Danny Jones Podcast - #191 - The #1 Reason Humans Are Suddenly being Born Genderless | Dr. Shanna Swan

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Shanna 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. EPISODE LINKS https://amzn.to/3XnfeS6 https://www.shannaswan.com https://twitter.com/DrShannaSwan FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 0:00 - Discovering the global sperm count decline 15:25 - How pesticide exposure is affecting sperm count 24:22 - Why sperm banks have extremely high standards 26:24 - Countries with the best sperm 37:54 - Lifestyle habits that destroy sperm count 42:06 - Endocrine disrupting chemicals, phthalates & plastics 46:44 - Size matters when it comes to your Ano-genital distance (AGD) 1:01:07 - How phthalates are disrupting hormonal development in babies 1:03:47 - Correlation between phthalates & gender dysphoria? 1:14:31 - Testosterone 1:20:47 - Homosexual frogs study & glyphosate 1:28:37 - How people can avoid phthalate exposure 1:37:51 - Population collapse is on the horizon if we don’t start reproducing 1:47:26 - Animal species facing sperm count & population decline Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you so much for coming down here and doing the show and sharing some of your insight and some of your work with us. It's very fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Your book has a very dystopian vibe to it. I'm not going to lie. The Countdown. How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive, wow, easy for you to say. Reproductive development and imperiling the future of the human race.

How did you first discover that this was a problem and that, some of these chemicals and plastics were actually threatening the future of our species. Before I go into that, I just want to thank you, Danny, for inviting me and for being a wonderful host. And I'm so happy to be here and talking to you and people who are listening about this important problem. So how did I get into this? I have to say that, you know, way back in the middle 90s, I knew nothing about endocrine disruption or thallates or any of this. I was completely ignorant. And I got asked to sit on a committee, a federal committee called the National Academy of Sciences,

kind of a big deal. And they invited me because of my neutrality, I think. So usually in those committees, there's people who take one position and the opposite position, and the people in the middle who are neutral. And I was a neutral, although they didn't say that explicitly. That was clear when I got there. And so I was completely open. I had never heard of endocrine disruptors or their effects or their purported effects.

And so the goal of this committee was to determine whether these chemicals, which can impact the body's hormones known as endocrine disrupt, chemicals, whether those are actually something that we need to pay attention to, right? So I love challenges. I love puzzles. And I thought, wow, this will be fun. And I'll meet new people. And yeah, I'll do this. And one of the first things we did was to look at this paper that had come out a few years earlier at Denmark. And this paper was alarming because it said that sperm count had dropped 50% in the prior 50 years. Okay? It came out in 92.

All right. And so the committee asked me as a statistician, which is what my doctor is in, to look at this and tell the committee whether this is something they could, you know, consider for their, work on the you know in this committee and although it wasn't related directly to at that point to hormonally active agents in the environment which is what the committee was called right so we had this harm that appeared to be going on with unknown costs at that point so i looked at the paper and i have to say i was not impressed why weren't you impressed Well, first of all, it was very thin in terms of number of words and pictures and data. And the data that were there, if I had a graph, I could show it to, but you've seen it in, I think, and maybe.

And a lot of the data were in recent years. They were kind of spotty over the time period. and more importantly, perhaps there were not, you know, any of the factors that we worry about, which might cause an erroneous decline. None of those were considered. So I said I wasn't sure. And so the committee said, well, can you investigate this and let us know what you think? Okay. So I had the good fortune to be on sabbatical and be able to do that and I spent six months answering that question. So let me just give you an example. So you might yourself think about things that could make, but you read about it. So that just

you know, somebody approaching this might think, well, okay, that went down because, you know, in more recent years, the men were older. That could make it down somewhat. Actually, sperm count doesn't decline dramatically with age. So that might be a small factor. Maybe the men are more stressed. That's probably happening. And stress actually does lower sperm count. Okay.

And the men could have been more obese. And obesity lowers sperm count. And maybe most importantly, you might ask, well, maybe the way we count sperm has changed so that in recent years the counting method counts lower you know methods change and maybe they're not exactly the same over the 50 years right so and finally there was a question of who are these men and maybe if you think about you can't ask a man or a street to give a sperm sample right so a man has to volunteer and he has to usually have a motivation to do that and maybe he's doing that because he's going to get a vasectomy. Then he has very good sperm count, right,

because he's had a lot of children. Or maybe he's doing that because he's having trouble conceiving. And then he has low sperm count. So the selection of the population is really important. Right. Right. So there were 61 studies. And so I took out of those 61 studies. I got them, retrieved them, looked through them, and took out of them any information I had on these and other relevant factors. I also took out what country they were conducted in and so on and so forth. So all the details I could about the study.

And then I and my colleagues put them in a, you know, spreadsheet and ran a more complicated analysis than had been done before. So we called it multivariable because we had all these variables in there, right? We're not just looking at the decline. And, Danny, it was staggering. to see that after all that work of six months,

accounting for all these factors, the slope changed from minus 0.93 to minus 0.95. It didn't change at all. Right. That's a million sperm per milliliter per year. And wow, I just like, I went back to the committee, and I said, I can't make this go away. It looks like it's real.

And then I did another analysis, which we don't have to go into detail unless you want to, where I re-abstracted the studies from the literature thinking maybe the original ones were biased, you know? And then I ended up with 101 instead of 61. So that was good. More studies. Longer time period. And then the slope was minus 0.94. So you see nothing made.

any difference. Right. Right. It's so, I mean, it's so unusual in science to see that, that consistency, you know. So I thought, okay, this is something I really have to look at. And that began sort of the mystery story, you know, that I tell in countdown, and I tell to people, and I can tell it to you today, of how I began unraveling that and trying to find out what was going on. So what year was it when you started your study, your study where you took how many patient or how many people was it, how many young men that you studied in 2017? Ah, so 2017 was actually not a study. It was a meta study. So we didn't actually study anybody. 2017 is this sperm decline paper. Right. Right. So do you mean that one? I think so. I think you mentioned that you in this. there was a study that involved something like 250 children or young men where you conducted it and it's still ongoing.

Ah, that's much later. Okay. Yeah. So that's, that was, the one that's ongoing now is tides. And that's started in 2011. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that's a different, kind of a different story.

But now we're talking about sperm count. So in terms of sperm count, what I asked after I saw this, not making, you know, couldn't make it go away. So I thought, well, what could be causing it? It's a natural question. You see something. You don't know what causes it. So I decided that an interesting thing would be to think about what the environment is doing. Because we couldn't explain it by those other lifestyle factors, right?

Stress, age, obesity. but maybe something in the environment is making this happen. And maybe that's changed over time. When you say you couldn't explain it by the lifestyle factors, what made you, I mean, it seems like you probably could explain it by the lifestyle factors, right? No, because when we included them, it didn't change the slope at all. Oh, right. See?

So those factors did not make this go away. I see. Adjusting for those. It's called controlling for confounders. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, when you can control for something like a confounder, you'll put that in the model and then the slope will change or the result will change. I understand. But when we put those in, nothing changed, so they weren't accounting for anything, actually, in those 61 studies.

So we thought, okay, maybe it's environment. So how do you address environment? So there's really not obvious what to do. but what we did was what I did, I selected four cities in the United States with different environments. And I recruited the men in exactly the same way. So there wasn't that problem with selection bias. And I'll tell you in a minute how we did that. And then we measured the sperm exactly the same way in each of the four centers. Okay? And to make sure we were doing that, all of the technicians from the four centers came to UC Davis and were trained together.

And they used the same counting devices, the same counting chambers in all places. And then every month they had a quality control send out. So what they did was they took one semen sample, split it in four, tested it in Davis, sent it to the four centers. the four centers sent back their findings. How many sperm? How much did they move? What were their shapes? The way you evaluate sperm.

So in that way, we knew that throughout the study, everybody was doing things the same way. Because we were trying to do replicates of the same study in four places, right? Right. Which cities did you choose? Okay. So at that time I was living in Columbia, Missouri, which is in the semi-rural center of Missouri,

very much exactly in the center of Missouri. And they grow a lot of crops there. So that was the agricultural center. And then we included Minneapolis, which is obviously urban. We included New York, and we included Los Angeles. So maybe not the best pick, but that's what we picked. And we wanted them to be distant, and we wanted them to, and we wanted to be able to work with the people that we had to find collaborators. Right? So, by the way, in Europe, a similar study went on independently with four cities.

And they had a similar finding to what I'm going to tell you. So what we did, the first thing I asked was who should we include? Because that's always a question, who's your population? In fact, whenever you see a result of a study, you should ask, what's the population and how do they get in this study because there's so many ways that you know biases can creep in there right so we wanted to get an unbiased population but we also wanted to know what's called what is the parent population so we're going to get a sample and where is it coming from you can't get semen from a man on the street you can't get a random semen sample right you just

can't do it okay so decided that the group that absolutely always goes for medical care is pregnant women. Almost always, right? So I decided to recruit pregnant women in order to recruit their husbands. Okay. Kind of devious maybe, but yeah, like that. Yeah, and and so we did a couple study. The goal, first goal was on the, you know, about the semen quality, but there, turned out to be extremely valuable that we had done that. So in these four places, we identified prenatal clinics that would work with us, and we became partners, and that was called the study for future families. Okay? So we enrolled the woman. At that point, we took her when

we could get her, so we didn't control the time of pregnancy, which was a later effort. And we asked her, would you be in the study and would you ask your partner, husband, to be in the study? And some did not want to ask their partner to give a semen sample. Interesting. But most did. And most did agree. We weren't asking them for a lot. We were asking them, the women, for a urine sample and a questionnaire and a blood sample. But they give that anyway when they're pregnant. So it wasn't really an imposition. And then from the husbands, we wanted in addition a semen sample. Right. So we got over 900 men and women to do this. Yeah. Approximately equally distributed amongst our centers. And then we looked at their

Seamen quality. And what we found was absolutely alarming and unexpected. And what we found was that the men living in central Missouri in Columbia had half, half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis. Wow. That's what I said. Wow. And is that, that's obviously due to. Wait, wait. Okay. Sorry. We don't know who could. Don't jump there. But your question, I know where you're going, you're going to say agriculture and pesticides. So that's the obvious difference between those places. But you can't conclude that that's the reason unless you actually show it. Right, right.

And unfortunately, we didn't have enough money to do that on the whole population. So how would you do that? How would you find out if pesticides were important? If they were important to the study? Yeah, if pesticides could account for the difference. I shouldn't. You're not my student. I shouldn't. I mean, I guess just test them against people who are nowhere near that stuff, right? How would you know that?

Geographically? Well, they're fixed. We've got them. They've got their addresses. They're fixed. We're not getting new people. We're just going to stay with these people. And we want to know in these two groups of men, let's say 250 in Missouri, 250 in Minnesota, that have very different semen quality. could exposure to pesticides be the question, you know, they could explain this. So it turns out, very luckily for us, that you can measure pesticide exposure in the urine. And remember I told you that we got the men's urine? Yes. So, and we got that at the same time they gave a semen sample.

Okay. All right? Right. So we could ask, okay, are the levels of pesticides in the men's urine at that time when they gave the semen sample related to their sperm quality at that time. And the answer was yes. And we found five pesticides that were very different between men who had very good semen quality and very poor semen quality in Missouri, in our center of Missouri. Five different pesticides. Yeah. Wow. Well, several were triazine alternatives like atrazine. You have you heard of? I don't have you heard of it.

Yes. Yeah. So those were big players. Enjoy that liquid death. No plastic. Death to plastic. That's your plastic. Were any of the people in the study, could you tell what their occupation was and what they did for a living? Absolutely. Were any of them workers on farms dealing like? Not abundantly. They didn't explain it. There were some. But pesticides exposure is occupational, but it's also through the air and water. And through the food, which of course is distributed, of course, the country or even the world. So everybody gets exposed to pesticides.

And yes, the sprayers and the applicators of pesticides are more exposed, but we had very few of them. We also asked them how many miles they live from a farm, you know, to look at that. So just let me say the European study also found significant differences between their four cities, particularly. between Finland and Denmark where Finland was high and Denmark was low. But they didn't do this kind of investigation into specific chemicals that we had done. Okay, so we published that. And that was the first study that really showed that pesticides can directly affect sperm count. maybe not the first, but it was an important study.

But that's only, you know, part of the story, right? And we asked later, let's see, how much later, I guess around 2014, we asked, okay, what's happening now with this, because we'd seen it going down in the Carlson study and then in the studies that I conducted and it didn't go away and it was still the same rate of decline but then this was a long gap you know to and so we thought okay what's going on now and we were at a meeting some colleagues and I and we were saying should we do this should we try to figure this out and yes we'd say we like

to do that that would be good and it's funny how these things get born you know just And I think I presented there and then they wanted to like, what's next? You know, what's happening now? So we put together a wonderful group of researchers to do an update of that paper and of the 2000 paper. And by then a couple of things that happened. One of them was that the methods for evaluating the literature, which Carlson had done back in 92, with kind of not very well-developed methods because they weren't there, those had been improved and the method, which is called meta-analysis.

Have you heard that term? Yes. Yeah, good. So meta-analysis then had become a term of art. Everyone was wanting to do it. And it really seemed to be the most objective and rigorous way to do an analysis of this kind. It's often used, for example, to compare to treatments, you know, treatment A, treatment B, how do they compare? There's been 20 studies of this.

How do you put them together? Okay. Got it. But this was different. This wasn't comparing treatments. This was saying, here are these data all over there. What do they report as a body of literature in terms of sperm decline? So you can see it's quite different, very challenging to figure out what's the context of this.

and what we decided was search the literature for every study that had certain keywords in it. Okay. Keywords like sperm count, sperm concentration, and they didn't have to say trend or they didn't have to say decline or anything like that. They just had to report a sperm count. Okay. And the other thing they had to do was not include men that were biased in different ways. And we had other exclusion criteria. They had to be in English because we didn't have a.

enough people speaking different languages. Yeah. They had to have all the data, not just an abstract, and so on and so forth. And so we ended up with a large number of studies, which we, I mean, thousands of studies. In fact, we went to a meta-analysis expert. We told him what we wanted to do, 7,500 studies. And he said, no, no, you can't do that. And a guy, Levine, the first author of what finally came out, who was,

the head of epidemiology for the armed forces of Israel. Oh, really? He knew how to get things done, and he said, oh, no, we'll just get more people. So we enrolled a group of seven people who would work with us on this, for no money, by the way.

And we spent over a year going through these 7,500 articles. So you can imagine this is fairly tedious. You want to do it consistently. You want to do replicates. So, you know, it's one person looking over another one's shoulder. You want to make sure, you know, you're not missing anything. And then you want to capture the data.

And what we captured the data on was with 185 studies. So it came down to 185 studies that were eligible. Okay. They had the numbers that were unbiased, as far as we could tell. And we could use the data. And the head of the armed forces in Israel helped you. No, epidemiology. Oh, I'm sorry.

Not epidemiology. Okay. Epidemiology for the armed forces. Okay, the head of epidemiology for the armed forces. Yeah. Huh. That's an interesting combination. Well, he was an epidemiologist, and he was in the armed forces.

Right. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, that's not really important, except to say that a guy knew how to get things done. That was what that said to me. That's safe to say. Yeah. So, yeah, one of the things in your book that really caught me by surprise was when you, you mentioned that some of the sperm banks, specifically in California, the processes and some of the criteria that in which they evaluate people to be eligible to donate sperm are insane.

Like, it's, you, I think it's easier to get accepted to Harvard than it is to donate sperm at one of these banks in California. Yeah. You have to like be a certain age, to be educated to a certain level. what were some of the other criteria? There were some crazy things. Health criteria. And I don't actually remember. We went to that sperm bank, a sperm bank in California and talked to them, and that's where we got that information.

But sperm banks are not going to be in this study. You see, because to give to a sperm bank, you have to have a certain quality of sperm. And that's due to what the women request mostly, right? No, a sperm bank will not. accept sperm that's below standard W-H-O standards for semen equality. It's not about what the, the women might want something having to do with the man's interest or education or height or whatever. They had to be above like, what, 5-8 or something?

Something like that, yeah. Wow. But what we cared about was their sperm. And because they're selected to be in a sperm bank, they're actually sperm donors. they're going to be way above average. Right. And so we didn't include them in this study that we're talking about, the meta analysis. Right.

Yeah. So that study started at that meeting in 2014, and it was finally published in 2017, right? And, you know, just blew me away that it had the same results, basically, as Carlson. still 50% in 50 years still 1% per year but that we did two things that were very different from what Carlson had done one is we'd separated countries by geography so and why what countries yeah so what I had seen in my 2000 publication was that there were very few studies from what we ended up calling other and then a lot most from Western. I'm putting air quotes because it's, you know, you have to define what that is.

So Western was Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Okay. And those are the places where there were a lot of data. And these are countries that are westernized, whatever that means, which can be quite political, by the way. The other countries, South America, Asia, Africa, had very few data. And because, here's the kicker, because the non-Western studies were late in the time period, if you think of a line,

there were all up to the right of the line. That's where they came in. There weren't any early studies, very few from non-Western countries. Okay. That means that there's a bias that the early years had mostly contributions

from Western studies, whereas the late years had a number of, you know, fair amount of contributions from other countries. And so that's called confounder. You can't separate the effect of geography from time because they're mixed up. Right.

Right. And so in order to do that, we did what's called stratified. So we divided the studies into Western and Other. And then we could look at the slope specifically in Western and specifically in Other, right? I'm going to make you into an epidemiologist.

I love it. Okay. So then the other way we stratified was what kind of men were these? What kind of men? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. How do you categorize them?

And the way we categorized them was in two groups, those men who were known to be fertile. Okay? That means they had had a child or they were married to a pregnant woman. And the other ones were, let's call them unselected. Okay. They had not been. So the fertile men were selected in some way.

They had proven their fertility. Okay. There's a question about whether they should have been in there at all because generally we tried not to select on anything that was related to sperm count. But we kept them in there because there were some very good and, you know, my study, the Europeans four city study, you know. And it seemed like we wanted to see what's going on with those men, too. So we kept them separate, fertile men.

And the other men, men who did not know their sperm count, did not know their fertility, were the most representative. So you see, they're ignorant. So they can't select in or select out. Okay. That makes sense. On that basis. Right. So four groups, four sources.

four slopes. Wow. And the strongest slope was this unselected Western men. And that's where about half of the men were. And that's the line that's very much the same as Carlson. Okay.

And how, what is the earliest that they started measuring the sperm count in Western countries? In our study? Yes. 73. 73.

Yeah. Okay. And it's gone, or is it sperm count specifically that has gone I think you say by 1% per year and is now recently up to 2.5%. We'll get to that. Yeah, 1% per year mean in that study, sperm cap.

At what point, sorry if I'm jumping ahead, I don't know if I am or not, but you can correct me if I am. At what point in this study did you guys decide to start measuring the taints of humans? Okay. That was not in this study. Not in the study. Not. Okay. No, that's sort of a separate story.

Let's get to that afterwards. Okay, so let's finish the sperm count. So, although it's not a finished story, but so we published that in 2017, and it was a huge paper. I have to say, it was just a huge paper. It was the front cover of story of Newsweek. Oh, wow. It was all over the world. It was global.

It was viral. And it led to countdown. So after this was published, an agent came to me and said, would you like to write a book about this? And I said, I don't think so. I'd never written a book and I write papers for scientific audiences, right? Right. But then I began to think, I knew a lot more than, you know, after this came out than I did when we started these studies. And I thought, well, there's a message here that people should be hearing, and they're not going to learn about this at scientific meetings.

So I think I have to talk to somebody else like you and your audience to let them know what's going on. And so I decided to write the book. And I got a wonderful co-author, and that went on. So now let me go back to the sperm decline because I haven't finished that yet. So we did publish that sperm count had declined 1% per year in unselected men in Western countries and also in fertile men in Western countries. In the other countries, which is Asia, Africa, other continents, Asia, Africa. What am I missing? Asia, Africa.

South America. Thank you. We just didn't have enough studies to say anything. You didn't have enough studies, but I'm curious, what did you see as far as sperm counts in those kinds? I'm specifically South America I'm curious about. I can't tell you that there weren't enough studies to say. You see what you see, if it's few studies with a lot of variability, you might see a line going up or going down, but what we say is not significant because the possible alternative lines are very, very wide, wide what we call confidence intervals. And you can't draw any conclusions.

Okay. So you have to be careful when you read a paper. If it says, you know, this, you know, happened, you know, this went up or this went down. Look a little deeper and say, how sure are they of this? Right? And when you ask that about the non-Western countries, say, how sure are you about this? We had to say, not sure enough to make any conclusions. Wow.

So a few years later, we decided. This gets boring, I'm sorry, that we should do it again. Okay. And the reason we should do it again is we knew from tracking the literature that more studies had come out in these non-Western countries. And maybe now there was enough. And from looking at the literature, it looked like things had gotten worse. So we started all over again and got in a seven-year period from the time our last, you know, selection. stopped. We got all, we repeated the whole thing. We got all the literature and we abstracted the

data and we put it in the database. And roughly what year was this? That you restarted, that you did it again? We restarted it in 18. 2018. Yeah. And we published it in 2022. So last year. Yeah. So maybe it was 17 that we started because we went seven years. Maybe it was 2015. Anyway, we covered seven years. Yeah. I can't remember when we started it. And two things. One is, yes, there were enough studies in non-Western countries now to say that an unselected man, there was a significant decline.

Okay? Okay. So that answered that. And we have to go on. Of course, we have to redo this again and again every X years. Yes. And but maybe more alarming, and this is what you alluded to, and I said, wait, that the 1% decline that we had seen in the past was now, if you look at studies in recent years, that was from 2000 to, I think it was 2015. I don't remember. I think that's right. The rate was 2.6% per year. Right? So, wow.

not only have people not listen to this, they haven't done anything to make it. So it's more than doubled. It's more than doubled. So that's the path from when I started looking at this about 95 to this publication in 2022, right, where I am absolutely convinced that there is a worldwide decline in sperm count. So let's take a breath and say what else is going on. Right. And why is this going on?

But you are the one asking the question, so I'm just going to stop here. So, okay, so those first studies you basically found out that the sperm count was going down. And you need to start looking for sort of things that you could correlate with the environment or with, that was basically beyond the lifestyle, right? So what do you look at beyond lifestyle that could have a major impact on this? And what was like sort of the lowest hanging fruit that you noticed was having the most negative impact on sperm count and testosterone? Testosterone is later. We didn't look at that until much later. But we should talk about that.

So there really isn't any low hanging fruit. It's all hard. because if I asked you well first let me say if you throw away lifestyle because we've we know about that and that's you know exercise and diet and smoking smoking and

alcohol right everything everything everything that's fun everything that's fun and by the way the things that your doctor says you should worry about in terms of your heart health or your overall health also affects your sperm okay so that's I was shocked to see this like screens affect sperm that's that's kind of bizarre

What? Staring at your phone or watching too much TV. Yeah, that was interesting. Yeah. That's a Danish study that I was involved in. Yeah, that was pretty interesting. Being a couch potato, actually. Right.

It's tied to that. So you're watching your screen. You're not outside exercising. You're not riding your bike. Okay. Right? So it's, these are never one factor at a time. It doesn't have so much to do with like the lights going into your retinas.

It's more to do with like when people are connected to screens. They're sitting down. They're inactive. That's right. Now there is, I have to say, a lot of interest in the question of whether electromagnetic radiation from devices is affecting sperm count. And- Yes, like laptop use. When people put the laptops, they set it right on their crotch.

Right. Or the phone in their pockets. Yes. I'm not endorsing that or discouraging it. I'm just saying this is now an active area of investigation. It needs to be looked at. Yes. Because the exposure is huge.

So if it has an effect, it's major, right? Right. So let's go back before electromagnetic radiation, and you asked what other factors, what was the low-hanging fruit? Well, the problem is that if you put aside, by the way, genetics is not playing a role here. It's too fast. Two generations, 50 years, two generations. Right. We can't get evolutionary change in two-jury.

So then it's environment. So what's environment? lifestyle and others. But what's other? That's not your lifestyle. And that's really what you're asking. So there's chemicals of various kinds, which we'll come back to. And then there's things that are non-chemical, but not lifestyle. And they're kind of broad, actually. Could be heat, could be sound, could be radio frequency, emissions, and so on and so forth. Those are not chemicals per se but they're also not lifestyle right right okay so i'm going to put all that aside because it's not what i studied and go over to the chemicals so why chemicals well along with the increasing

you know rate of infertility which we will talk about i'm sure and the decrease in sperm count at the same similar rates there's been an increase in the chemical burden that people have okay But it's huge. It's, you know, 80,000 chemicals. Yeah. So how do you know where to look? And so since I was starting with reproduction, I wanted to think about chemicals that could affect reproduction. And a major player there are the chemicals that can interfere with the body's hormones.

Okay. Okay, because you know, you know, that testosterone matters for reproduction, that estrogen matters. These are steroid hormones. Okay. And so if something could mess with that, because that's so important for reproduction, it could affect, in principle, could affect these things. Right. So I began to look, and others began to look at this class of chemicals, which were called endocrine-disrupting chemicals or EDCs. By the way, that committee, remember that committee that I started?

it out with. Yep. That committee was looking at those chemicals all the way back in the mid-90s. Oh, wow. So this wasn't a new story, but it was a new way to look at them. And so I began to focus on the chemicals that could affect reproduction. And then a very lucky thing happened. I went to Japan, which had a five-year big research effort on endocrine-disrupting

chemicals and I was sitting next to a chemist who was a friend name is John Brock and he said Shauna you should look at phthalates and I'm like what why should they look at what are they phthalates what is it a funny word it is a funny word and I never heard of them and so he said well first of all we know through our you know studies at the CDC how to measure them and we We've shown that they're in everybody. Over 90% of people in the U.S. samples that we had looked at. They had looked at. I wonder what the 10% of people who don't have thalates in their blood?

Who are those people? Yeah, really? Where are they living? Right? Probably, that's an all set, probably. Anyway, so he said thallates. And I said, okay, why do you care? And he said, well, and then he said,

told me this story, which changed my life. He said that his colleagues at EPA and at the National Toxicology Program had been feeding phthalates to pregnant mice, rats, rodents. And what they found was that the male offspring developed in a way that was not completely masculinized, not completely what you'd see in a genetic male who was not exposed. Okay. Okay. Okay. And this, they've studied this over and over and over again,

until they were really sure that they could do this repeatedly and which chemicals could do this. And then they published. And what they published was that when the mother, let's say rat was exposed to a phallite, let's just say, I'm going to give you a name, diethylhexyl phallate, D-E-Hexylphalate, D-E-Hexylate, D-E-H-P, just so I can talk about it. That's probably the most, the worst actor in this class for lowering testosterone. When the mother was exposed to that, in early pregnancy, then her male offspring developed smaller penises, smaller scrotum.

Testes were less likely to descend. And there were internal changes as well. changes to the vast deference and and so epididymis and so on. And this distance that they'd been measuring for years, but which I and no other epidemiologists had not heard about, the distance from the anus to the genitals became shorter. And they called it the Thallate Syndrome. So this is the first syndrome that was named after a chemical that. that a woman is exposed to in pregnancy. So that made it.

These guys in Japan were the first ones to study it. Sorry? The gentleman in Japan, your colleague, the chemist. He was not a Japanese. He was an American. He was at CDC. He was an American. Oh, he was at CDC.

And he studied the chemistry. But the people who saw this and discovered this in rodents were Earl Gray and Paul Foster at the EPA and National Toxicology Program. Okay. So they showed this thing. Allied Syndrome. And then I thought about this and I thought, well, what about us? Right. What about humans? John says we're all exposed to it. So what, do we see this in humans? So that became my next big project of unraveling this mystery, right? By the way, I'll tell you a couple of other

things about rats. What Earl Gray said, AGD is forever. So if you have a small age, GD, an al genital distance, sometimes called the taint or the gooch or the grundle. Very familiar with the gooch. Yeah, the three terms are better known than the technical scientific terms.

But when, you know, that distance is shorter when the mother has been exposed in this critical window, three days, three days.

If the exposure is during days 18 to 21, they found that out later, exactly, then they'd get this whole syndrome. After 18 to 20 days, after conception? Yes. Okay. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount.

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is not as specific. We don't know exactly what it is, but we know it's the first trimester. We know it's the early first trimester. Okay. So, I wanted to see how do I look at this? So they had rats, they fed the rats, the phthalates. We can't

do that. We can't feed pregnant women fallouts. Right. Right. No. That would be unethical. That'd be unethical. Highly unethical. But remember the study for future families? The first one? Okay. Remember I told you that we saved the woman's urine? How lucky was that? Right. Now we go back. We can go back, get those samples, test them and see how much salad is in their urine when they were pregnant. So that was just really fortuitous. And all my graduate students, I say, if you can collect urine, it's cheap, it's easy to store, and it's going to turn out to be useful. Right. Right. So we had this urine. We sent it to John Brock and others at the CDC, and we said, tell us how many, you know, which thallites are in these women and how

much. And there was a gradient. Okay. They all had it, but some had a little and some had a lot. And then we, what are going to do with that? We want it then related to the offspring. genitals, right? Yes. So we had to get the kids Of all these people, all these women. All these people. Wow.

To come in, and that was no easy task. Wow. But we got many of them. We didn't get them all, but we got many of them. How many, roughly? Oh, gosh. Off the top of your head, you don't have to be exact. Yeah, we could look it up.

But it was in the hundred, you know, it was like several hundred. Okay. Yeah. By the way, what is this graph, Stephen? This is the common phallates in America. So for instance, over here, the green one is what she was talking about, the DEHP. Yes. Okay, in Canada.

Okay, oh, it's interesting. There's no DEHP on the east coast of the U.S. No, maybe they didn't sample there. Okay. But they have that big graph there. It says MEP. So there's a bunch of red, like in the New York area. Yeah.

And then MBP. Wow. And what is that little zoo? Okay, that's like, okay, that's like the Eastern Europe or the Western Europe. Yeah. I actually don't believe there's anywhere there's no D.E.HP. Look at, look at that giant spike right on like, what is that, Iran or Saudi Arabia. That giant one of M.E, it's mostly MEP, which is red and the MDEHP.

So MEP, monoethylthalate, is in personal care products, fragrance, skin care products, makeup. Nail polish. Nail polish, right. Okay. MEP is a big player there. It's not actually one of the worst actors in terms of being anti-angiogenic. But the D-EHP is the worst. DHP is the worst.

And then dibutylthalate, DBP, and B, B. ZP venizal butylthalite and now what's interesting they're new ones we can talk about that process afterwards the new ones that are bad to coming out and being put in the market so where were we yeah where were we so we I wanted to figure out so John and others at CDC got the samples of the women and did the measurements right and we got the children and then the question is how do you what do you look at in the children so it wasn't obvious what an HED was in a child. We knew what it wasn't a rat. Okay. But how did he make that translation? So it took a while, a couple of pilot studies, to actually figure out how to replicate the rat exam, if you will, to an infant exam. I worked with pediatricians to develop this and set this up. So we could do it reliably and repeatedly and consistently get the same thing every time, which you need for science.

And once we figured out what that exam was going to be, we brought the babies in. And if the mothers agreed, measured this syndrome markers of the syndrome in these children. Right. Right. Okay. So we found it. We found the thallate syndrome in humans. This means that the mothers with the higher levels of the anti-androgenic thalates, particularly those three that I told you,

were more likely to have a child with these symptoms and most markedly shorter gooch. Yeah. Okay? Right. Right. And, of course, I didn't use that in the publication, but shorter AGD. And that paper also made a huge impact. It made a huge impact scientifically.

And lots of other people started measuring AGD. and also made an impact in terms of politics or actually public health because the elites were then investigated and included... Who investigated them? The Consumer Protection Act. Okay. Consumer Protection... Committee?

Committee. Yes, thank you. And I testified there, and they heard that. And when they went their report, they recommended that. that the Thalates be taken out of children's products. And they were in the Consumer Protection Act of 2008. Okay. So the paper came out in 2005 and we had this legislation.

Now, I have to say they were a little off the mark because the products that they banned these Thalates from were children's products. That's too late. That's... You get an A. Yeah. Yes. First time ever.

That is right. They really should have been worrying about what the mother was exposed to. So I think it's great that it came out of pacifiers and sippy cups and toys and rubber duckies. Important also, certainly continued exposure is not a good thing. But it did not protect the pregnant woman or the fetus. Right. Anyway, this paper made a huge impact. And then it left me with this question, and you've alluded to this earlier, which is, who cares?

If you look, you have two sons. If you looked and measured their AGD, it could be bigger, smaller. You wouldn't by eye see the difference. It's not anything that jumps out at you. It's not like the child looks weird. Right. Right? It's just something you can measure.

Okay. Okay. And what is the proper measurement? Like, what should it be, depending on age? Is there a equation? No, there is no proper measurement. It's because it's a function of body size and age. And so all of these measurements are adjusted.

So, you know, how, like your height, a child's height, you say, is that child very high at all? It depends on their age, right? Right. And for something that's measured very close to birth, which we did in our next study, what's the gestational age? How developed were they? Right. You know, so I don't want to, I mean, people could read the paper. They could read the book, but I don't want to have people going out and measuring their children's AGD and worrying about it. I don't want to do that. So like, for example, when you have a newborn, you have to bring them in for like a three month, six month, nine month checkup, and they give you a percentile of height, head circumference, weight, and all that. Do they do they do that? Do they do that? that with AGD. They don't do that with AGD. Unfortunately not. That's one of the things I really, really would like to see. I'd like to see this as a standard of care at the newborn exam. Just like you measure a kid's head circumference, you could measure their AGD. Exactly. And it would be simple, quick, and would give us

unbelievable amounts of information. Right. Because what turns out, this little measure is kind of incredible. It tells us something about the past and something about the future. So I've told you a little about the past, it tells you about the mother's exposure to things that not only thallies, but other things lower testosterone. So it tells you about what was the, what we call androgenic environment in the womb. And by the way, it's relevant for girls, too. We could talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. But it also tells you about the future, and that's the next step in this story. So when we said, who cares? Why does it matter? We were asking what, um, What does this have to do with fertility?

What does it have to do with function? What does it have to do with the life of that baby as he becomes an adult in general? In general. Right. So we fast forwarded and thought, well, okay, let's at least see because we had these children were very young. We couldn't see their function sexually. But we could look at young men. and Earl Gray had told us that AGD is forever.

If you adjust for height and body size, then if it's short, I told you it's short forever. So we thought, okay, so if a man in college has a short AGD, it's likely he was born with a short AGD. And does that, sorry to interrupt, does that also mean they have a small penis? Those are separate measurements, but they're correlated. They are correlated. And on average, the thallite syndrome in our study included a smaller penis. So small balls, or testicles, sorry. I want to be scientific here.

But we didn't measure the length of the penis. We measured the width. Oh, interesting. Why was that? Because the length is variable. And the width is not? No, not much. Not much.

Okay. It's much more stable. So that's what we measure anyway. So there's a strong correlation between the width of the penis and the length of the AGD. Yes. Okay. So I would say more directly, there's a correlation between yes and also to the Thali levels and the width of the penis. Okay.

And the Thali levels and the length of the AGD. Okay. Yeah. So we went to Rochester where I was living then, university, and we put up posters, and I had a wonderful postdoc working with me who took charge of the study, Jaime Mendiola, and he ran the study, and he got these volunteers to come in and give a semen sample and let us measure their AGD and complete a questionnaire. Okay. Okay. And they were very, you know, wonderful and helpful. And one of them said, well, for $75, I'll give you anything because that's what we paid them. Oh, nice.

And so what we found, or Jamie found, hi me, is his Spanish name, that the longer, well, let's start with the sperm count. The lower the sperm count, the shorter the age you d. The longer the HD, the higher the sperm count. Correlation, linear correlation. Right, right? Linear relationship. And then we couldn't ask about fertility in that population because these were college students. But in California, a colleague named Mike Eisenberg looked at men in an infertility clinic and did this a similar thing.

And he got their sperm count and he got their HD. And he showed that, again, that it was related, HD and sperm count related. but also that fertile men had a longer AGD than men who hadn't delivered a child. It stands to reason. So when people say who cares, I say, everyone should care because that measurement tells you something about the future, not only about the past, what was in the womb, but in the future, how that boy is going to function. Right? Right. So let me stop there.

And you also said there was a correlation between how soon they hit puberty, right? Or was that only in women? So that's not a correlation directly with allies. That's another, that is women primarily. And that is a whole other line of work, which maybe we shouldn't get into today. But it's very, very important and interesting that the age of puberty in women is dropping. Most markedly, apparently in African Americans. American women.

Okay. And we don't know why. So you did a very good job in the book of just explaining to me how during development the babies sort of like sexual reproductive organs are made. You basically explained there's a certain time where testosterone has an opportunity to kick in, which creates this certain area on the human groin area, the human groin that develops in the testes or not. Right.

And it seems like when these thallates are introduced, it stunts the growth of that area specifically. Correct. And that's very well put. So let me just back up and say, before, let's leave thallates out of it. Okay. Just in every baby. In very early pregnancy, the male and the female genitals are the same. Right?

Right. You can't separate them. You don't see ovaries. don't see testes, you don't see penis, you know, it's actually just a ridge of tissue. Okay. Okay? And then at the critical time, which we know in rats specifically, we don't know specifically in humans, but it's early pregnancy, the testes start to form, and that's genetically programmed

in an X, Y individual, right? And so they start to form, and at a certain point, they're able to produce testosterone, and they do that. okay in the genetic male female also but just a little bit but mostly much more

in the male okay so what they showed in these animal studies is that when the mother was given thallites in her food at that time

when the testosterone is surging that the surge is wiped out it's eliminated the graph is very dramatic Right. It just completely flat in males, genetic males. So that says that that male needs that testosterone at that time to develop normally. Okay?

Okay. Okay. And so the default, if he doesn't get it, that general tract will remain the default, which is female. Right. Okay. Okay. So the degree to which it differentiates from the female, you know, So the development of the testes instead of the ovaries and the development of the penis instead of the clitoris and so on and so forth.

The degree that that separation takes place is dependent upon this hormonal surge. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. And there's a large variation in how developed the genitals can be with these babies. Right. That's correct. And how, so in your book you described the,

this lady Tracy and her son Barry, who was a boy who identified as a girl. What sort of correlation did you find with children, specifically, with gender dysphoria? And as it relates to sort of like a, it seems like a more recent surge with transgender, the transgender movement. I know there's no actual evidence that there's been no real studies done on it. but what was your take on that? And did you, do you suspect there is a connection? So first of all, in terms of our studies, we did not study that. We did not have children.

We did not get information on sexual identity from children. That is an important study. And it should be done. And that should be related to chemicals that they were exposed to. But that has not been done. My suspicion is that just as the generals differentiate into male and female, the brain also does. And we know that there are, for example, you know, men, this is a stereotype, okay? And it's a social stereotype.

It's it's politically very difficult. But there are certain things like socialization seems to be easier for females. and spatial ability to manipulate things spatially, which is testosterone-dependent, seems to be stronger in genetic males. That's testosterone-dependent? Spatial. Like visual, spatial recognition? Yes, yes.

You ask men to rotate a figure in space in their minds. They can do that and much more quickly and easily than females. Really? Yeah, that's a... Throughout life or only an early... No, it's not, I don't know. Okay. But my understanding is this is throughout life.

Okay. Yeah, not early puberty. I don't. So in any case, there is a different, there's no question there's some differences in the development of the brain and that these are governed by, in part by testosterone as well as the genitals. So it's very conceivable to me that possibly the surge of chemicals, which can impact the body's hormones, might be doing something somewhat different in the brain and in the generals. So, you know, they could have maybe little effect on the generals.

And physiologically, the child could be male typical if he's a genetic male. But perhaps the surge to the brain has limited the development in that direction. Right. So this is just a wild hypothesis and maybe totally wrong. But I believe that these changes that are important and hormonally driven are happening in utero. And so I think that whatever we find as we go down the road for gender dysphoria and is going to relate to exposures in utero. That's the only hypothesis I have. whether it's going to be due to a specific chemical or a class of chemicals or not.

And let me just say that this whole area is very difficult because it's difficult for trans people. And I totally understand that because it medicalizes their identity. It says, why are you like this? And we don't ask that generally. You know, and it's similar concerns for people who, who have other atypical development, for example, ASD people and so on. You know, what causes that? Well, I'm not sure that that question is, yet we've learned how to phrase that question

in a way that does not make people feel that the way they are is the way they should not be. Right. And I don't want to give that impression. Well, right, but it seems like at the same time, it's very important to study, especially when it relates to some of these chemicals that are in our everyday world. You know, and when you talk about specifically the development of the sexual organs being stunted in utero and these babies being born with ambiguous genitalia, not necessarily 100% developed with testosterone or not 100% developed testicles or dropped testicles, you could imagine how that would translate to somebody being or the way people describe, I feel like people say they're a male in a woman's body or a woman in a male's body. that I can see a connection there. But the thing is you can't study it because you can't ask rats how they feel.

You can't ask a rat, you know, what do you feel like? Do you feel masculine or feminine? Right, right. So it's, I'm definitely curious about that. I think we're all curious about that. Yeah. And I think maybe, you know, animal toxicologists will find some clever way to figure out what an animal's preference is. You know, they can certainly already.

find out who that rat wants to have sex with. And they can produce rats, and as I told you, that want to have males want to have sex with other males. Really? Yes. Yes. That can be produced with the pesticide we talked about before atrazine. Right. Right. And this was a study that was done on fish and frogs as well, right? Right. Frogs particularly. Yeah. Frogs. Right. Yes. They made homosexual frogs. Right. Right. So that that is possible. But what that has to do with gender dysphoria is a really open question and one that I think is very delicate and we have to be careful about even asking without offending people. I think honestly that we need some trans people to come in and do this research because they will do it sensitively and they'll understand what the concerns are. And as a non-trans, non-binary person, I'm afraid I'm, you know,

at risk of sticking my foot in it. You know what I mean? And saying things that will offend people. And so I'm being really careful. Yeah. And maybe you could have somebody on your show who's trans and would talk about it. Yeah. Well, it's hard, you know, because serious academics like yourself, they don't want to talk about it because there's a very big risk of people coming after you or trying to discredit you in any way. And, you know, the problem with it is it does stifle discussion and research. Like you just said, you don't want to touch it. And that's a problem, I think. You know, I know, I didn't say I didn't want to touch it. I said, I didn't want to talk about it now because I don't know. Right. I can just tell you this a study that I think would be relevant

and that I think should be done, right? And that's what I always do. I always design, think, oh, how would we do this? And then I do it, right? Right. But this one is going to, to be hard. But it could be done. And there are databases in Europe and the United States where urine has been stored from a long time ago. And you could test that urine for environmental chemicals like phallates or whatever, the bisphenols. We haven't talked about other classes, you know, pesticides and so on. And then you could see if you have a very large example, how their children developed and what percent of them were trans. Right.

Or opted that took that option or considered that option. They're probably a gradient. And see whether the exposure correlated with the behavior in, say, the adolescent years around sexual identity. That study would really be valuable here. Yes. The problem is that, like I said, asking that question and writing, it's controversial. And I'm afraid that, you know, it will take a very open-minded funding agency or, you know, to say, we're interested in this.

We want to fund this. We want to find this out. Right. But I'm not against studying it. I'm just against talking about it in ignorance and talking about it without. the participation of the affected people. You know, we can't always do that. We can't always include the affected population in our design of our study or conduct of our

study. But the extent that we can, I think we're being more and more sensitive to people's needs. So that's what I would like to see. I would like to see. I actually know one person who's an epidemiologist who's trans, and she would be great to work on this. Absolutely. And yeah, I think that will happen, but I don't have the answer now.

Do you think there's any correlation with the gender dysphoria and things like anxiety or depression? I've read some that there is. And certainly genders for people are under considerable social pressure and stressors. So I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't more anxiety. And being prescribed things like anti- antidepressants and stuff that I don't know those data but I would I wouldn't be surprised let's yeah the pharmacology and the medicine and specifically the antidepressants they seem to be an issue I'm not an expert on it but I know that a lot more and more young people that I talk to every day are

on uppers and downers you know they're on antidepressants or on stimulants such as like adderol or whatever to study and to get through school and to get work done are you talking about trans people no no just in general just young people in general not specific trans people but yeah right But I imagine if you combine the two, right? It's got to be a cascading effect. It's got to just make it worse. If you're already dealing with this feeling of gender insecurity or dysphoria and you compound that with things like depression and anxiety because of it and cultural stigmas. Difficult.

Not a good combo. Yeah. Let's talk about testosterone. Did we talk about testosterone yet? I don't think we did. So how does testosterone, where does that come into the picture with all of this? Well, obviously, testosterone is very key here for, it's important for the production, you know, the development of the testes, the production of sperm. And by the way, now that more and more young men are seeking testosterone treatment.

Yeah, we talked about this yesterday, too. I'm concerned because they're not going to have adequate sperm when they're. they get around to having a child. So, yeah. So I've been on some of these online Reddit forums that talk about testosterone. And it's a, I don't know if you're familiar with Reddit, but it's basically like a website where people can go and just talk about any topic. And it gets deep. It gets into the weeds.

But there's lots of kids on there in like the bodybuilding communities who are in their early teens, early late teens, early 20s that are a lot of them even, some not, but some get. getting their blood work done beforehand and having abysmal testosterone levels. They're talking about how their testosterones are in like the one to two hundreds nanograms per decilator, which is on the very, very bottom of the scale that the CDC recommends. And these guys getting on testosterone because it's like, what's the, like, what's the tradeoff? Like, do I start testosterone therapy and feel great, feel like a normal person and be able to go to the gym and be healthy? And sacrifice not being able to have kids. It's a very heated sort of topic because it's so there's an obvious tradeoff to doing that.

But there's a huge advantage to doing it too because you feel so good when people feel so good when they do it. So the only, the information I have about testosterone, which is increasing as I study this more, is that it is declining just as sperm count is declining and probably at a comparable rate. And because we know that many environmental chemicals have the ability to lower testosterone, it's very plausible that that's why this is happening, right? Right. But that doesn't actually prove it. We have to do something similar, you know, that we did with, for example, in those Rochester young men. You know, I'm just getting an idea here. We might be able to do this.

What could we do? We could maybe if we have those samples still stored measure the testosterone, which we didn't do in those young men and related to their mother's valets, which we did measure. Right. Remember I told you that. And wow, maybe we've just started a study here. Wow. We got your next book. Yeah.

That would be really, really interesting. Or maybe not in these men, but some population where we knew. you know, prenatal exposure, because I do think that that's where it's happening. And then we have measured testosterone, maybe at several points in a young man's life, to see whether there's a relationship. So that's, I give that out to people as if they were listening, if they can do a study, they could contact me and we'll work on it together. Yes, we'll include your contact information below for people to email you.

So testosterone. Sperm count is declining currently by two and a half percent per year. Do you know what the number is for testosterone? What the number is how that's declining per year? The study, no. And the studies on testosterone are not recent. They're not as recent as the ones in sperm. That little upgrade we did.

Yes. Yeah. We haven't done that for testosterone. Okay. So we will. We will do that. And then I can come back and tell you the answer. Okay. So testosterone is very much linked to cardiovascular health, cognitive function, many things. Yes. And by the way, so is sperm count. Really? Yes. I thought sperm count was just because it was tied to testosterone. That's hard to separate, isn't it? Because they're intimate. It's one of that kind of confound and we were talking about. But I will tell you that there's a number of studies that show that men with low sperm count have more cardiovascular disease, have more diabetes, have more reproductive cancers, and die younger. Interesting.

So it's a marker of overall health, right, as is infertility, as is women's infertility, by the way. So all of these things are not, you know, they don't stand alone. It's part of a mixed, you know, a complicated. had a picture where they're all interrelated. Right. Yeah. I wonder if you had somebody who went through, like a young boy who went through chemotherapy

and that killed all his sperm and he wasn't able to produce sperm anymore because I know that happens to young boy, like kids who go through chemo, they're infertile after that. I wonder if that is tight, if that's the same, if it's still correlates to a shorter lifespan or worse cardiovascular health because of that. Great question. Well, it has to be. You're just designing all these studies here. No, it's a very good question.

And by the way, I have a friend, a young man who did go through chemo as a child for cancer. And he did bank some sperm. Oh, really? Yeah. And he was told that he was azo-spermic, had no sperm in the sample. But in fact, he did conceive a child. Oh, really? Yeah.

How did that happen? Well, they missed it. Counting is not a, you know, you can't be guaranteed of counting every sperm. And he had some left. So even if you have one, there's a chance? It's possible. It's possible. And he lucked out.

And he is very well and healthy and, you know, I'm happy to say. So it is not an absolute. Who was the name? Oh, I'm sorry. We talked about him last night. Who was the name of the gentleman who did the studies on the frogs that turned the frogs homosexual? Tyrone Hayes. Tyrone Hayes.

Okay, and he's at Berkeley. He's at Berkeley, yeah. Okay, cool. And what are the specific chemicals that he induced into these frogs? He studied atrazine. Atrazine, and atrazine, that's... That's the one that we showed was related to sperm count. Right, exactly.

Okay, so I wanted to ask you about glyphosate and Roundup. Yeah. What specifically did you find out about glyphosate and Roundup? So, surprisingly, glyphosate Roundup have been one of the most poorly studied pesticides out there. Given that it's the most widely used pesticide in the world, you know, makes you wonder why. But there are now studies going on, and we have some pilot data showing that glyphosate exposure does affect intergenital distance. But in these studies, which are small, and I won't put a lot behind this, these were the females that were affected. Okay.

And they had longer ADD. Longer agey d. And so they're more masculine. Yes. Interesting. Which, so a chemical can be anti-androgenic, not down. Androgens knock down testers. Or it can be pro-androgenic, increased testosterone.

So anything that increases testosterone will make girls in a gentle distance gooch longer, more in the male direction because they're getting more testosterone, right? Right. Right. Can that happen to men too? No, because they're already so high that the amount that can be increased by an exposure will be, you know, won't matter. Right. Right. But if you're very low and you get an increase, it could double your exposure, you see.

Right. And so, but this is very, very tentative. And this is an area of very, you know, current study that people are looking at the effects of glyphosate in various ways, you know, on the microbiome, on, you know, obesity, on lots and lots and lots of things. It's one of the hot new topics in the field. Yes. And, you know, it seems like all of this is you can put it all in the same bucket of our problem with trying to make everything convenient. And one of the big problems with glyphosate and the Roundup is like they used to spray the crops and just spray the weeds individually.

And now what they do, they've developed this thing called corn ready roundup. Have you heard of that? Where they basically just take an airplane and they coat acres and. acres of farmland with this roundup and even gets all over the corn crops, but for some reason it only kills the weeds and doesn't affect the corn. So basically this stuff is coated in these chemicals. Oh, wow. That's not good. Scary. That's not good. Yeah. And they, and you know, this just goes back to they're doing that because it's convenient. It probably saves them money. But how do we turn the ship? Like all of these massive plastic and chemical companies that I'm

sure have billions of dollars and have lobbying behind them, how do we convince them that this is a problem? And how do we convince them to leave billions of dollars on the table? And from their perspective, they're like, okay, we'll have thousands of thousands of people unemployed and potentially collapse our corporate empires for a benefit that will only be seen 100 years from now, potentially, right? Three generations or more than 100 years. I think benefits will be seen more quickly. I think that what might turn a tide is some specific individuals who have personal concerns. So some powerful person who has unable to have grandchildren or they are unable to have a child.

or, you know, or they see various, you know, problems related to these exposures in their family, in themselves. I think, I mean, that's why people donate money. You know, many donors are donating because of their own personal experience. Right. So, I don't know. I mean, that might be one way to, you know, so as we get this information out to more and more people, hopefully more people will be concerned. So there's a couple of things.

One is you can take personal action, and that's good, and I definitely recommend it. You know in the book, there's a couple of chapters about things you can do, and we can talk about that. And I'm not putting those down at all.

Those are very important, and also make us feel that we're doing something, which we are. We can take political action by, you know, sending letters, and but that's nobody wants to do that. No. Right?

I'll send a letter. Realistically, I don't know. More podcasts about it. More podcasts, maybe we'll do something. I think the first thing is that people have to know that this is a problem. As Joe Rogan said, why don't we know about this? Right. Right.

And that's why I'm talking to everybody I can so that people know about it. I think that's what happened with climate. So originally there were, you know, scientists and others that were speaking, you know, very forcefully about climate, but they weren't being heard. And then, partially through personal experience of hurricanes, floods, whatever, people became more concerned, personally concerned. And then they began to take more action. We started out by saying... But even that, like, just look what's happened with climate. It's just all it's become is just this political football and this polarizing effect.

You know, nothing gets done. People just like to fight about it. Yeah. Click on on news articles about it. I know. It's, but and by the way, our problem. I hope that doesn't happen with this. Right.

Our problem here that I'm talking about today is maybe people don't know this, but the chemicals in plastic are made from petroleum byproducts. Mm. So it's not really a separate. problem from climate change. Interesting. And one of my concerns, the concerns of many people in the field, that as we start pulling, you know, making fuel for homes and cars and so on, out of other products other

than fossil fuels, then those research will have to go somewhere and they're going to more plastic. In other words, that changing the source of our energy away from fossil fuels will increase the problem with plastic. plastics. Changing it away from fossil fuels? Yes. As a society say, okay, we're going to go to clean energy.

We're going to go to, right? So we're not going to use fossil fuels. Well, what's going to happen to those fossil fuels? Right? And they can be put into plastics. And so they'll be more economically, they have to go somewhere and or not be. Oh, I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying.

So they're out there and their use probably will increase as in these areas. household products and so on as we decrease. Who knows? That's a speculation. But it's a concern of mine that, you know, it's just another way that we're dependent on fossil fuel. So when it comes to plastics, though, how can people who are living their everyday lives and, you know, don't have the money to completely change their living situation or every single piece of Tupper and dish and thing in their house and things? everything they interact with, all their products. Like, what is a, what is like a rational sort of logistical way somebody can avoid some of

the worst exposures to these thallates into these chemicals? I told you I got rid of all my plastic baby bottles from my kid. I made my wife throw them all away and we got glass ones. That was great. But not everyone can do that. Right. So food, to the extent that you can. And if you can eat unprocessed food, like carrots in a bunch or lettuce in a head.

Even if it's wrapped in plastic? Because a lot of carrots come wrapped in plastic. Yeah, that's true. I, there, so here's the thing about chemicals leaving the plastic. If they're warm or if there's liquid, it's more likely, if the environment is warm or liquid, it's more likely for the thallates to, or the bisphenols to leave the, the, the, plastic, right? So carrots, I'm not so worried. But if you go to a farmer's market, if you're lucky enough to go to a farmer's market, you can just buy it from the farmer. That would be the

ideal, I would say. I think I told you yesterday about an experiment where they took this farm, and some of the cows were milked by hand, and some of the cows were milked by a milking machine, and the cows that were milked by hand had no phthalates in their... milk and farmers that in and those cows that were milk by the milking machine that milk had salads in it so it's really hard to know you know how to how to avoid them when if you go to buy a container of milk even it says organic on it that could have been processed through yes yes we don't know that yeah i mean it's ridiculous if you walk through the grocery store all the labels that are on every single product i mean the fda doesn't pay attention to all that stuff no so so you're

asking some simple things people can do. So I would say, if you can afford it, eat organic, because a food being organic keeps out most pesticides. Thalates are, by the way, also in pesticides as an inert ingredient because they increase absorption of the phthalate into the plant. and in general, organic food is produced more carefully with respect to environmental risks. Okay. So I would say if you can afford it and not everyone can that you would, you know, buy organic food. Or buy it from a farm. Or buy it from a farmer, ideally, a farmer's market or something.

And try to avoid fast food because these tend to be ultra-processed and full of huge numbers of chemicals. Again, that's an economic thing. Some people just have to, you know, grab a meal at the end of a huge long day. Yeah. But so then in the home, besides food, we talked about this, but it would be good to treat you water because we now know that water contains lots and lots of micro nanoplastics, and I would prefer not to drink that myself. So I distill my water, and I know you use a reverse osmosis. Those are both very good ways of treating you water.

You can also get a filtration system, which is a little more problematic because you have to change the filter and so on. But don't buy water in plastic bottles if you can avoid it. Right. Especially when those plastic bottles have been sitting in a car or somewhere. Right. Right. Don't, right. Don't leave water in plastic bottles in your car.

And then as far as air, our ambient environment, our air is full of these microplastics and nanoplastics. So hepa filter is pretty effective. Another thing that's effective is to just leave your shoes at the door. Then you're not bringing in those particles from the outside into your home and vacuum with a hepa filter. So try to keep your air clean. You know, so these things come in every which way through inhalation, through ingestion, that's eating and drinking, and dermal. So the dermal is your skin care products, makeup, sunscreen, you can worry about what's in those. And we don't have a completely perfect way of screening those.

environmental working group does a good job, and they have a consumer guide to personal care products. And cleaning products, by the way, also contain a lot of these chemicals. So I would say going to some of the guides we suggest in the book, or, you know, some of we haven't suggested that you can hunt for on the web, Right. Try to buy products that have been screened to some extent, none very thoroughly, I would say, but to some extent to be free of these chemicals. Now, you talked about how you distilled, can you walk me through how you distill your water and how that's done? Sure.

Sort of. I mean, I can't tell you the actual mechanics of the machine. Right, but like is there a certain thing that you bought somewhere? Yeah, I bought a distiller. That's called a distiller. Yeah. Okay. Where'd you buy it?

On the web? Okay. Can you search for distillers? We can maybe look at them. I'm curious. I would put, if you don't mind, countertop distillers. Countertop distiller.

Yeah, because you don't want something that's going to be huge for a business or, you know, but countertop, home distillers. Okay. Oh, is it one of these just sits on the counter? Yeah, the one on the left is actually what I have. That one.

Yeah. But it doesn't mean it's the best. It's just one. And that's how it works. You just fill it up. Let's read that. By the way, I don't want to be endorsing any particular brand here, but just say that... No, yeah, yeah.

We just clicked on the first one we saw. Yeah. So, you know, you put it in at night. It drips out, evaporates, condenses, comes into that pitcher, a glass pitcher, and then in the morning, I just pour that water into two glass pitchers that we keep in the fridge. It's wonderful, tasting water. and then my husband cleans it out. And by the way, what's left, I live in San Francisco, the water's good, but what's left after we pour out, you know, after it's been distilled, the residue doesn't smell great. I bet.

And so we cleaned it out with vinegar and then we're ready for the next batch. So we do that every couple of days. I've seen some of those water treatment. I have a friend who builds the water treatment tanks that are for like different cities. They basically like filter all the toilet water for all of the cities. And it goes into this giant tank. It's like bigger than an aquarium at SeaWorld. And they pour like tons of chemicals and stuff in there and filter it out.

And that gets all siphoned out to our drinking supply, which is like nasty. Right. It could be in there. Right. Those chemo, those things are probably full of thallates. And they're probably pouring Roundup in there for all we know. Oh, I'm sure. And and pharmaceuticals as well.

Right. Right. It's disgusting. Yeah. So that's a good choice. And I don't know. Do you want to say anything about RO? Yeah.

Yeah. What is RO? Reverse osmosis. Oh, yeah. I don't know anything about it. I just bought one because I heard they were good. Yeah. I got it installed.

It's like there's like these three filters that are installed under there and the water travels through all of it. It's very complicated. But it makes the water taste better for sure. It tastes. There's a stark difference. I can tell the difference between the tap water and that water. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And, and, And an interesting little experiment, which would not be hard, would be to compare, take the same source and pass it through a distiller, an RO, and a foam filter. And then blindly ask people which they prefer and test them for chemicals. That would be a great test. A great, simple experiment. And you can test it against liquid death, mountain water. Yeah. There we go.

Not in plastic. You know, I think it's like 70% of all recycled plastic goes into landfills. Yeah. That's disgusting. Yeah. It is not. It makes people feel like they're doing the right thing, which is, you know, unfortunate because in fact they're not doing anything helpful. Make sure I'm right on that.

Can you see if it is 70%? I'm curious what it actually is. I think it's close to 70% though. where does this go for humanity generationally? Like if we can't start turning the ship now, right? If we're staying on the trajectory we're on right now, where do you see this going in 50 to 100 years? Well, first of all, you know, I... Okay, it's 79%.

Only 9% has been recycled. The vast majority is 79%. And you mentioned in your book, so that it's, okay, so the 79% goes into land. fills, but you mentioned in your book, there's this giant floating island in the middle of the ocean that's the size of Texas, right? Yeah, yeah. That's all just plastic junk. I think that's pretty well known.

That's the Great garbage patch. Yeah. And people have seen, probably are tired of seeing all these animals, fish, turtles with plastic around their neck and, you know, the impact of these chemicals on the environment, on a wildlife. life is tragic. But you were saying, where do I see this going? I just want to say, I think I am an optimist at heart. And so I have hope that we can once alarmed enough, make changes that will really move the needle.

And I think we did that after COVID came out. And we desperately needed a vaccine. quickly. And it was produced faster than any vaccine had ever been produced, right? So I just think that what we need is alarm. We need concern. We need pressure to get governments and philanthropists and, you know, people that have the resources to do this to say, this is a moonshot. This is the moonshot we have to take. We have to make alternative forms of plastic. We have to get people to clean up their personal environment. And in animal studies, in three generations, full fertility can be restored. We don't have three generations. Because for an animal, three

generations is six years. A rat? For a rat, right? Okay. You're a rat. You've got six years. Three generations. So two years is the lifespan of a rat? And for us, our life, you know, we have intergenerational is 25 years. So we have to look out 75 years. Okay. At the rate at which sperm count and other things are declining, it's probably not enough time. I think we have to clean it up faster than that. The other thing that gives me hope is that we have alternative ways of conceiving.

And more and more of those are, you know, artificial insemination and assisted reproduction in general has developed tremendously. And I think that we will continue to do that. We will get more and more techniques for reproducing, which will be not the typical way of reproducing. For that to happen, people have to want children. And that's something that worries me a lot. We talked about this a little bit, but in many parts of the world, the desire to marry to have children is decreasing also. I haven't looked at the rate, but it's pretty dramatic in some countries. Yeah, specifically like Singapore and Korea.

South Korea, Singapore, Japan. So for the species to maintain itself, we have to have two, 1 children for every couple in their lifetime. Okay? That's... 2.1 children for every couple. Yeah. Man and woman, replace themselves and a little bit extra because there's some loss, right?

So that's called a replacement rate for total fertility. And we're below that and we're dropping. And that's gone down about 50% in 50 years also, just like sperm count and just, right? And some, so look, think about 2.1. That's where you want to be. If you want to keep the species replacing itself. South Korea is now at 0.83. And other Eastern Asian countries are around one.

China's got a big problem. And China has a big problem. And here's the thing. People don't want, apparently, to have more children. These countries are giving economic incentives for people to have more children, and they're not buying it. So, I don't know. I don't know what will turn that around. And economically, countries are recognizing that if you don't have enough children, you won't have the middle of the population pyramid to support the old people who are increasing.

Right. And you have economic chaos. Really? Yeah. It's like we talked about earlier when it comes with culture, I personally see younger people, my generation and younger, they're, when you ask them why they don't have kids, they're just like, oh, I want to wait till I'm rich. Or I want to wait until I get my life figured out or when I went to get my career figured out. A lot of people I don't even, you know, in their mid-30s haven't ever, you know, 30s and even 40s have never even considered having kids yet because they, they aren't where they are financially to have kids. And I think. think that what you were also alluding to is that there's a societal thing that's happening with with women in particular that are finding more and more successful careers in you know various industries or whatever it might be that they don't want to necessarily raise children they want to have successful careers and they think maybe I'll do that after but they don't realize that you can't do that after I think and then you look at people sorry this but then

you have like Courtney Kardashian who just came out as she's pregnant with her I think it's her fourth child with Travis Barker and she's like 45 years old so people think oh Courtney Kardashian did it I can do it too right right and they some can but it's much more difficult and the pregnancies are more complicated and actually parental age is a risk factor for lots of bad outcomes later in life which is interesting For example, older parents have more autistic children. If I remember correctly, it's mid-20s. There's a 1 in 800 chance of having that chromosome number 21. I think it is, Down syndrome. And then above 30, it increases to like 1 in 100. Yeah. Yeah.

That's terrifying. Yeah. So postponing child birth is risky. It's risky because maybe you won't conceive. because as a woman age, they have fewer and fewer eggs that are available for, you know, usable eggs. And more chances of chromosomal abnormalities in the sperm. And so more chances for failure of that pregnancy. And by the way, we didn't talk about this.

But if you look at couples going for assisted reproduction and test their urine, and that's the man, and the woman, the presence of a number of these EDC chemicals in the urine affects the success of that attempt to conceive that pregnancy. Wow. The embryo quality, the number of embryos retrieved, the embryo quality, I'm sorry, the number of eggs retrieved, the embryo quality, the implantation rates and the birth rates are all affected by the chemicals in the parents. And that's, you know, that's, a study out of many studies out of Harvard all out of what's called the Earth study and other people are looking at that too but it's it's not just affecting the fetus in utero it's affecting the fetus before it gets there if you will it's not a fetus that you know it's an embryo but

infecting the eggs affecting the eggs affecting sperm affecting what after they've been put together and even affecting the embryo, even after it's been implanted. So there's risks all along the way for the failure of this process. I love the fact that you're optimistic, but I don't see how we're going to be able to fix it. I don't see. I hope it does, but it's going to take a lot of these podcasts, and it's going to take really shaking up the hornet's nest to try to get people. to get off their ass and take some action here. Yeah.

Got to keep trying. We have to keep trying. Absolutely. Yeah. Is there anything we missed that we should talk about? Yeah. I would like to just say that it's not just humans. Right?

So, I mean, there are, there's a lot of information on declines of multiple species. Insect decline, insect Armageddon, bird decline. You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah. And now there are studies that showing even sperm count in horses and dogs has been declining as well as humans. So, of course, animals living in the environment or domestic animals are going to be exposed those domestic animals, those dogs and so on, to the same air that we are and the same water that we are. And probably they have a lot of the stuff in their food that I've never analyzed.

But And the alligators in Lake Apopka? And in the wildlife, like the alligators in Lake Apopka that were producing smaller and smaller litters and by the way, having smaller anergenital distance. Smaller penises. Smaller penises, right. Penal size.

That was the first thing that Lou Gillette showed was that alligators in Lake of Popka had a smaller penis. Lake of Popka was contaminated by pesticides. So that was, when was that? It was like in the 90s, I think. I think that's what you said. Yeah.

And so this is not a new story. And it's not just a human story. That's a point that I don't think I talked about and we didn't get into. But it's a planetary problem. Right. Right. But it's because of us. A large part of it is because of us, yes.

I won't rule out that there are some other forces that are changing, you know. But certainly we see direct relationship, as in Lake Apopka, between the pollution and the fertility of that species, the ability of that species to survive. And I think everyone knows about species decline, the number of species that are declining, and are endangered. And actually, we are as well endangered.

Is there anything specifically with marine life that we're seeing, like a decline in, other than like alligators that are in lakes and stuff like that, but like in the oceans. We talked about how specifically here in Florida, there's all these sugar plantations. The pesticides are running off and they're creating this giant algae bloom

that happens here in Florida every year where it basically kills off hundreds and thousands of fish and wildlife that all wash up on the beach and create this. There's your answer, isn't it? On the beach, yeah. You've answered your own question. I did answer my own question.

But I wonder if there's been any sort of people like looking at this on a large, like on a macro scale. with red tides and things like this? Or are there any things that were missing? Probably, but I don't know. I don't have that information. I do know that there's a, it was a study quite a long time ago

where this researcher took two lakes in Canada and actually polluted one deliberately with EDCs and left the other one clean and then compared the survival of fish in those lakes and showed very dramatically that the fish in the treated lake were pretty much wiped out. Wow. Yeah. So there's no question that we do that and that that's going on.

And by the way, a lot of the chemicals that are manufactured have byproducts that go into the runoff into the lakes, right, to the waste disposal. Yeah. So it's not a happy picture, but I'd like to just end by saying, Countdown, first of all, is very... Hold it up? Yeah. Hold up next to your face. Hold it next to my face.

There you go and smile for the camera. Yeah. Hi, Countdown. Beautiful. We, first of all, the book has a lot of humor in it, has a lot of personal stories, and makes it... You have a great sense of humor. Yeah. And my author, co-author, Stacey Colano, is an environmental journalist who was really responsible for that tone,

that, you know, ability to bring some... light to it and some humor to it. And we have two chapters of things you can do. So don't feel totally discouraged. Get the book, read that, and then share it. I think sharing it is really important because that's how we spread the word. Absolutely. Where, well, why don't you tell people where they can find more about you? Shauna swan.com. That's me. It's all over social media. You can look for me there. I don't know. Remember my Twitter handle. I'm right. I'll figure it out. I'll put it down there. People can find it. Or I can send it to you. Perfect. I already got it. You don't send it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you again. I very much appreciated this. And that's all, folks.