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posted by chromas on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the junk-shot dept.

Telegraph (no paywall version):

Male fertility is being irreversibly damaged by a diet of western junk food by the time men reach 18, a study has found.

A groundbreaking investigation has established that teenagers who favour high-fat and processed foods like pizzas, chips and snacks are killing off sperm-producing cells that can never be replaced.

It showed that a diet dominated by fish, chicken, vegetables and fruit is best is for protecting those cells and ensuring healthy levels of sperm.

[...] The research is being presented at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) annual conference in Vienna.

The solution is simple: don't eat anyone's junk.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:38AM (11 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:38AM (#860412)

    I might have sounded flippant, but it was anything but. I spent my 20's putting myself through college (working full time, school part time). I had 1 failed serious relationship because A) She lived 300 miles away and couldn't get a job here; and B) My college credits would not transfer so I either started over, or gave up on getting a degree. We broke up.

    That's not counting the number of dates I had to turn down because I had homework, or work work.

    I finally got my BA in Applied Math when I was 32. By then I owned a condo and had $0 student debt. I was also a consultant, making good money and my dating pool was pretty much divorces with a kid or two. Which I didn't really want to deal with (my bad, I regret that now. Diana widow with the green ford station wagon and 2 kids under 5, I'm looking at you). When I met my wife her oldest was flunking out of college, majoring in partying, and her other was a senior in high school. I did the best I could but, when we divorced, guess which side the kids took?

    Whatever. I made my choices, I made my mistakes, and now I'm dealing with them.

    Don't even get me started on forgiving student loans. I busted my ass to not borrow a single $, don't lecture me on the price of tuition or textbooks. There is no way in fucking hell I would have borrowed $10k, let alone the stupid numbers I'm hearing nowdays, to go to college.

    / diana with the green station wagon, I'm not joking
    // El Cajon.
    /// Tell me the name of our mutual friend who turned into a meth fiend and I'd love to hear from you.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:42AM (10 children)

    by aiwarrior (1812) on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:42AM (#860447) Journal

    You know i am into my 30th year now and i have recently got married. I am an European so i do not have student debt, nor does my wife.

    I considered going full work mode like you during my 20s but I did not and I think it was a good decision. I am going a bit more work mode in the last 2 years, with my woman, somebody who can help and understand. Do not get me wrong, if I have leisure time it is with her and for her. She is my best friend.

    Regardless, thanks a lot for sharing the story. It is interesting and certainly meaningful in terms of looking at outcomes of what could have been my life.

    PS If there is one thing I am afraid of having children is that one day they will be just partying losers who live off our success. That and health of course.

    Also maybe you could find a partner in an Asian country. This is not frowned upon there and you get comfort and she would get financial security. Mind you I am not speaking in sexual terms. I mean the whole girlfriend/wife/friend "package". In some countries' cultures this is acceptable. When traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia I met such couples and the arrangement seemed pretty good. They looked genuinely relaxed.

    Never forgot the Austrian guy who told me he was fed up of being alone in the metropolis so he went to Cambodia.

    • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @09:50AM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @09:50AM (#860463)

      Biological drives are REAL, gentlemen!

      What you "want" or don't "want"? It's not something you create in the mind. Your brain, you see, is a myriad of drives and genetic edicts. Your emotional being, and your 'animal being', are one with your mind.

      If you have lower sperm count, I'm willing to bet that you're just going to be less 'in the mood'. And I'm also willing to bet, that with smell, pheromones, and other factors (like just smelling how ready your happy-sack is), women are going to be less 'in the mood' around a less 'sexy' male.

      Don't have time for sex? Bull. Sex can take place in any number of circumstances, people can hang out an hour or two a week, and if you're very, very randy? You're going to find the time. Hands down.

      But you don't. I don't. And birth rates are dropping, the human race is literally going extinct -- not due to global warming, pollution, or whatever.. but something else that's been reducing fertility.

      IF we don't fix it, it could be 'like the bees' for us. Most extinction events for animals start off with a reduction, then it increases, then it's "off a cliff", with birth rates tumbling.

      We could literally be 100 years from only 100 million people worldwide. Think that's not serious? With a drop off like that, how soon to 100k people worldwide? Then NONE.

      And all these people prattling on about 'good' and 'I don't want kids', wrong. You WOULD want kids, if your body wasn't damaged.

      And it's not 'good'. Go put on your dark make-up and black clothes, Mr Goth, the human race needs to persist.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:09PM (#860473)

        And I might add...

        Is it money? NO! Coal miners working 15 hours a day, trapped by the 'company store', had PLENTY of kids.

        Is it time? NO! See above!

        It's not time. It's not money.

        It isn't culture. Why? Because how different can, for example, Japanese culture get from American? Or, South Korean from Australian? Or even North?

        Do you really think that North Korea has any care for feminist rights?

        Yet all of these cultures had a birth rate at, or below, replacement.

        It's not culture. It isn't being "too busy" or "money".

        You MAY tell yourself it is, but it IS NOT! These are the excuses you use to "not have", when you are CAPABLE of rejecting the idea of kids.

        But were you bristling with happy juice, were you biologically compelled to mate, you WOULD. Period. You'd rationalize a reason why it was time.

        Just try starving yourself. Not for a few days, but for weeks. Then, try doing it all the time. Not just once, and "yay! I went on a hunger strike, struggling with it constantly!!", but YOUR WHOLE LIFE.

        Do you think procreation is a lesser 'hunger' than food? Hell no! In fact, it's OK if (for example) men starve to death, as long as their happy juice gets into a womb! And OK for a woman to starve, as long as the child is weened, and just needs an apple or two.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:34PM (6 children)

        by Nuke (3162) on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:34PM (#860478)

        ... birth rates are dropping, the human race is literally going extinct

        You are out of touch. After remaining relatively stable for several thousand years, the world's population accelerated from about 1800 and has recently exploded - doubled since the mid-1970s and still increasing. The human race will kill itself by not having enough resources to go round. We have entered a classic boom - near-extinction cycle that has been seen in other species like rabbits and certain birds.

        We have learned to control things like sanitation and medicine, leading to population increases, but not births in much of the world. It is still in some cultures that having more kids shows you are macho (Osama-bin-Laden had 56 siblings from one father, and don't give me the SJW excuse that it was because he was poor). Even in the UK the population is increasing like mad - house building is everywhere.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:04PM (2 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:04PM (#860486)

          Quite so - to make things a little more concrete for those who don't want to do the research, estimates mostly put the "normal" world population at somewhere in the range of 200-400 million people across most of the last 10,000 years, until around 1000AD, though there's genetic evidence that our species went through a near-extinction bottleneck at some point before that, possibly being reduced to as little as a few thousand individuals.

          We're currently pushing 20x the norm, which means a 95% population reduction would just return us to the norm, and it would take a 99.9999% reduction to get us as close to extinction as we've already been.

          There's also the minor detail that stress reduces fertility and unnatural population density alone creates stress, even before you consider how stressful virtually every major culture on Earth has become. We may enjoy longer lives with fewer diseases and better food than our ancestors, but it's no longer enough to just hunt, gather, and farm enough to feed ourselves - which was a bit labor intensive, but not particularly stressful. You knew what you needed to do, you did it, and if bad luck knocked you down you were still a member of a far more communal society that helped each other get back on their feet for the good of the tribe - the population was small enough that every individual was valuable to the whole.

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:19PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:19PM (#860585)

            There has never been a "normal" world's population. Ever. That absurdity of trying to claim the world wide population was static, from the end of the last ice age until just a couple of hundred years ago? Good grief.

            The second part of your post, misses what I was saying. Population decline is uniform, but it is NOT culture. Are you trying to claim, that every single culture, be it rural or urban, be it Asian or Western, all just happen to have below-replacement numbers in terms of births, 'just cause'? You believe living in rural Wyoming, is just as stressful as downtown Tokyo? That living in South Korea, is the same as living in downtown London? That the cultures and stresses are equal?

            That was my whole point. That as far as you can range, it's a 'high tech' society that experiences heavy reductions in births.

            You know that small communities still exist all over the world still, right? You want laid back, go look at rural Norway, Canada, New Zealand. Also note the reduced birth rates there, where people are communal still, yet don't even have the internet! Still!

            This is my point. Look at population groups all around the world, as *I* have (you mentioned research), and note the similarities between those dying off.

            Areas dying off (if you remove 1st generation immigrants from the equation):

            - Canada, United States
            - Almost all of Europe, UK
            - New Zealand, Australia
            - Japan
            - North and South Korea

            Pretty much any place that his a higher tech culture, is experiencing reduced birth rates. And more startling, is the TREND of reduced birth rates.

            Go back 100 years. It's a steady, downward spiral.

            Again, because I know you'll take the last two sentence out of context, recall! This isn't urban or rural, this isn't 'city' or 'country', this isn't culture, this isn't stress (have you ever visited a community in rural Canada. I mean *rural*. There's no stress compared to sitting in traffic in the city, there's no comparison).

            I'm willing to discuss some of these things, such as "The stress is the same in rural and urban Canada!", but be reasonable. And also understand, that it's ALL HIGH TECH CULTURES EVERYWHERE ON THE PLANET!

            Why are people SO upset that it's not culture reducing birth rates, but environmental issues? And yes, 'available food being poison' is environmental.

            And then, the absolute absurd behaviour of people being all happy that the entire species might die out.

            Wake up! I mean it!

            If it's something we're doing to the environment, and our birth rate continues to plummet, we MIGHT have a chance of reducing it or solving it now.

            But what if it's something we're doing.. say it's plastic? Plastic being in everything, even most people's table salt? In the soil? In all the drinking water?

            If our population implodes, so does our ability to solve such issues. High tech requires specialists, and intelligent people to push forward, to research. Only so many per 1000 can do such jobs.

            Imagine we're cast back to the stone age. Can you see stone age barbarians solving pollution problems?! At a certain point, we'd drop below the ability to resolve and fix. We'd sit there happily (for example) drinking and eating plastic laden food, until everyone's dead.

            But you lot all go on about how it's a good thing. Yet in the same breath, you're all excited about global warming, pollution? Wtf?

            If you care about global warming, it's all about caring about mankind. Global warming could go crazy, but almost certainly we'd die off, and eventually things would stabilize, and on the earth goes! New species evolving, and so forth.

            And if you care about pollution, HELLO, we're fucking MAMMALS!

            Do you want to see all mammals going extinct too?

            I find it absurd that "Oh, it's the culture, not pollution!" is just constantly thrown out there. This is 1930s thinking, people!

            • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday June 28 2019, @02:35AM

              by Immerman (3985) on Friday June 28 2019, @02:35AM (#860798)

              Note that I'm not comparing stress in rural Canada to stress in central Beijing - I'm comparing stress a few centuries ago to stress today.

              A graph of the estimated world population for the last 12,000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg [wikipedia.org] (and accompanying numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates) [wikipedia.org]
              Using a 50year "useful adult lifespan" for reference of how much change one person had to adapt to.

              There was a notable population booms:around 300BC, with the population roughly tripling to ~225M by 0AD (20% per 50 years)
              But then it remained relatively stable, taking 1000 years climb to ~300M (1.4% per 50y)
              And another 700 years to double to ~600M in 1700. (5.1% per 50y)
              Then only 150 years to double to ~1,200M in 1850 (26% per 50y)
              Then under 100 years, as it more than doubled to ~2.5B in 1950 (44% per 50y)
              Then only 37 years to double to ~5B by 1987 (155% per 50y)
              And then to ~7.5B in 2017 (97% per 50y)

              And that's only the rate of population growth one person can expect to see in their lifetime. There's also the carrying capacity of the planet that we've begun running up against in recent centuries. in ages past the world was full of vast tracts of arable but largely uninhabited land, as most everyone clustered around the most fertile areas, and could expand to less fertile but still quite arable land if population pressures became unpleasant. At 12million square miles of arable land on Earth (which is also where we like to build our cities)
              in 0AD there was about 33 acres per person, far more than could be effectively used (for reference, the average Medieval farm was about 6-8 acres per person)
              by 1700 we were down to about 13 acres per person
              by 1900, we were down to 3
              by 2017, we were down to only 1 acre per person.

              Population densities have skyrocketed, cultures are changing at an ever increasing rate, things that were broadly acceptable 40 years ago are now condemned, while we're all expected to be fluent in ideas and technologies that didn't exist 20 years ago. And the internet has put us all in much closer contact with the rest of the world, allowing us to hear an unending stream of bad news, along with daily seeing how the wealthy flaunt their wealth while most of us keep slipping further and further behind (wealth inequality is increasing in almost every nation on Earth)

              It's a far more stressful life for pretty much everyone than it was a few short centuries ago. And of course, one *huge* thing has changed:

              Effective birth control that doesn't spoil the experience. The pill was only invented in 1960, 59 years ago, and has been followed by many increasingly effective options. Kids are stressful and expensive in the modern world, and most rational people try not to have them until they're ready, and only as many as they really want. Assuming most adult couples are sexually active, that means that fertility is largely governed by the effectiveness of the birth control. Condoms are about 85% effective in practice (real-world statistics for people using them as their only form of birth control, not always perfectly) - which puts the "half-life" between new babies for a (married?) couple at only 4.27 years. The pill is about 91% effective in practice, pushing that "half-life" out to 7.35 years, while IUDs and most other implants are better than 99% effective in practice, pushing that half-life out past 69 years.

              In other words, a sexually active (married?) woman hoping to delay her next child indefinitely will probably never have any kids if she uses an IUD, will probably have at least a couple using the pill, and probably several using only condoms.

              And of course, we mostly see no corresponding drop in fertility in the developing nations, because most of the population can't afford effective birth control.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:22PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:22PM (#860554)

          It's all about statistics and how you read them.
          Is there a breakdown on "the world's population accelerated from about 1800 and has recently exploded"?
          For example, if the population increased in Africa, India, and China, does that mean that people in the US should stop making babies?
          And about "UK population increasing like mad" does that come from immigration? Or immigrants that have their previous 'mentality' and having several kids?

          That said, I remember reading some paper about how after 1-2 generation, even immigrants have their birthrate fall to the same level than the society they live in. (check info about it, I might have read it wrong but it make some sense)
          If I read and remember correctly, it mainly means there's something not working in the policy that make everyone have their birthrate fall.
          That's just my 2 cents though.

          • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @06:10PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @06:10PM (#860632)

            For example, if the population increased in Africa, India, and China, does that mean that people in the US should stop making babies?

            Why would you even think that?

            If I read and remember correctly, it mainly means there's something not working in the policy that make everyone have their birthrate fall.

            *shakes head* Women, education, contraception.....

            ....
            ....

            Parent post is more evidence that it is time to make men extinct. As long as there are still humans with Y chromosomes on this planet, overpopulation cannot be solved. The Y chromosome is not necessary for further development as a space faring, technological species. In fact, as we can see by parent post, it has become a liability.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:02PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:02PM (#860580)

          No sir, YOU are out of touch.

          You are looking around you today. If you were to use the same logic, then there is NO global warming, you can't personally see it happening after all.

          And you'd be sure that that ozone layer business as absurd. Why? Look around, no problem with those ozones!!

          You're basing your UK numbers on immigration. Go look at the stats, go look at the facts.. every 'civilized' nation, regardless of culture, is experiencing a drop in population. Everything else? Is via immigration. Everything.

          All those houses being built? Wouldn't be happening without immigration.

      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:52PM

        by acid andy (1683) on Thursday June 27 2019, @03:52PM (#860574) Homepage Journal

        Go put on your dark make-up and black clothes, Mr Goth

        OK, if you insist...

        the human race needs to persist.

        Why?

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?