Summary
Transcript
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Healthy Living livestream. I’m your host, doctor Andrew Kaufman. Before I get started on today’s interesting topic, another in the line of topics related to men’s health and men’s issues, I want to draw your attention to a free mini course that you can register for right now, which will begin, I believe, on June 4 entitled True Masculinity Mini Course. And in this free three part series, I will teach you more in depth about some of the same issues that I will bring be bringing up in today’s livestream. And there will be also resources to help you implement some of these suggestions and improve your health.
This is not only for men, because most of these issues also apply to women and directly and through their relationships with their male partners. So please don’t forget to register for that free mini course. Okay, today I’m going to be talking about some issues related to sperm and semen, specifically fertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Now, these areas are quite interesting because the mainstream viewpoint that’s expressed is almost the opposite, or at least very, very different from what the scientific evidence actually shows. Now, this information is not being reported here for the first time. There are others who have put out material, but what I’m going to tell you about STD’s is going to be very unique perspective and my own hypothesis.
So let’s get started and talk about what the problem is. Now, we have all heard from various globalist organizations and people, you know, who are somewhat infamous out there, that there is a problem with overpopulation and that this is going to deplete our resources and increase pollution and all of the typical problems like climate change and lead to our demise. However, when we look at data on fertility and birth rate and issues related to sperm counts, we see quite a different story. In fact, the opposite of what they’re telling us is actually going on right now.
So if we can bring up the first slide, Alexander here is I’m going to start talking about sperm count specifically, and this is a study that was recently published, that was a redo of a study that was first published in 2017, which included additional countries, specifically Africa and South America. So we can see here that this data, there are two data sets that you’ll see in the graph on the lower left. The first blue line goes from 1972 until near the present time. And you can see that over that time, according to this meta regression analysis, which is a way to statistically analyze the data so that the percent change is spread evenly or more evenly over the time period.
So it doesn’t mean that every single year there was a 1.16 drop in the sperm count, but that was the mean. And we can see that over this 50 year period, roughly, that there was a little bit more than 1% drop per year. So overall, more than a 50% drop in sperm count. Now, the red line looks at data just from the year 2000 to near the present, and you can see that the decline has accelerated during that time period. So in other words, from 1972 to 2000, the rate perhaps was a little bit under 1% per year, but it’s picked up since 2000 to over 2.5% reduction per year.
Now, those grids on the top left of the figure actually show the sperm counts how they were in 1973 with 101 million sperm per milliliter of seminal fluid, and in 2018, they were down to 49. So more than a 50% reduction in sperm count. And this has been now found globally. So in all of the nations across the earth, there is this reduction in sperm count. So how do we relate this sperm count? Because we know that the sperm count is one, not the only way to evaluate sperm, because there’s also the shape, their motility and other parameters, but also what is the consequences of this? Are there consequences on fertility and birth rate? And then, of course, later on, we’re going to talk about what is the cause of this issue.
So if we go to the next slide, we will then be looking at human fertility. And we can see in the graph a that is the world total fertility rate. And it’s measured from approximately 1960 up until 2020. And you can see a pretty much a parallel decline to what we just saw with the sperm counts. Now, this graph is less linear because they did not do a similar meta regression analysis to make it into a line. But if we see the starting point, around 1970, there were approximately five births per woman. I believe that this is reported, or the total fertility rate.
It’s the average number of children a woman is projected to give birth to in her reproductive lifetime. So that was five children back in 1970, and in 2020, it is less than two and a half. So once again, just over 50% reduction in fertility rates. Now, the B and C panels are actually looking at the GDP, or gross domestic, gross domestic product product, which is an economic variable looking at approximating the wealth of nations and of the world. And you can see here the relationship that as the GDP goes up, the fertility rate declines. So there’s this.
Now, this may not be a causal relationship, it’s just an association, but it’s certainly interesting to see now if we go to the next slide in the United States. The CDC has recently, and this is just last month, reported that the US fertility rate is down at another historic low. And I’ll read the general fertility rate in the United States decreased by 3% from 2022. That’s in only two years, reaching a historic low. This marks the second consecutive year of decline following a brief 1% increase from 2020 to 2021. From 2014 to 2020, the rate consistently decreased by 2% annually.
So we see a big drop in the United States fertility rate. And if we look at the next slide from 2019. This is an article from the National Vital Statistics reports talking about fertility rates by race, but it says right there in their discussion section in the highlighted portion, the 2017 total fertility rate for the United States of 1765.5 was 16% below what is considered the level for a population to replace itself. In other words, the United States is currently, and has been since at least 2017, well below the population replacement rate. And this is true of virtually all western or developed countries.
And the trend is heading this way in developing countries as well. So in other words, in the United States, our population is declining, as it is in other developed countries, Western Europe, Canada, et cetera, Australia, New Zealand. And this trend at some point actually can lead to extinction. There is a point beyond which recovery can take place. So this is the opposite of the major narrative put forth by Bill Gates and others, that there is an overpopulation crisis. Actually, we are headed in the opposite direction. So we can pause on the slides for a minute, and I want to have a discussion about, from at least the male point of view, with declining sperm counts and male fertility, what could be the explanation? And of course, a lot of what I’m going to say also applies to women.
But we’re going to look specifically at data on men, sperm and semen. So they’re in the other presentations and literature that’s out there, they point to a variety of possible causes that generally point to one genetic factors as a possible cause. And that has even been ruled out by the mainstream because they realize that the time scale of this reduction in fertility is too quick to reflect massive mutations across the population. So then we’re left with environmental factors. Now, there are many people who talk about lifestyle factors such as obesity, smoking and other things, but many of these are problematic to investigate because they could actually be co factors for exposure to environmental toxins, especially things like obesity.
And the relationship is not super strong for many of those lifestyle factors, although they can be significant. The other thing that’s talked about is exposure to environmental toxins. And these are multiple and from multiple sources. And this correlates well with the exposure and the timeframe of the problems with fertility. So we’re going to look at the evidence for this particular potential cause of the decline in fertility. I just want to point out before we have this discussion, that you can divide toxins into two categories based on their solubility. In water. We have water soluble toxins and water insoluble or fat soluble toxins.
Now, they’re two different animals in terms of how our body handles them, because our body can generally, in almost all cases, readily eliminate water soluble toxins in a matter of hours to days if we just reduce or eliminate our exposure to those toxins. In other words, if we’re exposed to it day after day after day, it’s going to be in our bodies at all times. But if we recognize that and stop exposure, provided we’re generally healthy, our body can eliminate and get rid of those water soluble toxins within a relatively short time. Now, when it comes to fat soluble toxins, it’s a very different story.
These accumulate in our tissues, especially in our body fat. And many of these chemicals are known as forever chemicals or persistent organic pollutants because they stay in our bodies essentially for lifetimes and even generations, because they can pass from mother to placenta in utero and through. Through the breast milk. So they’re kind of a different animal in terms of how our bodies handle them and how much exposure versus how long they can exert their toxic effects on our body. So, that being said, let’s bring up the next slide, which this is kind of a historical perspective, because I found papers from as long ago as the early 1980s where they started to recognize this problem.
And being that this is practically 40 years ago, really, nothing has been done from a public health perspective to address these problems. But back then, they looked at semen samples, and I’ll read from the highlighted portions. Heavy metals and organochlorine compounds in semen were present in the same concentration ranges in blood and other biofluids. And of course, these compounds have no business being in our bodies at all in any fluid. And significant correlations were found between the simultaneous occurrence of lead and cadmium and between the occurrence of HCB, DDT and DDE, which are different pesticides. So, in other words, they found heavy metals and pesticides in semen.
And we know that by 1982 that they already had data of declining sperm counts and fertility rates. So this could have been looked at very critically, beginning at that time. Now I’m going to present a series of more recent studies. The next one looks at what I already termed persistent organic pollutants and semen quality. And it’s called the life study. Alexander, if you want to go to the next slide. Now here they measured quite a number of different compounds in different classes, such as PCB’s. In fact, they analyzed for 36 different PCB’s, which are polychlorinated biphenyls.
Now, you’ll note that this is a pretty recent study, but PCB’s were taken out of use back many years ago, I believe around 1978 or 79. But here what they found is that they were present in much of modern men’s semen. And what they did is, and they looked at other compounds as well. But what they did is they divided the levels of these various toxins from the semen into quartile. So the zero to 25th percentile, 25th to 50th, 51 to 75th, and 76 to 100. And they compared the first quartile, the lowest 25%, with the fourth or the highest 25%.
And this is a common methodology that they do when they compare groups. Like for example, this has been done with the relationship between age and athletic performance in children. So, like children that are in the oldest quartile of age in a given level of sports, for example, have higher performance than the lowest quartile. It’s true with academic performance as well. And in this study, they found that, quote, males with chemical concentrations in the fourth quartile as compared to the first quartile showed significant associations for several individual chemicals in each chemical class and type of semen quality parameter, indicating negative and positive associations with semen quality.
And I’ll explain that in a second. Polybrominated diphenyl ethers in particular, and those are flame retardant compounds, were associated with several measures of increased abnormal morphology. So the shape of the sperm was abnormal. Thus they were pathologically affected by those flame retardant chemicals. Now, it reports positive and negative effects. And that doesn’t mean that the overall effect of the chemicals was positive. It simply means that in some parameters, there was what’s considered a positive effect. For example, some of the chemicals showed increased motility in the sperm. However, in other categories, there may have been a negative effect on the sperm.
So if they would test those sperm in their ability to fertilize these eggs, I would hypothesize that they would have decreased ability even if their motility was increased. So overall, I think this really represents adverse effects of these chemicals on sperm in terms of fertility. Now, the next study, interestingly, looks at microplastics, and it was an interesting study and I wanted to include it. Now, it is unclear if microplastics exert direct toxicity. There isn’t sufficient data, and there are problems with some of the studies on microplastics. But here are the significance I want to mention, because one thing is that the plastics have plasticizing chemicals that are known to be endocrine disrupting chemicals and can alter various sexual functioning, including fertility.
And the most commonly known of these would be phthalates and bisphenols. When there’s microplastics present, then also these chemicals can leach out of the microplastics and also be present and have harmful effects on the tissue. The other thing I’ll say about plastics is they tend to absorb other things from the environment that they’re exposed to, including heavy metals. So they can, depending on where these plastics came from and how they got in the body, they could also be carrying other types of toxins that they absorbed during their lifetime in the environment. Here in this particular study, which found microplastics in the testes of both humans and dogs virtually universally, I’ll quote from their abstract.
Our study reveals the presence of microplastics in all canine and human testes, which they studied with significant inter individual variability. So, in other words, from one person to another, they had different amounts. Mean total microplastic levels were 122.63 micrograms per gram in dogs and 328, so more than twice as much in humans. Both humans and canines exhibit relatively similar proportions of the major polymer types, with polyethylene being dominant. Furthermore, negative correlation between specific polymers such as pvc, which is polyvinyl chloride, and pet, and the normalized weight of the testis was observed. So in other words, the more of those particular plastics, the testes were smaller.
These findings highlight the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system, with potential consequences on male fertility. And it reports potential because of what I was saying about the lack of clear studies showing toxicity for microplastics themselves, but not from the plasticizing chemicals. Now, on the next slide is from another paper, and this is sort of a review of a variety of chemicals, but it’s not an exhaustive list that has been shown to have negative effects on male reproductive parameters. So pesticides and herbicides like organophosphates and the infamous atrazine, which is the, you know, chemical that allegedly produces gay frogs, it’s shown to cause hermaphroditism in amphibians, but shown to reduce sperm motility.
In mammals, we see plasticizing chemicals that I already mentioned. We see heavy metals, cadmium, lead and mercury. And the next slide continues this list. Also arsenic. For the heavy metals, we see natural gas and oil. Actually, radio frequency pollution also may be a factor, especially those airport scanning machines that use terrawave technology. Various of these chemicals in air pollution we see lifestyle factors are listed here, but also exposure to steroids. And I want to mention birth control pills, also as an endocrine disrupting chemical that we can be exposed to even through drinking water. There’s one more study I want to include, and this is actually from the chemistry literature rather than the medical literature, where they were really developing a new liquid chromatography technique.
But nevertheless, they are still reporting on what they found in semen. And I’ll read from the highlighted portion. This investigation revealed the presence of various contaminants in semen, including plastic additives, which I had mentioned. Pfas, those are forever chemicals that are used as pan linings for nonstick surfaces, as water repellents and waterproofing, etcetera. Flame retardants. As we’ve also mentioned before, surfactants, which are used in many cleaning products, and even laundry detergent and insecticides, which we also briefly talked about. Notably prevalent plastic additives such as phthalic acid esters and bisphenols were identified, indicating potential health risks. Additionally, we uncovered previously understudied chemicals like the tire additive to mercaptobenzothiazole and specific organophosphate flame retardants.
So what this is pointing out, I think, is very important, which is that there are so many environmental, environmental, environmental chemicals which have never been tested for safety in animals or humans out there, that if we start testing for more things, we could actually find surprising chemicals in the semen, which may also be contributing to this problem. And here they found a tire additive. And one would ask, how could a tire additive end up in your semen? But I think these chemicals are quite pervasive and penetrative in the environment. And we have not really recognized exactly how we’re exposed to all of them now that we have reviewed quite a lot of evidence.
And I had to actually limit the number of studies I presented here because I was just finding study after study after study looking at different chemicals in seminal fluid and semen. And of course, also in follicular fluid, which is the fluid that bathes the eggs in the woman and other female genital related body fluids. So there’s quite extensive evidence of the presence of these compounds. And then there are studies that have strong associations with these compounds and fertility. And then there are some animal studies, like with phthalates, for example, that clearly show anatrazine, for that matter, and several others of these that clearly show effects, effects on the development of the genital system in males and females and on fertility.
And there’s even data with mice that show with phthalates damaging the male genital tract and causing infertility, that it actually takes three generations of not being exposed to those chemicals for full reproductive function to return. This, of course, is not very promising for humans. So we need to definitely address these issues. And in the last section of my presentation, I’m going to discuss some ways to do that. But before we move on, I want to kind of use this opportunity because it lends itself to this discussion, to talk about what could be the real cause of so called sexually transmitted diseases.
Now, this is something I’ve been asked about many, many times and even debated about when I was presenting evidence that germ theory has been refuted. So, in other words, if we look at the studies on contagion of sexually transmitted diseases, we see that there’s no evidence that they’re contagious. And there are published studies that you can find that I’m not going to review in detail right now. Also, if you look for evidence that the so called pathogens that are said to cause various sexually transmitted diseases, like herpes simplex virus, like treponema pallidum, bacteria, nicaea, gonorrhea, etcetera, there’s no experiments that show that those are the causative agents.
But people still experience sexually transmitted diseases, of course, and some people have experienced them after they’ve become sexually active with a new partner. So what could actually be going on? I believe that the evidence I’ve reviewed so far today really informs us. Now, let us first, for me to develop this hypothesis. Look at the symptoms of STD’s. So you basically have two kinds of symptoms. You have symptoms from irritation, in other words, burning or pain, which can occur with urination, with intercourse, or it could just be present at rest. And then you have symptoms of detoxification.
So the body is getting rid of something. So there could be increased frequency of urination. There could be discharge from the penis or the vagina. There could be blisters or vesicles where the body’s getting rid of some kind of fluid, right? And sometimes there are lesions on the genitals and they often weeping or oozing fluid of one kind or another. So here we have, you know, irritation of the tissues, resulting in pain and burning and unpleasant sensations, and evidence of the body detoxing something. Now, if we take into account that the fluids in the genital tract, and we can also look at urine, because urine contains these chemicals as well.
In many people, that if the body is going through some reason to dump more of these chemicals, for example, they would be present in these tissues and can cause these symptoms. Okay? Because think about it. If your peeing and in the urine are toxic chemicals, they’re gonna make contact with your urethra on the way out and irritate it and cause pain. And we can draw an analogy, actually, to contact dermatitis, because that is well known and characterized, where we expose the skin to a variety of toxic chemicals, and the skin has the same kind of reactions, right? It can have redness, inflammation and discomfort, and also it can have oozing, blister and vesicle formation, essentially trying to detox something, right.
Even ulceration and burns can occur depending on the nature of the chemical involved. And it doesn’t have to involve strong acids or bases to result in a chemical burn. In fact, there was one instance I found, reported in the literature, where a gentleman used a hair gel product as a sexual lubricant for masturbation and ended up with substantial burns that needed admission and treating in the burn unit in the hospital. And we know that those kind of hair products would contain some of the chemicals that I have been talking about so far today. So what could explain a sexually transmitted disease that is not from an infection which has already been disproven? Well, here are a couple of options.
One option could be that there is an exposure, actually, during the intercourse with these chemicals, which could be that your sexual partner has a large toxic burden, maybe infertile. And in the semen, there’s a high amount of these chemicals that, upon exposure to the vagina and the vulva, cause irritation, produce lesions, discharge discomfort, pain, all the symptoms of an STD. There’s other things you could be exposed to during sex as well, which could be from cosmetics that you’re using to enhance your scent or appearance. Could be from chemicals that are used with condoms, like lubricants and spermicides, and even sweat that can come from either or both partners that can get into the genital area, which is also could contain toxins that the body is getting rid of.
And sweat is known to be irritating and even causing contact. Dermatitis in and of itself. Now in addition to the exposure during sexual intercourse, there’s also micro trauma that occurs. And this of course actually occurs more if the man is circumcised, but the vaginal and penis tissues are rubbing and there’s a lot of friction. And so this can cause an immune response, which could mean that the immune system could bring toxins that are in the body and already in those immune cells to the genital area and cause a local reaction. So there are many ways you could explain the symptoms of an STD associated with these particular toxic chemicals which are known to be present in all of these genital fluids.
And I think this is definitely something to think about. And I haven’t found any evidence of it in the literature that anyone else has considered this because everyone has accepted the imaginary germ theory that these infectious germs cause these illnesses, but they’re simply is been disproven already in the literature. They just haven’t read that literature. But please look to my earlier work, the work of Sam and Mark Bailey, Mike Stone virology blog and Tom Cowan to find out more information about those studies. And don’t forget Daniel Roides’s recent book, can you catch a cold? So let me move on to the final selection so you don’t all leave this livestream walking away defeated and pessimistic, because there are things that you can do to mitigate and recover from these effects and first of all, decreasing exposure as much as possible.
So learning where these chemicals come from, and many of them come from plastics, including plastic food packaging, plastic clothing. So you can eliminate those things. I mentioned some other things like surfactants, the products they’re used in, a lot of these are in various cosmetics and personal hygiene products, especially things with fragrances. So fragrance free would be important. On the label you can look at the environmental working group’s healthy living app, and that has many, many products that have been declared free of these types of potentially harmful chemicals. So there’s a lot you can do to decrease your exposure.
In my upcoming true masculinity mini course, I’ll be going into more depth to those types of mitigations. Now, if you eliminate or reduce your exposure, remember what I said about all the water soluble toxins are going to get out of your body in a pretty short time if you do nothing else but reduce your exposure. And those include some of those plasticizing chemicals like phthalates and bisphenols, but do not include many of the other things. So if you really want to get rid of the fat soluble toxins that are the forever chemicals that will stay a long time.
The flame retardants, pfoases, DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls, etcetera, and pesticides, a variety of different pesticides. Then you have to do something that breaks down your fat lipoli. If they’re stored in the fat tissue. You have to break down the fat tissue in order for your body to excrete them. This can be a difficult process, and there is a risk that if you break down the fat too quickly without also doing some other things to help your body eliminate those toxins, they can actually move from one place to another and infiltrate your organs and make things worse. So I suggest that you carefully investigate that.
And one excellent resource would be to look at my power of pine workshop, which was just released a month or two ago, which talks about my favorite strategy of using the special pine solvents, healing solvents to help your body get rid of these fat soluble toxins. Well, thank you, everyone, for your attention, and I happy to take some questions at this time. Well done, Ann. It was an excellent presentation. All right, let’s go to a question from Kay. Would an oral chlorine dioxide protocol be an effective way to destroy microplastics and these other endocrine disruptors? Thanks, doctor.
I’m really not sure and have not actually looked into that, to be honest. So I can’t answer that question, unfortunately. But I would say that Andreas Calker is one of the foremost containers of knowledge on the topic of chlorine dioxide. So I suggest you look at his website for any articles on this topic. Right. He had a. Let’s go to Kieran then, because it was another question about oral chlorine dioxide. A question from Kieran. What about herpes? A guy I know gave her, gave a girl oral herpes the next day, and then ends up in hospital for five days due to the threat pain.
Well, you know, it’s impossible for me to comment on any individual situation unless I have all of the information and details. So if you have access to the medical records or if you can put me in touch with this individual and I can interview them, I can, you know, try to suss out what actually happened. But go back to the section in my presentation and listen carefully to how I explained what could possibly happen that could result in such a herpes outbreak that it could be essentially a form of contact dermatitis. And the time scale actually works out, because often there is a delay of up to 48 hours after exposure on the skin to a chemical and the development of symptoms of contact dermatitis.
So that could easily explain this situation, not knowing what happened with the throat. But maybe there was exposure there, too, because, you know, when you get blisters inside the throat, it’s more, much more problematic than if you get a few on your skin. Right. Interesting. Let’s go to Joe Poe. Can you speak about laundry detergents? I don’t use any, and instead I use Doctor Bronner’s pure castle soap. No sense. All organic. Yes. Wondering if you’re familiar with Doctor Broner. I’m familiar. And Castile soap is definitely, you know, superior than the commercial laundry detergents because they contain not only surfactants, which can be toxic, but also various fragrances and other chemicals that may have a variety of toxicities.
There are a number of different natural substances that can be very effective at cleaning laundry. I believe Alexander uses soap nuts, which are derived from a plant, and I use baking soda with excellent results. So it’s definitely good to think about alternatives, and you can try these different things and see what gives you your favorite results. Absolutely. And you’ll, after a few months of using them, either the baking soda or the soap nuts, you’ll be disgusted with the scent of those laundry detergents. I mean, you have to close your nose after those things. Right. Let’s go to one last question from Hank.
Ted, what about chelation therapy? Well, chelation therapy is generally considered for heavy metals, not for these other compounds. And most of the time when people refer to chelation therapy, they’re talking about synthetic pharmaceutical chelators like EDTA and others that are used sometimes in mainstream medicine or by a lot of so called alternative doctors that may be treating things like Lyme disease and cancer and such. I’m not a proponent of these pharmaceutical chelators. They have significant demonstrated toxicity, and also, they often are unable to be selective between toxic metals and, and, you know, minerals, trace minerals that are necessary for our health.
So you have to be careful to supplement with trace minerals extensively while you’re using these. And they are just risky and not my preferred method for, you know, if there is really a heavy metal issue that, that requires some assistance to help your body heal. There are many natural chelating substances which have been tested, at least in animal studies, and have been shown to have no toxicity or no significant toxicity. I’m talking about things like zeolite and cilantro are two of the most well researched and having the most superior evidence and least possibility of toxicity, so I would look further into those.
I believe I know I have a healthy, living livestream about cilantro where I present a lot of that data. And in the future, I’m sure I’ll be doing one on zeolite as well. All right, excellent. Now, just for the announcement, if you’d like to learn more about ways to avoid hormone disrupting chemicals and preserving your virility, make sure to register for our completely free three day true masculinity mini series that’s taking place on June the fourth, the 6th and the 9th at 08:00 p.m. et. Use the link using the link in the comments. Now, that being said, Andy, would you like to make any closure? Have it.
Do you have any closing remarks before we jump off? Yes. Well, I just want to draw attention. I know many of you have noticed that I have been focusing on men’s issues and men’s health lately, and the reason is obviously because I’m a man and I’m personally affected by these issues. But also I think there is a real lack of attention on issues related to men and that most men who are affected with these problems don’t really know where to go. In fact, I know of several couples who have had problems with fertility and before I spoke to them, they didn’t even really consider that it could be from the man, the issue.
So I want to draw attention to these issues and delivering this free mini series on true masculinity is my contribution to try and draw some attention so that we can come together as men and begin to right these wrongs and take back our true role in the world. So please do join me and I will see everyone next week, of course, for another healthy, living livestream. Bye.
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