Western men are becoming increasingly infertile.
>Last summer a group of researchers from Hebrew University and Mount Sinai medical school published a study showing that sperm counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past four decades.
>That is to say: We are producing half the sperm our grandfathers did. We are half as fertile.
>Scientists had expected to see a past decline and then a leveling off. But they couldn't argue when the team ran numbers again and again. The downward slope was unwavering.
>men with poor semen quality have a higher mortality rate and are more likely to have diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease than fertile men.
>What you are seeing in a number of systems, other developmental systems, is that the sex differences are shrinking,” Swan told me. Men are producing less sperm. They're also becoming less male.
>The problem is that these chemicals are everywhere. BPA can be found in water bottles and food containers and sales receipts. Phthalates are even more common: They are in the coatings of pills and nutritional supplements; they're used in gelling agents, lubricants, binders, emulsifying agents, and suspending agents. Not to mention medical devices, detergents and packaging, paint and modeling clay, pharmaceuticals and textiles and sex toys and nail polish and liquid soap and hair spray. They are used in tubing that processes food, so you'll find them in milk, yogurt, sauces, soups, and even, in small amounts, in eggs, fruits, vegetables, pasta, noodles, rice, and water.
>What's more, there is evidence that the effect of these endocrine disruptors increases over generations, due to something called epigenetic inheritance. That's part of the reason there's been no leveling off even after 40 years of declining sperm counts—the baseline keeps dropping.
Western men are on track to be completely infertile within a generation.
