American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Why American Sperm Count Dropped 41% in 50 years | Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D.

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists and a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. An award-winning scientist, her work examines the impact of environmental exposures, including chemicals such as phthalates and Bisphenol A, on men’s and women’s reproductive health and the neurodevelopment of children. In this conversation, we focus on her new bestselling book Count Down, where she profiles the precipitous drop in sperm count, testosterone, and fertility across the developed world. Please enjoy the fascinating and sobering conversation with Dr. Shanna Swan. Shanna Swan's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Count-Down-Threatening-Reproductive-Development-ebook/dp/B084G9MMVH *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - infertility male factor infertility phthalates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shelf will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Before COVID, there was actually another virus going around. You could call this virus the bullshit delusional optimism virus.

Its primary vectors were people like Stephen Pinker and Bill Gates, people that always say things are getting better and better in modern life. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of stats that support their claims. Child mortality, violence, and the cost of TVs are all going in the right direction. But Western society seems kind of sick. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high. Younger generations are assetless and broke, and that's why so many people are considering moving into the Metaverse, because material conditions are not as good as these people might have you believe. And this is translating into the amount of babies that young people are having.

Fertility is now below replacement rate at 1.78, a far cry from peak baby boom in the U.S. in 1960 when it was 3.58. But there's a far more insidious reason for declining fertility in the U.S. And it has to do with the fact that male sperm count and testosterone have been dropping off an absolute cliff since the 70s. Per capita sperm count is 59% of what it was in the 70s, and testosterone has been dropping 1% a year since then as well. Why is this the case, you might ask? For this, we must meet this week's American alchemist Dr. Shana Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai in New York. The dangers of these chemicals was known a long time ago, but people didn't listen. Since 2002, Dr. Swan has been definitively linking the presence of toxic chemicals like phallates and pesticides to declining male sperm count and testosterone.

In fact, when pregnant women are exposed to phallites early in the gestation period, it deprives the fetus of the necessary testosterone for it to fully develop. Fallates are almost impossible to avoid in the modern world. You can throw a rock and probably hit a product with phallates in it. Their plasticizers found in everything from soaps to perfumes to colognes to packaging to pharmaceuticals. The list goes on. It's disrupting many, many aspects of development. Lower IQ, more developmental problems. Jesus.

Yeah. Her new book, Countdown, which I highly recommend, chronicles this silent epidemic in incredible detail. She warns that if we don't turn the fertility trend around, we might suffer from a dramatic decrease in population that we won't be able to bounce back from. You can look to countries like Japan, China, and South Korea who are all dealing with dire, inverted demographic issues right now. Anecdotally, ovarian reserves and egg counts seem to be dropping as well. We're just lacking in hard data on the female side because of the medical community's negligence around this subject.

There was no requirement that women be included in studies. That's crazy. So do I have your attention yet? I thought so. Normally I'd say like and subscribe, but concurrent with the theme of today's episode, I'd say, say you should probably buy some hormone and pesticide-free steak, ideally grass-fed, some natural wine, and go make a baby. Either way, listen to this sobering and somewhat shocking conversation with today's American alchemist, Dr. Shana Swan.

Maybe you should interview me. My initial entry into this field, I think, was when I did look at those early studies. It was published in 1992 from Denmark saying that sperm count had declined precipitous. What I did was to pretend that we could do the same study exactly in four environments. So I picked four cities in the United States that had different environments. And then I used really tight quality control. When I was all done, I found, wow, there was a big difference depending on location. And the most dramatic one was that men in central Missouri had half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis.

Half. Crazy, right? And so people living there are in the middle of agriculture and they're about pesticide exposure all the time, all the time. We showed that pesticide were significantly related to the men's sperm count. And another study in Europe did the same thing, four cities and independent of ours. Around that time, John Brock, who worked at the CDC, he said, Shana, you should study thallates. And he said, at CDC, we can measure this in people's bodies now. And we know that everybody is exposed to lots of thallates.

People in the National Toxicology Program had studied valets in animals, and what they showed that when the mother was exposed during pregnancy, the male offspring are born with their genitals different. They're not completely masculine. An important indicator of lower sperm count is a shorter AGD, or anogenital distance. It's a good proxy for how much androgen or testosterone that little male fetus saw during gestation. So when I heard,

heard about this thallate syndrome in animals, then I said, okay, what about humans? And so we had in hand urine that I had collected from the pregnant women and from the men, had stored it, and then I could look at the babies and see what do their genitals look like, right? So it showed that, yes, the thallied syndrome exists in humans, and kind of we went on from there. I replicated that, other people replicated that, and now it's pretty well. How prevalent is it? Obviously, it's sort of a topic that I'm sure there's all sorts of men specifically walking around

and they're like half developed in that area. Jesse, it's not that dramatic. Okay. On an individual level, they're very subtle. Okay. On a population level. They're dramatic. They're dramatic.

Yeah. Right. 50% in 50 years. Right. But for an individual, these babies, if you look at them, They have a slightly shorter intergenital distance. Okay. Right?

They had slightly smaller penises. Okay. They had more likely to have undescended testicles and so on. In fact, people said to us, who cares? Yeah. You know, these babies don't look funny. They don't look odd. They don't look malformed.

Why does it matter if it's a little shorter? Yeah. Well, it's a proxy for sperm count. That's when we showed that. So in these college students in Rochester, we paid them $75, for which they said they would do anything. I believe it. They let us measure their indigental distance

and gave us a urine sample and a blood sample and completed a questionnaire. And what we found was that the shorter that distance, the lower the sperm count. And then sperm is a proxy for longevity, right? Right. And that's somebody else's study. That's not my side, but that's amazing, isn't it? That's scary.

Right, yeah. I think what's going on is that in that critical period, which we know now is in the first trimester, early first trimester. When phallates come in and lower a person's testosterone, which they have the ability to do, then they're also affecting lots of other things. Poor language development, lower IQ, more developmental problems. Jesus. Yeah.

There's lots of things. It's disrupting many, many aspects of development. And one of those is something that leads to lower sperm count, which is associated with more heart disease, more diabetes, more testicular cancer, you know, and shorter life expectancy. So from the first trimester, a small exposure to these chemicals, it's kind of astounding. It is astounding, but it sort of makes sense that that time in your life would have the greatest multiplicative effect on your future development.

Exactly. These are all devastating consequences. But the most obvious negative repercussion of low male sperm count is its effect on fertility. A 2011 study showed that average sperm count is down to 47 million per milliliter. This is a pretty dire number given that Dr. Swan has cited 40 million per milliliter as a baseline necessary to be a fertile male. So we're possibly verging on a world where the average U.S. male is infertile. Below 40, you start having trouble conceiving.

So you can track. A beautiful study did this. couples trying to get pregnant, they got their sperm counts, and then they saw how long did it take. And when the count went below 40, it took longer and longer, and it rapidly went, you know, it was the number of conceptions per cycle. The probability of conceiving in a cycle dropped to zero very quickly from 40. And then you combine that with the fact that men and women are generally having kids later. And so sperm generally both mutates and declines in count just naturally.

That's right, and so do eggs. And so do eggs. Of course, yeah. That's a good segue. So we talked about decline in sperm count. What about the decline in ovarian reserves, as you call them in the book? Yeah. So that's much, much harder to study.

But everything from sonograms that are done, it has been shown that the premature ovarian failure, which is premature decline of the number of eggs you have, has been increasing. But we can't put it in a meta-analysis. the way we could with sperm because the data are much, much more limited. By the way, I don't know if you know this, but until about five years ago, there was no requirement that women be included in studies. Generally in studies? Generally.

And the NIH had an edict put out saying that's crazy, though. That this point on women must be included in studies. Well, yeah, they're biologically different, so you can't know anything about them. You know, I come away from reading this, and it's kind of hard to make sense of the world right now. I feel like half of my friends have read Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker, and they talk about how, you know, this is the apex of human civilization. It's better than, you know, we've ever had it. And they set all these stats sort of in this direction. And then there are other people who think that things have stagnated, declined, and that, you know, there are some real negative repercussions of modernity.

How do you make sense of where we're at, given this work? By the way, I love Stephen Pinker's work on violence declining, and this may be a reflection of the decrease in testosterone. Yeah, that is downstream of a lack of vigor, which is not good. Right. But where I live and work is in the toxicity crisis. What we're seeing is, you know, these dramatic declines in fertility, reproductive function, sexual function, we haven't talked about that, but there, you know, there's an increase in

erectile dysfunction. Erectile dysfunction. The use of testosterone by young men is going up dramatically. Right. Which lower sperm count even more. Which lower sperm count, which is so paradoxical, right? When you see a decrease in reproductive function, it's pretty hidden. People don't talk about that.

People don't want to talk about the fact that they're not able to conceive a child naturally. It's also difficult to talk about because for men, when they do find out that their sperm count is low, it's pretty threatening to their masculinity, right? And if they find out their testosterone is low too, that's a double whammy. So this is a hidden, hidden epidemic, if you will. So the exposures are silent. We don't know what's in our bodies unless we get our urine blood tested, right? So that's silent. It's not like smoking, you know you're smoking, but you don't know what's coming in from these chemicals.

So it feels like the options, if you're growing up in modern society, say you're growing up in an urban environment, we're in New York City right now. This is actually a great example of this. All I had in the hotel was Evian, and so that we're drinking Evian plastic bottles. Right. Now, this plastic may not be too bad. Okay. Okay, so not all plastics are equal.

And I don't know if you pick this up from the book, but I have a little ditty in there, which is four or five, one, and two, all the rest are bad for you. So if this is a four or five, one or two, how do we check? We turn it over. Okay. We look at the bottom.

We see a triangle, and I see a one in my triangle. I see a one in mine as well. Yeah. Well, it feels like phallates are, you know, it's on clothing, modern clothing. It's in a lot of soaps and lot of lot of potions, and that sort of thing for absorption, for optimal absorption. And so I guess the question is, how do you do these small things, like look at the bottom of these water bottles,

but it seems pretty hard to avoid unless you, you know, again, go full, walled in the row on society or something and try to live some self-sufficient totally off-the-grid life. I think if we worry about our food first, you would go to the market. You would buy organic food. Is there a number one bad pesticide, like DDT or glyphosate? Well, DDT is banned. Glyphosate I'm pretty concerned about.

Yeah, it seems pretty bad. Yeah. It's like everyday fruit that you can't have. Right, right, right. So if you can buy organic, and if you can afford to buy organic, that's a good thing. If you can buy unprocessed food, that's a good thing. When you process food through tubes, the phallates are in the tubes, they live. leave the tubes, they enter the food, they go into your body. Very few people milk their cows by hand.

If you milk with a milking machine that has tubes that contain thallades, the thallates are in the milk. Yeah. It's on and on and on and on, right? Lininges of tin cans, soda cans, we'll have this phenol A and so on. And you absolutely do not microwave in plastic. And then there's smell. So anything that has a fragrance is going to have thallates and phenols. And so you try to buy laundry detergent fragrance-free, cleaning product fragrance-free, on, on-on, on. So are most colognes or perfumes? Yes. Interesting.

Can we get it banned? Can we get it banned? Yeah. No, not in our lifetimes, I think. Certainly not in mine. What we can do is get it better regulated. The EU is doing better than we are. In the EU, 1,100 chemicals are banned from personal care products.

And in the U.S. 11. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com.

Only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N.? must be 21 to enter. That's crazy. They're moving in the right direction. They care about it and they're working on it. And that's not true really in this country. What do you say to the people that say, you know, so what?

The American population was growing too fast anyways and we're already at, you know, 300 and some odd million people and resources aren't going to be able to provide for all of those people. And so this is some natural kind of Malthusian stressor just causing population is sort of flattened out and it'll, you know, uptick again in the future when we're ready or something like that. Right, right. Well, first of all, the U.S. population is below replacement. But countries like, by the way, South Korea, I think, is at 1.0 or a little under. No, South Korea is at 0.9. Japan's at 1.6. Right. Are you looking? You probably have been

looking at that database. Here's the catch. Those countries in Asia that have, these very low fertility rates have been making efforts to bring up the population, bring up the number of births with economic incentives. And it's not working. Yeah. It's not working. And there's a wonderful book called Empty Planet. And his prediction and that of Juergen Ranners and other demographers say it's going

to increase the world population to perhaps till about 2040, and it's going to decrease and it will never come back. Wow. And the reason is that once women experience having few children rather than five or six children, and once they are able to be educated and enter the workforce, they will not go back to staying home with five or six children. It just isn't happening. Right. You know, it's not going to happen.

Yeah. So are you apocalyptic or what is that? Are you hopeful? You know, I'm a hopeful person, and so maybe I'm putting too positive spin on it. But my hope is that as we get people to listen to this, they will modify their behaviors and they will demand that we get safer products. And I think it's going to be, you know, we're going to be dependent on assisted reproduction for a long time.

Yeah. You might want to think about freezing your eggs in sperm. Using your eggs and sperm, I wanted to talk about that. They're increasing number of startups that allow you to do both. So both are probably a good idea, like what before the age of 27, 28, 29? Before 35 for women if possible. Okay. Yeah.

And for men, the decline is slower. So, you know, you have longer. But some people are giving this to their children and grandchildren as presence paying for this reason because they want to have grandchildren. children. Yeah. I have a friend who thinks that sperm motility is correlated with fitness of the sperm. So he's a geneticist and he wants to build a sperm motility filter. So essentially it'll be, it's almost like preconception embryo selection where it's not embryo selection, but it's a sort of you know, a way to get the most, the survival of the fittest of the sperm or whatever,

get the best sperm. It's certainly possible. But the problem is unless you're doing an ixie, You know, Ixie is when you take a single sperm and you inject it into an egg. Okay. Okay. If you're doing that, you know what sperm is going to conceive that pregnancy, but in general you don't know. Right. You can talk about a man's, you know, motility function in general, but you can't say what

the motility is of the sperm that does the job. Well, speaking of doing an Ixie, in the future you might be able to do gametogenesis, right? Where you take like a skin cell and you kind of rinse it in chemical. chemicals make sort of a more primordial, basically a gamete, synthetic gammy. And you can even do more sort of genetic variation than you would in embryo selection. I just want to point out that there's some environmental justice issues here, so it's very expensive to do these procedures, artificial, you know, insemination of various kinds. Yeah.

And most people can't do it. And we can't even create synthetic gametes, I think, at mass scale at this point. It was just being studied, but this was a woman named Evelyn Telford, I think it's Scotland who's studying, and the Japanese study. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, there's wonderful new technology that's coming in to help us when we need it, because as sperm count is getting lower and lower, we're already at the point where we have to do this next impossible thing quickly. Otherwise, we're going to be drifting towards a dystopian idiocracy. I didn't even know that it affected intelligence and just general kind of performance. That's kind of scary. Yeah.

Well, shit. The dangers of these chemicals was known a long time ago, but people didn't listen. Yeah. So I think we need to listen better to our scientists. Yes. And the scientists have to learn how to talk in a way that people can hear them. Yes. And that's what I'm going to try to do next.

So you have a new study. That's incredibly consequential. Right. And it would get lost in some random kind of peer-reviewed journal. Right. Right. I'm trying to get the science out of the eye. every tower and into things like your podcast and Joe Rogan's podcast and after school, YouTube.

I appreciate you putting me in the same sentence as Joe Rogan's podcast. Thanks, Dr. Swan. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So men, I know what you're thinking. You want to book the next available lab appointment to check your sperm count. Whatever you do, remember this. Petrochemicals, microplastics, phallates, and pesticides are everywhere you look.

Outside of moving to a log cabin in the woods or Mark Zuckerberg's sweet pad in the Metaverse, smart consumer decisions might be all you have. But demanding legislation and spreading the word on this silent epidemic might be a better long-term solution. So think twice before you buy, except when buying Dr. Shauna Swan's book, Countdown. That should be a very easy one-click buy. Until next time, my name is Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.