So pests and soy boys and sterility all mixing it up in the noggin when the following shows up in an email from a friend.
From Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, February 6:
Chemical Toxicity and the Baby Bust
By Jeremy Grantham
Viewpoints
February 06, 2020
Unexpected threats to human fertility and, hence, chemical companies
Executive Summary
In today’s society people are choosing to have fewer children, and delaying having children at all into later, less fertile years. These two factors have driven fertility rates below replacement level in most of the world, but a crucial third factor gets little attention and is having a profound impact on fertility: toxicity. The economic and social ramifications will be severe.
“Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be.”
Paul McCartney
A profound and largely unexpected phenomenon is occurring: we are choosing to have fewer children. The most significant drivers of this choice appear to be higher income and better education, especially for women. At the same time, we are choosing to postpone these fewer births into our later, less fertile years. Because of these two factors, fertility rates are below replacement level almost everywhere in the developed world and China. This development, despite its economic and social importance, is not yet receiving as much attention as it deserves, but now there is a new third factor that gets almost none: toxicity.
Human “fecundity” (the number of children you are able to have) is being affected by endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which interfere with hormones. This interference is growing at such a rapid rate that if left alone it is likely to leave us sterile in a few decades with only the rich able to easily afford the healthy lifestyles and the exotic medical help required to have babies.
One of the most measurable and most nerve-racking results of increased chemical damage is our very rapid decline in sperm quality and concentration, which appears to have fallen to one-third of its probable pre-industrial level. If we do not ban whole classes of chemicals in the next 10 years, we will face a crash in the number of new births. The effects of this will be felt to very different degrees by country: those countries that do not act will quickly fall behind in both births and general health. There are in fact indications that health and longevity in the U.S. are already being affected by high levels of toxicity. It is important both for society and the economy that this new information be correctly and quickly processed and that the back-up medical data, which is thin in parts, be supported by new and larger studies. Time is not on our side.
[For the immediate present I do feel a moral imperative to urge anyone pregnant to eat nothing but organic fruit and vegetables for the duration and men the same for six months prior. For more about this, please see the Appendix.]
The Threat to all Life: from Insects to HumansOur attention was drawn to this issue of rising human infertility via the dramatic loss of flying insects that has been registered in the last few years; a loss of up to 75% of the original populations of the pre-WWII era. A toxic stew of chemicals in the air, water, and soil is simply making our environment hostile to insect life. Almost all entomologists believe losses at this scale will have “catastrophic” consequences for the environment and ultimately for us. This can be seen as a second derivative chemical threat through insects to us. But now it appears we are vulnerable to a first derivative effect: the chemical stew is creating a world that is toxic not just to flying insects but to humans also, and very probably through cascading effects to a great majority of life forms.
The Three Reasons for Reduced Fertility: Choice, Deferment, and now Toxicity
Given our current preferred lifestyles – at least given current economic conditions and social norms – families almost everywhere in the developed world (and in most developing countries also) are choosing to have smaller families. This effect – choice – caused by a variety of reasons that differ across countries, is clearly the biggest driver of lower birth rates.
In second place as a cause of reduced fertility is the now equally widespread tendency for women to be older when they have their first child. Since the natural fertility of women drops steadily with age and at a steadily accelerating rate after their mid-twenties (and this applies also to men, although at a slower rate) – it is not surprising that this too would reduce the birthrate. In addition, the quality of both eggs and sperm falls with age so that the percentage of perfectly healthy babies also declines.
There are several recent books highlighting these two effects. One such book selling well is Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline.1 Published in 2019, it outlines in great detail the very many reasons for the decline in birth rates yet does not even mention toxicity, so off the radar is this topic. The only buzz today, in fact, is in the world of well-educated 25- to 40-year-old women, between whom a growing number of apps on fertility-related topics, including exposure in everyday products to toxic chemicals, are now frequently exchanged....MORE
But now toxicity intrudes as a third factor, and one that interacts particularly with the deferred age of pregnancy. A 16-year-old Nigerian girl (in Nigeria women typically start families when older than 16 but far younger than us) today has modestly more trouble becoming pregnant than 40 years ago, but she has the time to adjust and she can still produce the 5 children that is the current Nigerian average, despite toxicity and a falling sperm count. (Nigeria is one of the few developing countries for which we have good data; China is another. Both show rapid declines in sperm concentration and quality!)
In comparison to the Nigerian example a 36-year-old in France or the U.S. has a much greater problem becoming pregnant than 40 years ago and on average this group will have far fewer children than they would like. It is highly likely (although not yet completely nailed down) that the intersection of these two problems, toxicity and postponement, compounds the negative consequences; that is to say, that the total effect is likely substantially larger than the sum of the two separate effects.
Recent Surprises in Fertility
The net effect of choice and postponement combined with the recent decade of “help” from toxicity has been an unexpected and accelerating decline in delivered fertility in developed countries, as well as the critically important China and India, with new annual cohorts of babies already declining in absolute numbers, not just growth rates.
The particular surprises for 2019 have been: 1) in Japan, whose 864,000 births were fewer than every year when its records began in 1899, when the population was about 40% of today’s; 2) in the U.S., where the baby cohort was the absolute least for 32 years and the fertility rate an all-time low of 1.73 children per woman; 3) in China, whose baby cohort dropped to 14.6 million, the lowest in 70 years (ex the 1961 famine) and whose fertility rate – if they don’t change the data – will be well below 1.6 children per woman; and 4) South Korea, where, shockingly, the fertility rate fell below 1.0! Probably for the first time anywhere in peacetime since the Bubonic Plague. Not a single developed country other than Israel (3.1 children per woman) is above the 2.1 replacement level, with some such as Italy at 1.3 and South Korea already reaching levels that could threaten economic and social stability due to unexpectedly low economic growth rates and much-increased retirement fund deficits.
The Basic Data: the Decline in Sperm Concentration from 1973-2011
The definitive meta-study on the topic of decline in sperm count, by Levine, Swan et al.,2 concluded (from the largest and most rigorous studies selected from over 7,500 abstracts) that sperm concentration in the developed world had fallen from 99 units3 in 19734 to 47 in 2011. This is a compound rate of decline of 1.9% a year, a rate sure to threaten the viability of our species unless action is taken.
Prior to this paper there had been concerns about falling sperm counts for more than 40 years, but the various studies had individually been considered too local or too small and even the earlier meta-studies had been found unconvincing by a critical mass of influential academics. This study, though, removed almost all doubts, to a degree unusual in scientific circles.
Immediately after publication, the paper received considerable publicity in the press and had notable write-ups in the Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, GQ (which is particularly good – a link is provided in the Appendix), and many other sources. Strangely, though, this publicity seemed to make little or no lasting impression for such an important and, we might say, personal topic. It seems as if we as a society are reluctant to process this very disturbing data. My financial audiences for example – The Financial Analysts Societies of New York and Boston (separately) – showed absolutely no awareness of toxicity problems. It feels as though I have woken up in 2050 with global average temperatures up almost 2o Celsius and no one has noticed that the climate has changed for the worse.
Exhibit 1 shows the key findings from Levine et al. together with my own extrapolations from this work. The type of statistical projection that my extensions to the data represent is routine in finance, where we are not trying to meet the rigorous and conservative requirements of a peer-reviewed paper but are trying to get the best estimate of an uncertain future...
Surprisingly Mr. Grantham does not mention the population-wide (as opposed to individual, possibly age-related) decrease in serum testosterone levels observed in American males.
Here's a dandy little paper from way back in 2007, from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism:
A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels in American Men
And some further discussion at Healio Endocrine Today:
Generational decline in testosterone levels observed
A similar study concluded:
Testosterone levels decreasing in Danish men
Somethings up.
