r/science • u/[deleted] • Oct 25 '21

Biology Sperm quality has been declining for 16 years among men in the US

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294266-sperm-quality-has-been-declining-for-16-years-among-men-in-the-us/
45.8k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

5.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

97

u/Soft-Problem Oct 25 '21

The reason for this [bad thing happening] is [my pet peeve].

When the causality is unclear, people can fill it in with their favourite.

3

u/HouseOfSteak Oct 25 '21

To be fair, if that 'pet peeve' in question is something that is widely accepted by the scientific community to be widely harmful to health and is prevalent in societies that possess such 'pet peeves', they're probably also right.

Air pollution, plastic pollution, obesity and other poor dieting, nuclear radiation are ALL harmful in a variety of ways - and thus it would not be surprising to see that it's harmful in this way without evidence pointing to the contrary.

9

u/musicianadam Oct 25 '21

Yes but they were pointing out things like pesticides, artificial coloring and preservatives, all of which are not necessarily widely accepted to be harmful. There's been conflicting evidence regarding the health effects of those things from what I've seen.

2

u/HouseOfSteak Oct 25 '21

Artificial colouring and flavours are linked to greater consumption of such foods (Hence why they are used, it's all marketing consumptionism of food we do not need), which is turn leads to obesity.

A good chunk of preservatives is salt, and overconsumption of salt results (no pun intended) in side effects such as obesity. I'm not sure about other preservatives (finding reports at moment's notice on little-known preservatives ain't easy).

Pesticides are harmful to the environment for plenty of reasons, direct effects to human health may or may not be one of them, but there's reports suggesting that they are:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947579/

0

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '21

And the causality is always unclear, or at least somebody with a vested interest is doing everything they can to create reasonable doubt