Transcript for #1638 - Dr. Shanna Swan

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I think we should all be kind of scared.

Oh gosh, a whole bunch. But what I write about in this book is the problem with the decline of our reproductive health and the chemicals in the environment that we're surrounded with every day all the time that are playing a big part of it. Not the only part, but a big part.

Yes, that's actually what a good part of what they do. They affect the interfere with our hormonal systems in various ways. So they could increase production of a hormone like a pro estrogen. They could decrease, say, an anti-androgen decreased testosterone. They could mess with our thyroid hormone and so on and so forth. So they change levels, but they also change how they're transported, and they interfere with making them available to other parts of the body, basically. And you got it right. I mean, that doesn't sound so scary to people, but the consequence is sound really scary, which is that we're, you know, by every measure, our sperm count, our miscarriage rates, our fertility rates, our testosterone levels, they're all going south if you will at the rate of about 1% per year.

A whole bunch of them and as a group they're called endocrine disruptors because they disrupt the endocrine system, right? And so I spent a lot of time studying one particular class of those which have the ability to lower testosterone. And the reason I did that is because I'm interested in reproductive health and testosterone is so critical as you know for men and women's reproductive health. So that class is called thalates. It's a terrible mouthful to say. Thalates. Thalates, right. And they sound weird, but they're very, very common. And if you give a year in sample today, and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control, you would see that you have not only salads, but other chemicals and plastics and other chemicals in your body right now. You could do that. It would cost a little bit.

All of the above. All of the above. But the salads are probably mostly coming from our food. And that's kind of surprising. Do you want me to tell you how? Yes, please. Yeah. OK. So let's think of a little experiment. So go into a hospital into the neonatal intensive care nursery. I'll come back to the food. And there's a baby lying there, and that baby has a lot of lines coming into her body. And that's delivering food, nutrients, oxygen, whatever the baby needs. And the tubes are soft, squishy, plastic. So as the food nutrients comes through the tubes, goes into the baby, the baby metabolizes them, goes into the urine because they're water soluble. And then we get the urine, we measure and we can see what's in it. And the amount of salad that's in that urine is exactly proportional to the number of lions come into the baby. So if you understand that, you understand how food could be contaminated with salads, because milking machines have this. And all kinds of processing machines have the soft plastic. So this stuff is coming into the food somewhere between the time it's picked. And by the way, salites could be in pesticides as well. I'll tell you why in a minute. And then they're introduced not only through those tubes, but also through the packaging. They're wrapped in soft plastic, sometimes. And then in our homes, we might cook in microwave in plastic, for example. All of that just, it's not, doesn't stick to the plastic. It's not chemically bound. Hopes into the food, gets into us, gets into a pregnant woman's womb, affects the offspring. And I hope to be able to tell you how it does that. But it's, that's what I've been studying for about 20 years.

Different plastics are different and I can't speak to all plastics and some people take a lot of care to wrap their food in safe plastics.

Yeah, so it's a changing landscape as new things are introduced, but there's an old saying, which I think is pretty much still true, which is four or five, one and two, all the rest are bad for you. What does that mean? It means that if you had a Plus a cup here, we could look at the bottom of it and you'd see a recycling code. You've seen those, right? Yes. In the triangle, there's a number. And that number is one two three four five six seven. So if you want to know, is it, is it?

You have to look at the bottom.

Well, some do and some don't, but four or five wanted to all the rest are back for you. That's pretty easy, right? So unfortunately, the rappings on the peppers and so on don't have a number on them, but by and large, if it's by large I can't say it really it really varies but I do know that anything that comes in plastic you do not want to put in the microwave absolutely do not want yeah really so microwave foods that are in plastic containers no no bueno no bueno hmm take them out put them in ceramic put them in glass is really good um and in general if you can get plastics out of your kitchen

Well, I came to understand it first in animals because that's the way science works. First, you do animal studies and then you try to replicate them in humans. And so in around 2000, they did some experiments where they fed a rat food contaminated with salads. And then they looked to see how the offspring developed. Right? And what they saw was that the males were born different than the females and different from unexposed males. Do you want me to tell you how different? Yes, please. So this will really interest you, I think. What what happened is, so let's go back. Okay. So before the thallides, you know, early in pregnancy, the genitals are just a single ridge. same in males and females, undifferentiated. And then, at a certain time, in mice and rats, it's 15 to 18 days of gestation, the testicles start making testosterone. And then that gives the signal to produce the male typical genitals. So if they don't have the testosterone, there will be ovaries, and if there is testosterone, they'll be testicles and so on and so forth, right? And that migration requires testosterone at exactly the right time and the right amount. It's a very delicately programmed, okay? So if that happens, if everything goes well, then the penis will develop, it'll have a size. And then there's something which is very key to my research, which is something you might know by the name of the taint. That taint, or we call it anogeneral distance.

But anogeneral distances.

Right. Well, I'm saying that course I'm talking to a lot of people who might not know. The area known as the, okay. Yes, um, known on the street as taint. Yes, the streets. And, um, or the Gooch, or the Grandal. The Gooch.

Sorry. I had also ABC. Have you heard ABC?

As ball connector.

Yeah. Okay.

Yes, you can imagine. It's not called an ABC. It's not called the ABC. Okay. Sorry. So here you got this distance and it's been measured in animals for like 100 years. And what they use it for was first to just sex the animal. So the litter is born. There's a lot of little pups. They want to separate the males and the females because they're going to do different things. And they just hold them up by the tail and they look. And the reason you can do this is because in the male it's much longer. It's 50 to 100% longer. Now, this is, stop and think about this. There's nothing else in the body that's that different between males and females in terms of size, organs, yes, but size, no. You know, our heights don't differ by 50 to 100% or weights, nothing, nothing. It's this is it. This is the, the mark is that in all animals it's almost all mammals really the hyenas a little different yeah well I know about those you have a whole bit about them yeah um so you know they're meant the females are masculine so they have a longer AGD right but most for most mammals it's this way okay including humans so here's this little pup that's born and he's if he's unexposed he'll have a good you know standard penal size and a gd and he won't have any malformations of his penis and so on you know he'll be normal but if his mother was exposed to salads everything can go south and what happens is the penis is smaller and the HUD is smaller, and the scrotum is smaller, and the testes are maybe not descended. In other words, it didn't finish the process. It was arrested, if you will. So we say that that that pup is incompletely masculinized.

And I'm going to tell you what I did to show that. I show that.

So when I heard this story, I was flying on a plane to Japan to go to a conference. I was with a friend who was a chemist for the Centers for Disease Control. And he said, Shauna, you should study felites. And I'm going, why? I'd never heard of them. What? Why foul it? And he said, well, we have been measuring them at the CDC and they're in everybody. They're in pregnant women. And this group of scientists in the National Talks College program has shown that they altered the development of the male newborn. And they called that the foul it syndrome. That's what it's called. That collection of changes that come about after the mother has salads is called the salad syndrome. So I thought, well, does that happen to humans? Same question you asked, right? So how would you answer that question? Then I'll tell you what I did.

It's really close. Thalates have the property that they dissolve in water, water soluble. And so they go into the urine. So for this class of chemicals, if you want to know how much is in your body, my body, we've got to measure the urine. Other chemicals, like flame returns, we would look in the blood. So it depends what the chemicals, but your right ideal, look inside the body. Okay, then rather than looking at kids with problems, what I did was I just took a whole population of pregnant women. And I got their urine, measured their salads, got their kids, measured their kids. So then I had the problem of what to measure in the kids because nobody had made this translation from an animal, you know, development system to a human. And so that was kind of a challenge, you know, figuring out how to do that. But we did that. And we developed this system for this exam for measuring all these things that you measure in a rat. We measured it in our children. And then we showed, and this was a big news when it came out, that the mother's salads did alter the generals of the boys. So that was the first evidence. That was 2005. And then we published some more in 2008. And then we fortunately, I got money to do it all again. NIH doesn't like to pay for replication. It's a very expensive. These things are $5 million a study, by the way.

Yeah, so they gave it to me. They gave my money to do it again. So the second time I did it better because I really knew what I was looking for. And I got urine actually in three points in pregnancy and I measure the kids exactly when they're born. So everything was much more precise and I found it again. So now there's no question, I don't think anyone questions, that at least this class of chemicals, which we know lower testosterone, alter the development of these boys. And then I asked, well, what does that have to do with sperm count? Because actually for a long time, we haven't talked yet about sperm count, but I've been studying tracing, you know, what's happening with sperm count. I'll tell you the history of that in a minute. But so then I thought, well, is this related to sperm count? Well, these are babies. I don't have a sperm count. But in rats, it looked like the AGD was permanent. So if you were, had a short, just like if you have a small hand, you know, your statures are set at birth, right? So the AGD, if you're born small and my friend Earl Grey, who is a toxicologist, said AGD is forever. We don't know that for sure about humans, by the way. But because we haven't had the 20 years yet. But if you believe that, then a sensible thing to do was to take a group of adult men who could give you a sperm count and measure their HD. And then you could see whether those with a shorter HD had a lower sperm count. And then you would have one pretty solid piece of evidence that chemicals in the environment lower sperm Are you with me? Yes, ma'am. Okay. So I did that study too. So I got students in Rochester, New York to volunteer for 75 bucks to participate and they gave us a Seaman sample and they gave us opportunity to measure them also a questionnaire.

I happened to bring you something to show you.

So, this is not for a baby. This is for our Rochester young man's study. And it looks kind of fierce, but we had the points taken down in the... Yeah, I used one of those to measure polq tips. There you go, all right. So you know all about it. Yeah, turn it on.

I don't know if I pulled you into that. So look, I also brought you a little diagram. So see where we measure.

But we can't show this. Yeah, I don't know how to show this.

You both, you couldn't count. Yeah. Yeah. And so, oh boy, you got a diagram.

Can we have a selfie with you and me in that picture? Yes, ma'am. All right. So what I wanted to, so when I published this, the headlines were size matters, but it's not what you think. Right. Right. And so I got all these people asking me. What should it be? What's good enough? What's big enough? So I did this translation from the millimeters for you. So here it is the two inches is the median, okay? And in this population. And here's the kicker. If it was less than two, men who had less than two inches were seven times more likely to have a sperm count in the subfertil range. I can tell you what that is. As men who had an AGD longer than two inches.

Seven times. It certainly is related to sperm count. And then another study in California showed that infertile men in an infertile clinic versus men who had had born a child had smaller taint length.

So the growth of these chemicals tracks with the growth of the petrochemical industry, because they're made from petrochemical byproducts. Okay? So if you look at a curve of the, it starts around the 50, 1950. Okay? So back in 1950, you have people loving science, jumping on the science bandwagon. There's this better living through chemistry that everyone's talking about. Everybody is just wanting everything made of plastic. It's the new, it's the new craze, it's the new, and it just took off. It went faster than a straight line, exponentially up. And so somewhere in there, it started having an effect, but we're not sure, but I did look at the decline in sperm count over time, so we could look at that as an indication that This is not the only thing that's affecting sperm count, by the way. These salads. But that's one where I feel I can say this with confidence, because I measured those babies, and I, you know, I did it. I did the science, and I did it again. And other people have done it. And so it's, I believe it's solid. And that's just one example of the many chemicals that can affect our hormone system.

No, the last, I mean, the first study was 2000. 2000. That was the first one. The animal studies were earlier, but that was the first human one. And they've been going on ever since. The problem is that we don't talk about the consequences of this. We as a society, we don't talk about sperm counts are going down. Testosterone is going down. You know, we're having more and more children by assisted reproduction. I don't know about you, but, I mean, do you know anybody who has had trouble having a child? Yes. Everybody says yes.

Yes, aging is definitely a problem, but it's not the only problem, and there are many young, if you talk to your nice nurse that I forgot her name, Mercy. Mercy, she told me about two of her young friends who've had trouble having, it's not just, it's the older ones, you know, they're more prevalent, so you hear more of them, but young people too are having problems, and it's it's everywhere and it's increasing so I think now we're going to start paying attention because we're feeling the impact you know until it comes home to roost as you say it's not going to make us change anything but I think this might

The same thing.

That's child is the most sensitive organism. It affects adults too, but because it's just so much going on there, right? Everything is developing then, that's the most critical period. And like you say, it's forever. So let me give you a good example of this. Smoking. Smoking is not a good thing for reproduction. It's not a good thing for sperm count, okay? If the mother smokes, then on the average her son can lose 40% of his sperm count.

If the father smokes in that period before he conceives the child, there's 60 to 70 days that the sperm is being created. In that period, that sperm is vulnerable to what he's exposed to, like smoking. So then that child has also about a 40% lower sperm. And that's not fixable. However, if the man smokes himself, his parents didn't, he did. He might have a 20% reduction and then he goes off and then he's good to go. So it's very different if the exposure occurs in utero or postnatally or in childhood or in adulthood. It's the unborn child that we really need to protect the most.

to my peers, meetings, conferences, writing papers. I've written over 200 papers and say this. But it's a very small circle of people. Let's know each other and know the facts. And that's where it stays. In order to get it out, I have to talk to you. I have to talk to your listeners. I have to, I've given I will over 100 interviews in the last two months. I mean, I'm just saying this to everybody I can because it's, it's got to get out there.

It's definitely under reported.

It is a significant issue and hopefully more people are recognizing, but look, people don't. If you have a problem with your cholesterol, I'm sure you don't. But suppose you had a cholesterol check, you go to a cocktail party to say, I went to the doctor, I had a high cholesterol, I got to not eat this in this. You wouldn't say, I went to my doctor and have a low sperm count. Right. Right. People don't talk about this. They don't talk about their reproductive health. And here's one of the surprising things is that low sperm count, that's related to balance, that man is going to die younger.

I haven't looked at that, but I can tell you it affects libido.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to follow up on that and look at that. What we've just, you know, we followed our kids. Our kids are now in our latest study nine years, eight, nine years old. So they're not, they're not there yet. So I don't have those endpoints, but we do know that when we asked, for example, by the way, women need testosterone too. And it's related to women's libido. So in our study, we did ask the woman about her sexual satisfaction, frequency and so on, and higher levels of thallides were associated with lower sexual satisfaction. And it's, of course, it's related to erectile dysfunction, which, by the way, is now We know rapidly rising and testosterone replacement is being used by young or young or man. So it's a big thing. It's affecting all of our, you know, reproductive health.

No, I don't know of a study like ours in a developing country, but we have studies in other countries for sure in Europe. But if you one measure of where it's a problem, I would say, is where is sperm count declining? I mean, the kickoff for this book, Countdown, was a paper that we wrote in 2017 in which we showed that sperm count in Western countries had declined kind of catastrophically. So let me just tell you the numbers. I think back to 1973, that was the first, that's the start of our trend. And at that point, the median, that's the middle of the distribution, was 99 million sperm per milliliter. I said, good, healthy sperm count. 73. At the end of our study period was 2011. In those 39 years, it had dropped from 99 to 47.

Overall Western countries.

That's a more than a 50% decline in under 40 years. That's crazy.

Right. Right. What if it keeps trending down this way? It is. So what we did in our curve, we said, okay, that's 40 years. What about if we go 30 years? Maybe it's slowing down. Nope. 20 years. Slowing down? Nope. 10 years? Nope. We saw no indication that the trend was slowing down. It's going to have to. Let me just point out because if you bring it down to zero, Just think what that means. Medium of zero means half the sperm would be negative. Counts would be negative, not possible. Can't have a negative, right? So it's gonna have to just think about the curve coming down, coming down towards it's gonna have to flatten it.

I know.

Absolutely.

And here's another thing to think about. So a mother is exposed to some thallets, other chemicals, the phenols that line tin cans and the flame retardants and the pesticides. They all, they're all bad. They all can do this in different ways. But let's just talk about this thallets. So the mother's exposed to the thallets, and she's caring, let's just say a son in the womb. And then he has, within him, what's called the germ cells, of his sperm, right? So that he's exposed, the child is exposed and the next generation is exposed. So from one person being exposed, you're exposing three generations. So you're right to say think about the later, you know, the kids coming and the kids coming after that. But here's the good news. Should be some good news, right? Yeah. The good news is that in a very elegant study in the University of Washington, Pat Hunt showed that if you have a guy, mouse, who was exposed and had impaired fertility in sperm count and then you cleaned up everything about his environment and that and for his child's environment and his child's child's environment in three generations we can recover reproductive health.

Absolutely right.

No.

All right. I'm sure there'll be a lot of push back from your listeners, but there's, okay, first of all, we can do better. One place, let me just say, we used to do terribly with drugs. The regulation of drugs was terrible. That's why we had a little bit of my babies and other terrible breakthroughs. And then the FDA got it together and learned how to regulate drugs. And we're pretty safe now. And we know, for example, how to test vaccines and so on and so forth. So we can worked toward a viable regulatory system if we want to. So I believe that. In Europe, there are many steps ahead of us because they have instituted something called reach. Now, under reach, if a guy manufacturer wants to put a chemical into commerce into our plastic bottle into a personal care product where they are also. By the way, he has to show that it's not harmful before he does that. There's so there has to pass a series of tests. In this country, we don't have that regulation. In this country, it's put it in and we'll see if it's harmful. No prior regulation required. You see? So it's really, really different. The bottom line is like, we have only like 11 chemicals that are not allowed in our personal care products. In Europe, they have 1100.

Right. So, you know, what we have to think about is how do we get angry enough and concerned enough to change the regulations so that we're protected?

So this delicate testosterone balance that I talked about can go the other way for females, but that's not through something like salads. It's through other chemicals possibly. We just published a paper that, and this is early, I'm not going to, you know, just not the same weight of evidence at all as I have for the salads, but we just published two papers in which we showed that when mothers were exposed to higher levels of a certain pesticide, which is in round-up, which is, have you heard of round-up? Black for C? Black for C? Black for C? Yeah. So that, that, that, that, the, that, the gentle distance in the girls was long, was more masculine. And that was shown in rats as well. So that made go away. This was the first study. It was a small study. I don't know that that's going to stick. But that's the kind of thing that could be going on. That there are chemicals out there that alter increased testosterone. They're called proandrogens. And they can mess up females in the opposite direction.

No, glyphos, it doesn't. No, I don't think so. Not in our, you know, or not kids. So the animal data is a little not clear, but but in our kids, we didn't see anything in the males, but the point is that there's lots of stuff out there. that's messing it's messing with our hormones systems and so that's where we should be looking we should be looking at you know what's going on out there that we're taking in all the time by the way right we call them everywhere all the time chemicals you know because that they're they're just coming in we can't we can't stop and we don't know we don't know what's in our bodies there's no and you know what

Oh my gosh. So there's the chemicals that are in coatings, just to say, coatings of teflon frying pans, coatings of your jacket that you wear in the ring, repellent. those coatings and they're also on paper, you know, keeps the grease from going through to the box when you buy a piece of those coatings are also hormonally active and very, very prevalent. I haven't studied those myself, so I don't want to talk a lot about their effects, but I know they have reproductive effects, I know they affect, for example, fetal growth.

Yeah. The rate, the repellent, the repellent, you know, anything that puts a barrier, any barrier, a chemical barrier, they're called the PFOS, sometimes they're called PFOS and PFOS, they're different classes of chemicals, but perfluorinated compounds. Then there are the phenols, the bisphenols, which, by the way, you probably, did you ever try to buy a BPA free bottle? And I don't know if you ever try. Yeah, yeah. Right. So the label would be favorite. So what happened was, and people got really upset about BPA, it had a lot of reproductive effects. And it, so they took it out. And that's good. But what happened was, and this is what happens over and over and over again in chemical cycles, they put something else in. They put in BPF like Frank and people S like Sam. And BPF and BPS are actually, particularly BPF is equally, if not more, risky and then BPA. And the bottle says BBA free, that's true, but it doesn't say BBA free. Right. Right. So I think that's a dirty trick. And we call it, um, whack them all.

It's a big job. For one thing I'd say by countdown and look at the several chapters where we go into detail on things to avoid. But I could say, you could think about, thank you. I think about walking through your kitchen and looking for plastics and trying to swap out ceramic and glass or metal, not for the microwave, of course, but in your bathroom to look at your personal care products, they won't say salads by large.

I don't know why they're not required. No, I don't, it doesn't say the allides on our spaghetti sauce that has the allides in them either. We can come back to that. But I don't actually know what the regulation is. I know for sure they don't have to be labeled in fragrance products because those are trade secrets.

Probably from the processing. So when you go from a tomato to a sauce, you have to process it. And so that processing introduces salads. If you go think about a cow, this is different, but it's the same principle. So the cow is being milked. Maybe this cow is on a wonderful farm with You know, the picture of the farmer and the grass and it's an organic farm and everybody's happy. And then he milks the cow where she milks the cow through a milkering machine that has tubes, one of those tubes made up. And so they go into the milk. So I actually am hoping to do a systematic study which I'm calling farm to fork where we take a bunch of products see what's in them at the farm see what's in them at the table and see where it's introduced along the way because nobody's done that we don't really know where they come in so we don't really know how to keep them out

But I would say the number one thing is do not microwave in and plastic.

Yes, because it's so warm. And those little packets that it sealed in are not good. So we have a lot to do to keep these out of our bodies. Like I said, it's not, it's not really our job to do that.

You know, probably those single layer wrappers that those things are coming in. I don't know. I haven't tested those and that's one of the things I want to do with this project. But probably those are not so bad. I think the ones that have been sealed in are worse. And ideally, I would say, if you can go to like, I go to the farmers, I live in New York. I go to the farmers market down in the square. I buy stuff. You know, I take a bunch of carrots. I take it home. I put it in the fridge. I eat it. That will definitely not introduce anything into the product.

I don't think we know. We haven't studied the effect of adult exposures of somebody my age, but if it's a couple who's grown up, but wants to go to say assisted reproduction, beautiful series of studies that Harvard showed that the amount of chemicals in their urine and blood when they come in for their assisted reproductive procedure, influences how that procedure comes out. So how many eggs can be retrieved, how many are implanted, how many actually progress to a live birth is related to the chemicals in their body at the time they start the procedure. So that's an effect of an adult, to an adult exposure that I know of for sure. It's very possible that these are related to aging and diseases of aging. It's certainly effect the brain. We know that from our studies. But, you know, every one of these questions requires, like I said, $5 million. And you've got a lot of chemicals and you've got a lot of questions. So we've really got to get busy.

Yes, and not to swap out once we put the finger on with other ones that we haven't tested yet.

I think that would be fabulous study.

Many people have a reaction like yours. This is really serious. We have to take this seriously. We have to do something about it. And there are people, I'm sure, that don't believe it.

There have been some people that have been dismissive of the kind that say there's too many people in the world anyway.

I can show those people. Too many people in the world anyway.

and penises, by the way.

This is nature's way of dealing with an overpopulation problem.

But you know what? It's not just humans. Do you know that many, many species on the planet have the same problem? And we can cause these problems in animals with these chemicals in the laboratory. So when you say, it's nature's way of working things out. Well, is that working its way out for the species that are becoming endangered?

Maybe. Maybe. This is not everybody's favorite topic, as I mentioned, and it's, by the way, it's painful for women, especially, let me just, we haven't talked about that, but you know that for centuries, women have been blamed for the fact that a couple can't get pregnant. The guy assumes he's good to go. until he needs to prove himself. And then if he can't, it's got to be on her. Most men don't have a clue about their sperm count. I don't know about you, but I can tell you I think that every man should know his sperm count. Not only because he might want to have a child, but because it might tell him something about his overall health, by the way. But so here's this woman that's being blamed. She's also being, and by the way, infertility we now know. Is about 50-50 in terms of blame? I don't think blame is the right word. Yeah, it's a weird word, right? But you know, you can find a female cause about a third of the time, a male cause about a third of the time. And a third of the time, it could be both, or you don't know. So that's kind of 50-50. And then you go if they manage to conceive, then a high percent of pregnancies have miscarriage. The miscarriage of rate is probably over 50%.

No, I don't. I think it's going up. It's going up. It's the same rate as sperm count is going down, by the way.

I think it's a lot of chemicals that are causing that. Different chemicals. And I studied some of them. I studied chemicals in water at one point. I studied solvents in water and showed they were related to miscarriages. Can man-made chemicals are not great for our reproductive health?

The well, I can't say that off the top of my head, all of them, but the ones that I've studied when I studied that, those were the chlorination byproducts. So when you chlorinate water, the high levels of certain chlorination byproducts and also solvents that are used to clean chips and other, you know, certain high.

My study was on homes, tap water, in homes, but probably there's some risk from, from pool.

Not that I know of.

Yeah. So here, the big picture is that we have these thousands of chemicals that we can't get a handle on. There was a law that was called the toxic substances control act, and it was published in 76. And at that point when they put that in, they said, OK, here, thousands of chemicals that have been out there for a long time, nobody seems to worry about them. They're all OK. They were called grandfathered in. They were not regulated. We have that legacy on top of the lack of testing of new chemicals. So there's very little regulation of all of these chemicals that are circling in our environment and entering our bodies. And my colleagues are few compared to the problem and we need more resources and we need more people worrying about this. And I think the first step is to just have people like you and your listeners and people I talked to on all these shows I've gone on, recognizing, thinking about it, just thinking about it. Wow, this seems to be a problem. Maybe I should worry about bringing this in this into my house. Maybe I should read these labels. Maybe I should, you know, because it hasn't been on our conscious. Yeah. It's another way of thinking.

I actually did that study. Oh, okay. But the answer is not what you'd expect. Oh, really? Yeah. So in this study, we got four groups of people and that turned out to be men and women. I can tell you why. And they were one of the centers was Columbia, Missouri, where I was living. And that's rural. It's agricultural. They grow a lot of corn and so on there. And one of them was Minneapolis, urban. And then there were some, I'm just going to talk about those two. And in those two centers, we saw that men in Missouri had half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis.

Yes, that's the next study I did. So then I took man with good seeming quality and bad seeming quality and measured how much of the pesticides were in their bodies and there was significantly more pesticides in the sample of man who had poor seeming quality as compared to good seeming quality.

or water run off from the fields into the water supply right or air I couldn't I didn't study how they were getting us but they weren't workers they weren't agricultural workers and they weren't living on farms they were farmers just regular folks living in that area including me So that was pretty dramatic.

And the workers who are spraying and getting on, you know, there are even more highly exposed. And those studies of high exposure, here's an example. There was a pesticide that was used to grow pineapples. It was a pneumaticide, it killed nematodes and die-bromo chloropropane. And so there was a picnic and the wives were talking and we haven't gotten pregnant. We haven't either. Really? And gradually, they did a study of these men who had zero sperm. Zero. Zero. And then they banned DBCP. And in about, I think, four to five months, the men sperm returned. So that's the thing about adult exposure. You can reverse it. So that's kind of the good news that you can reverse it.

Yeah, I honestly don't know, but I hope there is a way. And I think there are people that are working on that, you know, regenerative farming and so on. I don't know.

So maybe those enormous cornfields are not good for us.

Right. or a thousand cows in a. Yeah, right small enclosure.

And I would say post-war is where it really took off.

The declines that we see in miscarriage and fertility and sperm counts are not exponential. They're linear. But the growth of the plastic industry is exponential.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it isn't exponential. Maybe it seems to be faster than linear though. Yeah. So would you like to take a quiz? Sure. Okay. I love quizzes. Oh good. So we have something called the giz quiz.

But you you have to go you have your phone. Yes. Okay. So and your listeners can take a two. Okay. Yeah. So so you go on to Dr. Shana Swan.

This is my Instagram.

And you should see, under the highlights, on the left, you should see the Gis quiz. Oh, it tells me I have no internet connection. Hmm. Is no internet? Well, you might have it. I might not be logged in. So maybe you can do it. Do you see a page that looks like this?

Yeah, so you see the driz quiz?

Yeah. Okay. Click that. Click that. Click there. Yeah.

So you're really, messed up.

Oh, they better catch them.

Okay. No, it's okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah.

It's very catchy. So people can take that.

Well, this isn't just just a little piece, but I'll tell you that I have, we're going to make a film. I have several producers.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I actually have another quiz here. But these are what we call revelations. And these are things that you might not know.

Yeah, yeah. These are things you might not know. And you can just turn them over. Some of them are about the man, some are about the woman, some are about both. So they're in the book. OK. But try, just turn them over. Oh, you just turn them over and read the revelation. Well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's the male ones. Oh, yeah.

Oh, antimicul. Yes. That's another name. It's an alternate thing.

Well, these are all true. Okay, they're all true. So this is just fun facts. Oh, okay. So just to go on that one for a minute. So this guy who developed the microscope was the first person to see this and he saw sperm. He was the first person to see his arms.

No, but he imagined that.

That's hilarious. Uh-huh.

Yes, for my me.

Right. Yeah. I've heard that, too. that actually there are physiologically the way the woman is shaped and her vagina is shaped and is to make it easier for the earlier sperm to kill off the later ones that are coming in off of them. So I think there is something to that but I like it.

Oh I don't know about the two kinds but it may be that The there's some battle of their definitely is a battle to get you know to the target right there's a race race But I don't think they're killing each other.

and certainly the ones that are ejaculated are going to be the ones that are already ready and get rid of those and have make room for the new ones.

I'm not going to give any advice.

Right. Yeah, I don't know that I've heard there's been a different kind, but I've heard that maybe the timing of the sperm and the place in the, you know, in the race. So to speak, might affect, you know, might affect the survival of the later ones.

That's crazy.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, testosterone is going down worldwide at the same rate as sperm count.

Did he have a sperm count?

But he is not a liar.

That's volume. Yes. The volume and the count are not the and the concentration are not the same thing.

Or maybe they only do it in, in place, in the crypto place. Right now, right now. Yeah.

And you know what it means is that what people think of us, you know, that you have to get it all on one day. It's not correct.

But see how what the imbalance is there? That's a big imbalance. Yeah. Here's this guy made a hundred million every day and you know.

And they die off for her. Yeah. Pretty quick. Yeah.

So it's not just delaying your first child until your older. That's making fertility decline.

Yeah. A lot of those are very early. Maybe the woman didn't even know she was pregnant, right? She might have just had some spotting. And there's just some error. Yeah. Yeah. And that because, you know, you don't want to put all those resources into a crumbly, similarly abnormal fetus.

Well, like, tell us who's the same rate of sperm decline?

Yeah. So back in 1960, the number for utilities, the number of children that a woman has. So back in 1960, it was five over across the whole world. So on average, people had five children, right? And now they have less than two and a half.

We don't know.

And when with sperm count. So it's when when and here's what's happening in some countries, it's a lot worse. So like in Singapore, into the microphone. So like Singapore and Korea, they're down to one.

No. No. And they can't. The government is like subsidizing them having children paying them to have children building apartments for them to go into if they have children. They can't get the number up.

I don't know why it's more difficult there. I know that, yeah, I don't know. We don't know how a lot of information about the distribution of these things across the globe except to know that they go everywhere. So I don't know what the explanation is for that very low fertility rate in Asia, but I know they are extremely concerned.

None that we know of.

But right now, we don't know.

See, now we can eat as old. You know it all. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And that's why I'm saying everybody should know theirs.

They're less men. I feel themselves to be less of a man, right? Yeah. But on the flip side, a woman feels something like that also. Sure. She feels like she can't produce.

I wouldn't say they're turning gay. I'm saying.

Yes. Yes. And that's correct.

There's almost 8 billion of us even though like we're declining infertility we're increasing in numbers Yeah, but that the criteria if you I I opened the book because that I thought this might come up the place where I have that oh, okay, you want me to read sure. Okay, all right, so um oh, you have the bookmark That's right. So some scientists suggest that it's hard to fathom, but an argument could be made that homo sapiens already fit the standard for an endangered species based on U.S. fish and wildlife services requirements. How would that be? Well, of the five possible criteria for what makes a species endangered, only one needs to be met to be called a danger. Okay? So the first is that we're arguably experiencing destructive modification or curtailment of our habits. This is wording from the fish and wildlife. Well, what this means that we're messing up our air, our food, our water in a way that just modifies our destroys our habitat. And we're definitely clearly doing that. We talked about the next thing is the next one. The second is that we have, quote, an inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms. Bingo, we talking about that. The third one is that we're, there are man-made factors affecting our continued existence.

So we make the criteria for the endangered.

even of the souvenirs.

That's that single, that's that, yes, the guy's having fun. But we, that's that single ridge I told you about that starts out. The default is female. By the way, right? It's a disaster. It doesn't come along. Then it's female development. So that's, that's what that's about.

I call it the 1% effect.

I love that. But jokes aside, I am very disturbed, but I feel, I guess I'm an optimist at heart. You know, I still believe that we can do something about this. We got lead out of gasoline, right? Yes. We do make changes. We've got pretty much asbestos under control. We've got a mercury out of thermometer. I mean, they're just small things, but we got a haloroff of apples. So when people... If you multiply that by hundreds of times, having people gal after specific problems that they're concerned about, I think we can do this. We've done amazing things. We produce this vaccine in a year. People said it wasn't possible. We put the lander on Mars. And I have a lot of faith that technologies that I haven't thought of. You know, chemicals that I haven't been designed yet will come in and take the place of these chemicals.

So we have to as a society recognize that we need more governmental regulation. Yeah. And a lot of people don't want that.

Well, I'm actually glad you're disturbed because you have a lot of followers. And maybe they will listen to this and think about this and help to turn this around. By the way, I ask people to use the hashtag count me in. Count me in.

Count capital M capital I. Okay.

No, they don't think I don't know.

I don't think so. I think we covered pretty much everything. I think it's the next problem, you know, I just say, in closing that we had denial of climate change and then some recognition of climate change and then finally people saying there's things we can do about it and I see the same pattern happening here initially there was a study saying sperm count had declined in 1992 which was dismissed I was actually skeptical of it myself as first and And then when my paper came out in 2017, it went viral. It was the 27th most cited paper in the world that year. It was on the cover of time and you name it. And then people didn't say sperm count has not declined. They said yes, we do have a problem. But they didn't make the next step, which is doing something about it. And I think the same progression will happen here has been happening with climate.

Thanks for having me.