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RFK Jr. Warns Teenagers Now Have Less Sperm Than 65-Year-Old Men (www.mediaite.com)

submitted 3 days ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] beejboytyson@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ya, my biology professor had a theory that it was because of estrogen being introduced to the water supply through birth control. After the pill was introduced breast size started increasing and girls started reaching puberty earlier. Makes sense.

[–] EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So! It's actually kinda crazy how accurate your professor might be. Because progesterone, the chemical in birth control, does indeed break down into estrogen under the right circumstances. The components of broken down progesterone pass through the body via urine, enter the water system, and - this is the important part - is far too small and difficult to be collected or filtered out of the water.

So people taking birth control have absolutley added an insane amount of estrogen to the water supply. And most tap water now does have low levels of estrogen in it because people have been taking birth control for 60+ years.

In that same time, the average age of puberty has continued to fall.

So, it sounds a bit wild, but that theory is far more feasible than most realize.

[–] xep@discuss.online 3 points 2 days ago

There're also other endocrine disrupters in the water such as pfoa/pfos etc. We should absolutely be filtering our tap water or drinking RO water if we can.

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can estrogen in water become bio-available through drinking it?

What kind of concentrations are you talking about? There's possibly a big gap between enough to be detected and enough to affect someone's hormonal regulation.

In that same time, the average age of puberty has continued to fall.

As it did before birth-control pills were in widespread use. And another confounding factor is that modern birth-control pills have much lower doses of hormones than the originals did, so we need to look not only at the rates of usage, but at the amount each pill contains that gets excreted.

And filtration is not the only water treatment technique. The use of highly reactive treatments such as chorine can break down such chemicals.

[–] EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I am by no means an expert, but there has been a significant amount of studies done on the estrogen in our water levels increasing:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2854760/

Detection of estrogens in the environment has raised concerns in recent years because of the potential of these compounds to affect both wildlife and humans. " The incomplete removal by publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) of excreted endogenous estrogens and prescribed estrogens leads to their introduction into surface waters and potentially into drinking water sources that rely on surface water. Estrogens, specifically estrone (E1), 17β-estradiol (E2), estriol (E3), and ethinyl estradiol (EE2), have been detected in numerous studies of wastewater influents and effluents. (Several links to the studies of the levels of estrogen in waste water are then provided after this quote).

This study in 2009 concluded that kids are exposed to more estrogen in milk and food than water, so it shouldn't be a problem to worry about. However, at least imo, it never looked at overall levels of estrogen intake increasing from all combined sources as water has certainly added to it at least marginally.

So that's all to say, I'm not 100% behind this being all true, just that there's actually quite a bit of valid scientific studies that have proven there's now more estrogen in our drinking and waste water that seems to be at least corolated to our medical use of it.