significant support from family, school, and society. The boys have been struggling and have experienced limited support to a degree that I find shocking. Perhaps half will never achieve regular employment, and sadly several seem destined for addiction and early deaths.
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.
Society made religion optional through scientific inquiry. It can make America optional too as no theory of science suggests it’s existence is immutable law.
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."
The data being insufficient because it focuses on white men only, because that's where we have the earliest data, which is "colonial" and "white supremacist". Who's the mob again?
This isn’t about anyone’s hurt feelings. This is about an ideologically motivated author wading into a subject in which they have no obvious domain expertise and then making irrelevant assertions that the original research is “colonial” or “racist.”
It is completely reasonable for people to point out that your linked rebuttal to the original topic is garbage. I think you’re the one with the hurt feelings.
"The extraordinary biological claims of the meta-analysis of sperm count trends and the public attention it continues to garner raised questions for the GenderSci Lab, which specializes in analyzing bias and hype in the sciences of sex, gender, and reproduction and in the intersectional study of race, gender, and science,” said Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab, and a professor of the history of science and of studies of women, gender, and sexuality."
"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.
That article is not saying sperm counts are not dropping, but arguing that that is not linked with dropping fertility (and that the original study is racist for only including western countries or something).
To be fair I think it is kinda racist to categorize sperm as either "Western" sperm vs "other" sperm. They couldn't do the bare fucking minimum and at least separate by continent or wealth? Health?
It is really weird the original study decided to categorize it this way. Especially because there are potentially drastic environmental differences between say the US and Australia. Same goes for the "Other" category. How are China and Brazil similar?
Maybe it's not the bare minimum? Maybe they had limited funding, largely access only to "Western sperm" (which actually is a reasonable category I would argue because we share a lifestyle to a greater or lesser degree), maybe they had sparse data that covered simply "not the West".
If they had access largely only to "western" sperm then they could separate it out by country, or income, or something more sane. It's not like the rest of the world shares a lifestyle!
Not a biologist, but that kinda makes sense: you only need one single healthy sperm to reach the egg in order to fertilize it, so even men with pretty bad sperm counts are probably still able to have children. So the average sperm quality may drop for some time without a corresponding drop in fertility. But then the drop in fertility will be all the worse...
>This framework is designed to take into account a wide range of locations, individual conditions, and other data that can contribute to changing trends in sperm counts.
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.
A study not written by a scientist to oppose scientists. Allowing literature/philosophy people to publish on everything is as bad as allowing antivaxxers everywhere.
It's not saying the study is flat-out wrong. It's critiquing specific aspects of its reasoning and categorization. Not at all comparable to antivaxxers.
I have noticed a few of these headlines in the news but I didn't really pay them any mind because of how the world population is actually still increasing. But then I did a quick Google search and found out that the rate of growth is slowing down. Is that a sign of this issue?
No, you can’t reproduce or buy a house or find a wife or eat nutritious food. But you can get AirPods and Taco Bell delivered to your doorstep in a few hours! Isn’t modern society amazing? All of the necessities are impossible, all of the optional things are easy!
It already has a long time ago. Most of the world’s population is going to contract hard in the next 15 years. Looks at China. They have far too many old people relative to young. It’s getting worse. Few people to pay for the elderly let alone care for them.
> They have far too many old people relative to young. It’s getting worse.
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
There is argument that the way sperm count data is collected is not accurate[1].
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).
The lack of federally funded research on this topic is astounding. It's been like this for a long time, but ignored.
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."
Well I mean, given the public discourse of the past decade...it seems to me that they want the population to decline. So it makes sense that no one has in interest in investigating this.
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.
World population is still growing. It seems ironic you are casting aspersions towards people desperately trying to fight climate change, when you are desperately worried about population decline, when it isn't declining.
It IS declining in western countries though, which is where all the “stop having children, you’re killing the earth!” propaganda is concentrated. ALL the population growth is happening in Africa and parts of Asia, that’s it. But curiously, no one is chiding poor Africans for having so many children.
Yo. Number 1 reason I'm not having kids is I don't like kids. Number 2 reason is I don't think it's ethical to intentionally bring a child into a world that's going to be torn to pieces by climate disasters & wars.
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.
> 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.
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.
People throughout history continued having children through wars, disasters, and climate changes (ice age) worse than anything that our children will experience. Climate change is a problem, but a manageable one. No need to panic.
> The majority of scientists reacted negatively to The Skeptical Environmentalist and he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book; the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited." His positions on climate change have been challenged by experts and characterised as cherry picking.
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.
Wikipedia is heavily manipulated and not considered a reliable source on scientific issues. Do you have a substantive criticism of Bjørn Lomborg's positions?
I mean unless you're a climate scientist yourself, at some point you have to choose your experts to trust. Almost every climate scientist disagrees with this guy. I'm far more likely to trust the IPCC and their hundreds of experts than I am this single guy.
> 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.
How do you determine that? As far as I have heard from people working in fertilization clinics, they can help pretty much all couples that have problems with conceiving due to male fertility issues. You need to go there in the first place, but once you request help, you get it.
No, you do not understand. What I am saying is that we understand very well what is happening. 'The science is there'. What does not exist is the policy (to prevent it) and we only react when absolutely necessary. Like with poverty, to give another example.
Its the same with obesity, which has been sharply increasing in much of the world since the 1970s, but pretty much all the conventional explanations (increased availability, excess sugar, excess carbs, excess fat, decreased physical activity, etc.) don't seem to stand up to scrutiny.
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.
I read an interesting study on this. It showed that obesity rates were lower in places like Colorado, and theorized that the reason was that they were at the headwaters of their water source, so there was less opportunity for contaminants to enter their water.
That is interesting, but probably the reason is the highly active/outdoor culture of Colorado leads to lower obesity rates and people who are less obese move to Colorado.
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.
In the article series I think parent is referencing[0] they talk about Colorado along with a bunch of other things people come up with based on "common sense".
Notably higher altitude alone seems highly correlated with lower obesity and diabetes rates regardless of physical activity. Again, this points to environmental factors.
Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story? The staple bodybuilding foods are rice and chicken breast. That's about as industrialized as you can get.
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.
There is the idea of a "lipostat" which is the mechanism of the body to regulate it's weight. In a person with obesity or anorexia, the lipostat would be off, so the body would be trying to maintain a higher or lower than regular weight. (I think I read about it first on the slimemoldtimemold blog).
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.)
> Doesn't the existence of anorexia (which appears to be socially transmissible) and the fact that people who take up hobbies like bodybuilding are able to manage their fat levels well suggest that environmental contaminants aren't the whole story?
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?
Paradoxical effects are rare and tend to happen only with psychoactive medications. I see very little evidence for paradoxical effects playing a major role, but obviously it can't be ruled out entirely. I don't find paradoxical effects a convincing explanation for anorexia because of how people develop anorexia. You can become anorexic merely by changing your social circle or even your desired social circle, so why would a paradoxical effect occur in that situation when presumably the environment hasn't changed in terms of chemical consumption.
> 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.
There can be more than one cause for a trend increasing. The way to look at it would not just be to observe anorexia but also whether or not there has been an increase in the merely underweight in the same time frame as the obese. People who eat and are just sated with very little intake. I am not aware of any data on this.
> 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 wild animals that become obese are ones that have access to human food and garbage. It's not like fish swimming in the runoff from chemical plants become obese (they develop other disorders but not obesity as far as I'm aware).
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.
Different mechanism. Detergents are a class of chemicals which bind very strongly to water on one end and oils on the other end. This strips oils and waters off things, for example gut lining or microflora which require maybe water or oils.
I'll rather hang myself then going to a nursery home now and even more so in the future. I'm living a happy life and looking forward to tomorrow - and yet I am dead serious about that. I've seen enough people in those places. Did you notice that one thing you learned while growing up and maturing was that you started to notice when the party is over and it's time to leave instead of hanging on until the very dire end - it's the same thing with life.
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.
The situation is a bit more complex than that, but in any case, that's a rather weak rationale for not committing suicide.
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.
Sorry if I did a poor job of conveying, but my comment was never intended to rationalize committing suicide or not committing suicide. It was to illustrate society generally doesn't respect these wishes, that these wishes often fail, and that ending up in an institution staffed by our juniors may be less of our own choice than we may think.
Assisted suicide (death in friendlier terms) like we have in Canada is only going to become more permissive and other pleases will continue to adopt such laws.
In the future when people have real options this is less likely to be an issue.
Not to belabor this point, nor reply to myself. But my mom is 85 and totally capable of shopping and helping herself and her brother just died at 91. He was also capable of doing basically anything you would need to survive daily.
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.
This is misleading. Birth rates globally are still above replacement level. Even if they weren't, immigration still provides opportunities for people to move from areas of higher relative birth rate to areas of lower relative rate, should they choose to.
it's not really misleading at all. Places like Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, and Malaysia all had birth rates below replacement in 2021.
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.
What you're describing is tragedy of the commons. No negative consequences to not having children, but big negative disproportional cost to the parents raising them. With disproportionately privatized losses and socialized gains.
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.
> Should an individual opting not to have children be expected to have negative consequences in old age? IMHO, no.
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.
I would argue that expecting your children to care for you is actually far more egotistic than merely expecting a social safety net for all people to exist.
I did not say that in any means, shape or form. I said that all people need someone to help them when they are old, so all people have some responsibility these "someone". The "someone" are children of people, so society needs people to have children that will become adults and be part of society; all people, if possible (medical conditions are usually the accepted exception).
Outcomes aren't great for old folks who go into homes without having someone on the outside looking out for them. I don't know if you've seen the recent stories but a little cognitive issues and you'll be signing away everything you've earned to the home itself or one of it's employees. It's quite common.
Yeah but that was the whole point. You're telling someone who already doesn't want kids why they should want kids, but you're giving them only one reason. If they do so, it will only be for that reason
Not necessarily. Suppose that person has multiple reasons to want kids and multiple reasons to not want kids. They analyze the pros and cons and figure that the cons slightly outweigh the pros so they choose not to have children.
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.
Yeah, if the number of people shrinks, so does the size of a market, and so do revenues of companies. If you own stocks, those will be worth less. If the number of people shrinks, so does the demand for living space, and the value of your apartment goes down. Etc.
Young, productive workers and consumers will exist somewhere globally, it’s a matter of capturing some of that productivity as investment return. If it all goes to hell, sure, the rows in a database are going to mean very little and you’re going to fallback to fuel, food, and firearms until the end (unlikely).
Not all markets are equally accessible by public companies as is the case with the US. Often you have a lot of private companies, companies owned by people close to the government, etc. If you own real estate it might suddenly be disowned and given to someone close to the local elites, etc. Also, in coming decades, declining birth rates will be a global concern, not just one of the developed countries plus russia (and OMG does russia have this problem right now).
There will be a lot of poor suckers. A lot of pension schemes and even social security in the US rely on having younger workers paying into it. It's a huge part of how people do retirement planning.
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.
Your money will have to be worth something and nursing homes to still exist in a world without children. Imagine everyone stops having children tomorrow and make a point for that case, then accept some will have a few kids - that is an improvement but is that enough?
I’m hoping this was said in jest but this is definitely not great news for you, and will only make the demographic cliff even steeper.
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).
The machinery of society will presumably evolve to match the number of work-capable people. Automation will likely increase, efficiencies will be found, some services will be cut.
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.
I live in a semi-rural area. Three car garages were always seen as the over-the-top status symbol when building a new house, at least back in the day. This is probably a local thing.
The machinery of many societies, including the most powerful ones, is one where an owning class keeps most things for themselves, yet expects the non-owning class to want to contribute children to it and pay for it themselves. No thanks. If the owning class cares so much it can start doing things like making having a family much less economically stressful.
I have been reading about this for a while and personally, to me,vthat's why I felt the bleak future in Children of Men felt more like a prophesy than fiction.
From what I 've read so far, sperm counts do not matter much above some threshold, but the decline has brought us near that threshold. And the cause is not clear.
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.
That's true, but we do have an environmental and climate problem driven by human activity, and a reduction in human population would help in solving it.
Is exposure to plastics a risk factor? I might be handling a lot of library books and those books are often wrapped in polyurethane to help protect the covers. Over years, are there any health risks to that?
Sperm is not a limiting factor of anything, and even if it plumets by 99% it still won't be a limiting factor of anything.
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
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.
I can't remember the last time I talked to a gay man who wasn't on PrEP. It's arguable that in reasonably responsible circles, HIV these days poses little-to-no risk, even among sexually promiscuous people. And most other common STDs are completely curable. The big exception is herpes, the spread of which is not prevented by condoms.
If a sore is outside of the area covered by a condom, a condom doesn't do anything. But I am reading that it is recommended to use condoms to prevent the spread of herpes generally, even without an outbreak.
I don't have the source to share, but I read that some types of STDs are more and more resistant to antibiotics, to the extent that they need combinations of multiple, last-instance antibiotics to cure it.
It is interesting, I have a friend group that consists of about 5 married couples all of whom have been having issues conceiving and have been trying for a while now, but are still having issues. Curiously enough my wife and I just had our 4th and every time we've conceived within two months (even when I was hoping it would take a little longer).
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.
In my experience it was a stress issue for the couples that were having trouble that I know.
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.
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.
Ahh, anecdotes about consuming meat, I can't think of anything more scientifically rigorous and less influenced by sentiment.
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.
When the anecdotes all seem the go completely against the prevailing narrative ("meat is like smoking!") and there are huge numbers of them, that has got to pique your interest https://carnivore.diet/?s=cycle (try different search terms, YouTube is also a great source).
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.
> Only slightly taken out of context, but telling I think.
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.
Just counterbalancing people making the same outdated claims about meat being unhealthy. I've personally and know of many people who greatly improved their health by eating meat, so I'm sharing.
The thing is, no one asked, and it was completely off topic.
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.
I think it's a great resource, these are personal testimonials, real people (many of them have interviews on YouTube). I would think it wouldn't change your stance anyway.
Meat has been a staple of the human diet since recorded history. Its basically a science experiment spanning millenia with favorable results for meat-eating--no anecdotes necessary.
One tip - get some ovulation sticks. My wife and I never realised but the egg is actually only around for a single day - it must be fertilised in those 24 hours. If you have sex after that there is zero chance of conceiving, sperm can hang around so you can conceive with sex a few days before. But outside that really small window you are wasting your time. The actual accurate window is massive guess work - some women are not that regular with ovulation. Ovulation sticks tell you exactly what’s going on - tell you when ovulation is coming, so that’s when you have lots of sex.
Before we used them we basically had sex loads (outside this window) which was worse than nothing as it makes you less likely to be going hard in the right window. First time we used the sticks she got pregnant immediately.
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.
To add to this, home sperm test kits can help rule out the man as well. Some men don't know to avoid vigorous exercise, hot showers, and jacuzzis until they realize how low their sperm counts actually are. (The below kit isn't the only kit. Shop around if this is pertinent to your interests because I don't want to feel like I'm shilling this specific one).
The woman's libido should be really high when she is fertile and men can tell as well; She smells better, and mechanically the sex works better as there is there is more lubrication and it just feels much better.
In no way was my intention to brag. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the parent commenter's intention either. Just people reflecting and commenting on their experiences on this topic.
I'll keep in mind how comments like that come off in the future.
I wonder if it's because this is probably the only place they feel they can get away with bragging, but have been "proud" of their "accomplishment" for some time now.
Many old people tell us about all types of fertility ceremonies etc available to us at a local shrine in order to help my partner and I get pregnant if we needed it.
I don't think it's all that new to be honest, else these ceremonies wouldn't exist.
Yup, part of it is definitely that millennials have had it bashed in to them that it's super easy to get pregnant so never have sex without precautions and only stay thinking about having kids when you're "ready".
Many millenials wait until they're thirty and probably think that they should be able to get pregnant in one or two months, when it can easily take half a year. At least that was my own personal experience trying to get pregnant. It became pretty stressful after trying a few cycles with no result.
I was surprised at what the other clients looked like in our IVF clinic’s waiting room. I was expecting us to be the only youngish, fit couple. Instead they all looked like us other than one woman who was maybe 35 or so.
This seems scary to me. Imagine a world where children have to be conceived in this way: it would be trivial for some authoritarian governments to now control child birth. I don’t mean disincentivizing like China did but actual control.
n=1 but with my daughter we had issues and ended up resorting to IVF.
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).
That’s true, but keep in mind there are issues that can happen on the women’s side where you having twice as many sperm could brute force their way past it. One example would be her immune system attacking your sperm.
> many in our age bracket 20-30 year olds are struggling to have children
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?
Some fertility problems go unnoticed for a decade. I suggest to my younger (25-29) female friends to have their egg reserve estimated, even if they at that point are not thinking about ever having children. This is because the original issue can be upstream of the couple: a parent who had early menopause, or low ovarian reserve, may pass similar characteristics down to their female progeny.
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.
If abstinence is a reasonable alternative for anything other than sex (don't eat meat, don't use gasoline, etc.) it's also a reasonable alternative for sex. Some won't agree that limiting your "core" desires in any way is reasonable - and I agree. I just disagree that eating, sleeping, or sex are "core" desires. They are secondary to the real core need - happiness.
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.
It is definitely possible to go your whole life without having sex. Much like it is possible to go your whole life without loosing your temper. It may not be easy, but it is definitely possible.
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).
Sex is not required for individual survival. Food and transportation are necessary for individual survival.
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.
> the potential impact of the increased difficulty in having children is.
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...
Sorry, but isn't that a good thing? Putting aside the fact that we're (at least in Europe) paying for a pension fund we'll never have, isn't reducing the amount of people on earth the right solution for basically all problems long term?
Not if it’s unequal, and infertility is a cruel way to lower the population. Wanting kids and struggling to have them absolutely wrecks you emotionally, and it’s even worse for women.
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.
Population reduction is good, but once the world population falls to say 500M and you want to maintain it, you need ~2 babies per woman on average. If conceiving becomes difficult, we may not achieve that and hypothetically end up in a Children Of Men situation.
If there are less kids, the ability to pay for your pension fund in 40 years time will be much much harder than it is today. So barring other fundamental changes, more kids will help.
Most other problems on earth will be solved by more technology.
This is an issue with the pension system. I don’t believe we’re overpopulated but it is clearly a bad system when it relies on a constant flow of more children
Growth helps, but it's not required. What is actually required is stability in the age pyramid. The problem is we transitioned suddenly from high growth to a population crash. Now the age pyramid resembles more a propane tank shape, and the pension system went haywire. A very slow transition would be easier to adapt to.
Not what I said. That it requires an increasing number of children to adults to continue is the issue. Personal retirement accounts is a much better alternative.
Basically every major economy completely relies on the fact that there will be more workers/consumers in the future when you break that trend you break the economy. Expect South Korea, Japan and others with demographic inversions coming to have major major issues in the future.
Good or bad depends on too many other variables to easily forecast.
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
I'm a Catholic and fairly traditionally minded and am surprised by what you're saying since at my church, couples in this age range are on their fourth or fifth kid by the time they're 30.
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'
In what sense? My wife and I certainly planned our first child very young (for the US at least; internationally, we were on the late end, like most Americans)
I suspect the increasingly shrinking demographic of churchgoers is different in this regard from the rest of the population. I think they're right in saying people who plan typically don't plan children for before 30, I don't know anyone near my age (early 20s) who is doing that; many don't want children at all.
My wife and I plan to have all our kids before 30. We're doing well above average financially, and we want to be young while our kids are young. She is currently pregnant with our first.
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.
Some of it may be psychosomatic - of the "Catholic group" I know of only two couples have had issues, and one resolved after they adopted (and immediately got twins and have three girls that are the same age).
You may also have the age issue - starting at 20 is a lot different than starting at 30.
Age matters massively. People getting married in their 30s and trying to conceive in their mid-30s are going to have a much harder time than young people in their early and mid 20s. It's really not a linear drop off in terms of difficulty either - it's fairly exponential.
I think people assume that since a woman who had her first kid at 20 can still have kids at 40 that you can start anytime along that line - I suspect that's not the case for various reasons.
The comment I responded to was about 20 - 30 year olds though. Age .. I totally get that, and the effect in this very group is also obvious. Children are typically front loaded and then the youngest are born in a more spaced out fashion.
Anecdata also Catholic. NFP and hormone therapy worked but it was a journey. Tried for 2+ years before realizing we had an issue and did NFP to conceive. Lots of other Catholic couples struggling with it go that route as it is a church-approved method.
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).
Not sure why your comment is downvoted but you have a point..
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.
Yeah that makes sense to me. I also think a lot of fertility doctors are hoodwinking couples into thinking something is wrong with them if they haven't conceived within a year. I think it'll happen for most people eventually (and the stats agree). Of course, it eases nerves if your 'eventually' is longer because you're younger.
> I understand we have different beliefs and such but since we're all in the same environment,
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.
Okay, well you didn't mention this. This is certainly more interesting. I've heard of one couple that I know who are having issues, but they are now much older than they were. I'll have to wait and see. I don't really have any anecdata to confirm or dispute here.
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
My guess is luck. In my little circle of friends, nobody had any trouble conceiving. Heck, some were provably one-and-done (sad though it may sound, one of my friends only had sex with his wife when she was ready for them to have kids. Do it, wait a few weeks, try again, but they didn't have to try twice for either of their kids). One of my friends had two kids and his wife really wanted a third, then they had twins. Ha, whoops!
Interesting. Our first took about 4 or 5 months? I think my wife stopped her birth control at the end of July and we conceived in December. Our second took 2 months, my wife stopped her birth control in September and we conceived in November. We're both in our mid-30s.
Anecdotally, my wife's sister and her husband have been trying for almost a year? And they've had one miscarriage and nothing else.
My wife’s sister got pregnant her second time before she even had her period after their first baby. My wife and I tried 3 years with several IUI rounds and eventually had to resort to IVF.
I think a higher rate of miscarriages also limits post-30s fertility for many women. A miscarriage is at least one and often multiple months of time lost, while the clock is ticking.
It's obesity 100%. You can try to blame microplastics all you want but plastics have been around for a long time now and the amount of people having issues in the last generation has skyrocketed along with the obesity epidemic.
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.
At the same time, the world health organisation estimates 95% of people are inactive. I think a lack of activity is the biggest cause of the obesity crisis. Especially these days where even older generations who weren't raised in this modern environment are often chronically online nonetheless.
Sure, but what I think I'm ultimately trying to say is: that problem probably isn't getting solved anytime soon, given what we've turned the world into with technology.
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.
And I will state again that you're not going to solve the problem of people being active anytime soon - that's a personal choice people have to make for themselves, and we've seen it's not happening.
For cultures who prefer child-bearing-age women to always be pregnant, does this affect how many children they are able to have? And will this have a negative effect on religions who encourage large families?
It's certainly preferable that I were never born. But suicide is not the same as never having been. Right now, the marginal utility of living another day is not always negative, but I expect that to change as my physical health deteriorates in the coming years. Once that changes, I'll revisit the suicide issue.
Personally I am very fond of voluntary human extinction.
If we give up on withering away, and instead learn to accept death with some dignity instead of becoming a parasite to our offspring, euthanasia is a good way to go.
The fact that the older, non productive population will be more than the productive population in the not so distant future suggests that we need to rethink the way we go about doing things.
If life expectancy moves past 100, and people retire at 60-65, society will need to feed and take care of people for 35 or so years, that is far far more than the time and money it invests on its children, for a much larger segment of the population, which suggests that the old exploit the young.
You mean, reality itself? Does the next moment in time consent to the current one? I don't think we should annihilate ourselves because you can't reconcile it with your clinging to the idea of consent
I referred to the pyramid scheme that we have designed, where people have children and said children work to fund the retirement and pension of old people.
Old people could just accept their death, and pass away peacefully instead of burdening the society with their existence while actively causing harm to younger generations with votes on matters whose consequences they will not experience.
As a young adult, I am asked to reconcile paying and working for old people, most of whom despise my very existence because I am not cis-het, people who repeatedly called for my death, people who go on twitter tirades about how LGBT people shouldn't exist and in the process making a their base of borderline functioning adults more rabid, my taxes and work pay so that said rabid animals have healthcare while they vote to deny mine.
I have to fund the pension of people who tried to indoctrinate me into their religion by instilling fear into a younger me, telling me that I will go to hell every single day for being a non believer, or for being different.
With all due respect, humanity is a steaming pile of garbage.
>I have to fund the pension of people who tried to indoctrinate me into their religion by instilling fear into a younger me, telling me that I will go to hell every single day for being a non believer, or for being different.
Considering the trend is apparent in data from the 1970's through 2011 (during which time there were zero covid vaccines administered), it is unlikely covid vaccines are relevant.
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.
Well the article doesn't mention covid or the vaccine, it talks about lowering sperm counts as a multi decade incident. Although I have heard reports that either the vaccine or getting covid can impact sperm count
Given trends in birth rate and fertility, we are much more likely to have an under-population / geriatric population problem than an overpopulation problem.
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 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.
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.
BPF is a common used in packaging, water bottles, etc. "BPF exhibits similar estrogenic and anti-androgenic effects on the mammalian endocrine system to those of bisphenol A (BPA)"[0].
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.
I think it's frankly weird to see what is clearly a male health issue and make a jab at women's health funding when its not like the article was talking about comparing to women's issues. This is very whataboutism.
When you've seen women's issues get tons of attention and funding for decades and any attempts to do the same for similar men's issues get ignored at best, you can get kind of bitter. This image kind of encapsulates the entire dynamic for me:
But like, why are we griping about women getting more attention, literally on a comment chain about male issues? We're just giving the attention back to women, which is what you had an issue with in the first place??? If your problem is that men aren't focused on enough, let's talk about men in this study that studied men.
Along with the rise of age of adulthood and general hysteria, i would think they are all correlated.
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.
> But whether sperm counts are falling or not we need more funding towards artificial reproduction and extracorporal pregnancies
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.)
It's not a negative propaganda but truth. Having a child today means your life does not have anything else in it besides being a provider. At most you can argue that it's something extremely good, but you can't refute extreme amounts of time having children takes.
those things are popular in america but the US doesnt even have a big birth rate issue. Some of the most pro-welfare countries are having the worst crisis in europe. I dont think financial help would do. People really now consider children to be more somewhat a burden to things they want to do in life. I think it was all deliberate, not a forced hand
Maybe it’s due to commercial dishwasher rinse aid residue which is reported harm cells or maybe it’s car tire micro-particle chemicals that also kill fish…
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.
