Experts™ and commentators continue to be baffled by continuously falling fertility rates: 'the Science™' with a new (partial) explanation that begs consideration
The real reason for falling birthrates, Sterility, and Infertility. Men are being castrated by bioidentical estrogen.
Read, Soy Boys: The Rise in Low Testosterone & the Feminization of Men Due to Phytoestrogens https://a.co/d/c3hy6e4
In the 1980s, Dr. Hobbins, a researcher in thermography, alerted the public about the link between soy consumption and an increased risk of breast cancer. The introduction of soy into processed foods in the late 1970s coincided with an increase in breast cancer rates, from 1 in 11 in 1980 to 1 in 8 by 1992. Since 1979, there was a reported annual increase of 1% in the incidence of breast cancer among men, and testosterone levels have been decreasing by approximately 1% annually since 1980. Effects are seen in women first.
In terms of potency, a gram is a billion times stronger than a nanogram. While chemicals like Atrazine, BPA, and phthalates raise estrogen levels, the use of popular phytoestrogens (PE) has exponentially increased this estrogenic effect. This is exemplified by products like the Impossible Burger, which contains an estimated 18 million times more estrogen than a Whopper. Combining these findings with studies showing the transplacental transfer of soy from mother to fetus, and the ability of Japanese researchers to produce all-female catfish populations using soy, raises concerns.
Their 2013 publication marked a milestone as the first researchers to publish medical evidence that demonstrated flax and bio-identical estrogen increased risk of breast cancer with a chapter warning about the feminizing effects on men. Research indicates that one cup of soy has the estrogenic effect comparable to one birth control pill, and flax is twenty times stronger than soy.
However, doctors advocated the health benefits of plant-based lifestyles. Adopting this trend, many women integrated estrogenic supplements like chasteberry, prepared meals with estrogenic chickpea pasta and sesame seeds, applied estrogenic lavender on their children and estrogenic CBD on their husbands.
The men's supplement industry has also embraced the PE trend, rebranding estrogenic fenugreek as 'free testosterone' and incorporating flax oil into testosterone injections. Over the last forty years, research has indicated a concerning trend: a 25% decrease in testosterone levels, a 52% drop in sperm counts, and an alarming study warns that if these trends persist, sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Decline in testosterone results from an excess of estrogen.
The widespread use of PEs has led to excess estrogen levels causing PMS, menopause symptoms, low testosterone, early puberty. Women were labeled ‘crazy’ when they tried to express their symptoms. Doctors didn’t listen and prescribed synthetic hormones and bio-identical estrogen to mask the side effects, similar to how addicts are treated. Breast cancer remains the second leading cause of death. It's reported that the identification of girls as transgender has surged by 4,000%. Doctors recommend hormone therapy.
Due to the public's and doctors' reluctance to acknowledge physiology, we've reached a critical precipice. Children are exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria, and signs of feminization among boys. Treat the root cause: reduce estrogen.
Phytoestrogens: the pill no one can swallow. Dr. Sellens' eighth book offers an extensive compilation of research on estrogen making it one of the most comprehensive sources on the subject.
Thanks for the reading suggestion, I'll have a go.
As to the one 'true' reason for this or that, I will say that I remain wary of such explanations; as I mention in my piece, these 'true cause of' pieces typically address a facet of a larger, more complex issue.
As to the matter at-hand, I do believe that synthetic hormones--both 'the pill' and the stuff people take in regularly through, e.g., tap water--compound the problems deriving from, among others, pesticides, herbicides, microplastics, and the like. This is before we talk about wireless ionising radiation from wifi, cell phones (which most people carry in their pockets thereby frying their genitals), electric vehicles (they seem like microwaves on wheels), etc. Feel free to add to the list.
Radical idea for the researchers you look at here: look at the curve from 1850 to today. If people in 1850 had 0.5 more children per woman than average, then people in 1870-1890 too will have more children than average. Or lower, when there's a dip.
That there's an overall down-arching trend isn't new, it's been that way since the 1950s.
And there's no /one/ single reason for dropping births or dropping pregnancies either. Another thing to consider is if the numbers used are produced by comparing registered pregnancies/woman with live births/woman (in Sweden, the child must rage age 1 to count as a live birth), and if abortions are part of the numbers or not. Let's say Finland had 20 000 abortions carried out last year. If those are added back into the data for pregnancies/woman over time, it is fully possible that the downward trend would leveled or even broken.
That's just a sample of issues with the reporting on pregnancies/births - it's a lot more complicated, but the numbers exist (especially in the Nordic/Scandinavian nations; if you are an accredited researcher you can get data at individual city block level of detail) and the methods for collating and presenting are well-known. It may be useful to start e-mailing the relevant agency for any nation and ask polite but well-defined pointed questions about births, SID, abortions and such. Just consider the impact if 0.3% of fertile women of any year of birth chooses to sterilise themselves each year. That alone skews things, just IVF treatments do.
Now, I'm not going to simply add these two numbers, but two things stand out: even if we assume, for the same of the argument, that 50% of aborted babies would be carried to term, the fertility decline would be virtually inexistent; if 75% of aborted children would be carried to term, there'd be an increase in live births.
That said, abortions were declining since 2013 (I don't have time to dig deeper now) and began to increase across the board from 2022 onwards, which indicates at least two major things: people became less careful (which would be in line with increases in STDs observed since the 2022 end of Covid mandates as well as with the many more 'sexual health'-themed posters in university toilets) and/or more wary of health-related issues (which would also explain, to a certain degree, the increasing number of sick days).
In short: by looking at but 'births' or one or the other individual factor (be it 'class', social media overuse, etc.), we lose sight of the proverbial picture. I suppose that your comment is quite accurate and points in a very interesting direction.
If you're looking for the One Big Cause, then it's "urbanization, stupid." I mean, it is. Cities have always been population sinks. It's a *good* thing that it's now happening via a reduction of fertility rather than an increase in infant mortality. (Back in the bad old days, city folk produced plenty of babies, but those babies just kept dying.) But yes, if you pack humans into cities, they simply will raise fewer children on average (whether due to few births or due to many infant deaths). Sure, a few thousand years of cultural and biological adaptation *might* change that, but then we're not talking about this generation, or the one after that, or the one after that.
As far as I'm concerned, population contraction is inevitable for the foreseeable future, I see it as more good than bad (good because there are too many humans on the planet, and bad because an inverted age pyramid causes all sorts of problems), though it is desirable to prevent catastrophically fast contraction a la South Korea. But South Korea is probably something of an outlier, having culturally cornered itself into a situation in which childhood is a miserable affair, raising a child is very expensive and very stressful, and if the child "fails" (i.e. does poorly one that one big exam), it's far worse than if you'd never had children to begin with. A cautionary tale for everyone else, though other (sub)cultures are inching in that direction.
Well put; it's inevitable, and I think the only parallel that makes sense is the mass migration 'debate': mass deportations won't happen, so it's kinda pointless to engage in shadow-boxing about it. I think it's far better to discuss consequences and how to address the complications for, say, elder care, the implications for the work life (too few hands on the shop floor), and, well virtually everything else.
Also, there's the issue of ever-smaller fields that are discussed with fewer and fewer people learning about correlated things, such as the abortion numbers mentioned by Rikard.
Yes, I agree with this. Here's the thing: much of our cultural technology is optimized for a large supply of young people. This includes both a very long education for the masses, and generous old age retirement for people who aren't all that old. This doesn't really work when the average person lives 80 years or so, and when every year there are fewer 20-somethings than there were the year before that. Also, to the extent that the economy changes rapidly (hello, AI, with all that it might entail), and 20-somethings become fewer and fewer in number, employers will need to get better at teaching new tricks to old dogs (y'know, 30- and 40- and even 50-somethigs). Some nations will adapt better than others, and those that adapt best will inherit the earth (so to speak). In the past few decades, Western countries have adapted by simply importing ready-made 20-somethings from other countries, and that kinda worked for a while, but it is working less and less well now. There is no Eastern Block waiting to collapse and send a large number of Western-ish young people to do the jobs that Western employers would like 20-somethings to do. (Suuure, there are plenty of Somalis who'd like to move to Europe, but y'know...)
It's not merely the 'optimisation' for more and more young people; any 'system' (ahem) that requires new adepts to pay for the existing members is, at best, what is called 'multi-level marketing', a scam, or a Ponzi scheme.
That's the most apt description of 'capitalism', classical, liberal, or neo-liberal.
It is, indeed, pretty funny when the most enthusiastic free market enthusiasts suddenly become anything but when it means that *they* have to pay more. So, when young people are in short supply, they don't conclude that they might just need to pay their workers more in order to attract and keep them. No, sir! It's them womyn who need to be forced to produce the missing babies. Or better yet, import ready-made young adults from elsewhere (and then throw a tantrum when those young adults turn out not to have been produced to the receiving country's cultural specifications).
The real reason for falling birthrates, Sterility, and Infertility. Men are being castrated by bioidentical estrogen.
Read, Soy Boys: The Rise in Low Testosterone & the Feminization of Men Due to Phytoestrogens https://a.co/d/c3hy6e4
In the 1980s, Dr. Hobbins, a researcher in thermography, alerted the public about the link between soy consumption and an increased risk of breast cancer. The introduction of soy into processed foods in the late 1970s coincided with an increase in breast cancer rates, from 1 in 11 in 1980 to 1 in 8 by 1992. Since 1979, there was a reported annual increase of 1% in the incidence of breast cancer among men, and testosterone levels have been decreasing by approximately 1% annually since 1980. Effects are seen in women first.
In terms of potency, a gram is a billion times stronger than a nanogram. While chemicals like Atrazine, BPA, and phthalates raise estrogen levels, the use of popular phytoestrogens (PE) has exponentially increased this estrogenic effect. This is exemplified by products like the Impossible Burger, which contains an estimated 18 million times more estrogen than a Whopper. Combining these findings with studies showing the transplacental transfer of soy from mother to fetus, and the ability of Japanese researchers to produce all-female catfish populations using soy, raises concerns.
Their 2013 publication marked a milestone as the first researchers to publish medical evidence that demonstrated flax and bio-identical estrogen increased risk of breast cancer with a chapter warning about the feminizing effects on men. Research indicates that one cup of soy has the estrogenic effect comparable to one birth control pill, and flax is twenty times stronger than soy.
However, doctors advocated the health benefits of plant-based lifestyles. Adopting this trend, many women integrated estrogenic supplements like chasteberry, prepared meals with estrogenic chickpea pasta and sesame seeds, applied estrogenic lavender on their children and estrogenic CBD on their husbands.
The men's supplement industry has also embraced the PE trend, rebranding estrogenic fenugreek as 'free testosterone' and incorporating flax oil into testosterone injections. Over the last forty years, research has indicated a concerning trend: a 25% decrease in testosterone levels, a 52% drop in sperm counts, and an alarming study warns that if these trends persist, sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Decline in testosterone results from an excess of estrogen.
The widespread use of PEs has led to excess estrogen levels causing PMS, menopause symptoms, low testosterone, early puberty. Women were labeled ‘crazy’ when they tried to express their symptoms. Doctors didn’t listen and prescribed synthetic hormones and bio-identical estrogen to mask the side effects, similar to how addicts are treated. Breast cancer remains the second leading cause of death. It's reported that the identification of girls as transgender has surged by 4,000%. Doctors recommend hormone therapy.
Due to the public's and doctors' reluctance to acknowledge physiology, we've reached a critical precipice. Children are exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria, and signs of feminization among boys. Treat the root cause: reduce estrogen.
Phytoestrogens: the pill no one can swallow. Dr. Sellens' eighth book offers an extensive compilation of research on estrogen making it one of the most comprehensive sources on the subject.
You can find Dr Wendy on IG at Www.instagram.com/estrogenfree
Her website that shows all phytoestrogenic plants and herbs to avoid that are leading to estrogen dominance.
Www.estrogen-free.com/the-diet
Show your support for the leading breast cancer prevention Dr & ACTUAL bioidentical hormone researcher/Whistle-blower!
Thanks for the reading suggestion, I'll have a go.
As to the one 'true' reason for this or that, I will say that I remain wary of such explanations; as I mention in my piece, these 'true cause of' pieces typically address a facet of a larger, more complex issue.
As to the matter at-hand, I do believe that synthetic hormones--both 'the pill' and the stuff people take in regularly through, e.g., tap water--compound the problems deriving from, among others, pesticides, herbicides, microplastics, and the like. This is before we talk about wireless ionising radiation from wifi, cell phones (which most people carry in their pockets thereby frying their genitals), electric vehicles (they seem like microwaves on wheels), etc. Feel free to add to the list.
Radical idea for the researchers you look at here: look at the curve from 1850 to today. If people in 1850 had 0.5 more children per woman than average, then people in 1870-1890 too will have more children than average. Or lower, when there's a dip.
That there's an overall down-arching trend isn't new, it's been that way since the 1950s.
And there's no /one/ single reason for dropping births or dropping pregnancies either. Another thing to consider is if the numbers used are produced by comparing registered pregnancies/woman with live births/woman (in Sweden, the child must rage age 1 to count as a live birth), and if abortions are part of the numbers or not. Let's say Finland had 20 000 abortions carried out last year. If those are added back into the data for pregnancies/woman over time, it is fully possible that the downward trend would leveled or even broken.
That's just a sample of issues with the reporting on pregnancies/births - it's a lot more complicated, but the numbers exist (especially in the Nordic/Scandinavian nations; if you are an accredited researcher you can get data at individual city block level of detail) and the methods for collating and presenting are well-known. It may be useful to start e-mailing the relevant agency for any nation and ask polite but well-defined pointed questions about births, SID, abortions and such. Just consider the impact if 0.3% of fertile women of any year of birth chooses to sterilise themselves each year. That alone skews things, just IVF treatments do.
Ha, the point about abortions is a good idea. I've had quick look (public health officialdom just published the 'abortion registry' for 2023: https://www.fhi.no/op/abortregisteret/abort---fakta-med-statistikk/#svangerskapsavbrot-i-2023), and here's what I found:
There were 51,980 live births in Norway in 2023 (source: https://www.ssb.no/befolkning/fodte-og-dode/statistikk/fodte) as opposed to 12,814 abortions (source as in the above-provided link).
Now, I'm not going to simply add these two numbers, but two things stand out: even if we assume, for the same of the argument, that 50% of aborted babies would be carried to term, the fertility decline would be virtually inexistent; if 75% of aborted children would be carried to term, there'd be an increase in live births.
That said, abortions were declining since 2013 (I don't have time to dig deeper now) and began to increase across the board from 2022 onwards, which indicates at least two major things: people became less careful (which would be in line with increases in STDs observed since the 2022 end of Covid mandates as well as with the many more 'sexual health'-themed posters in university toilets) and/or more wary of health-related issues (which would also explain, to a certain degree, the increasing number of sick days).
In short: by looking at but 'births' or one or the other individual factor (be it 'class', social media overuse, etc.), we lose sight of the proverbial picture. I suppose that your comment is quite accurate and points in a very interesting direction.
If you're looking for the One Big Cause, then it's "urbanization, stupid." I mean, it is. Cities have always been population sinks. It's a *good* thing that it's now happening via a reduction of fertility rather than an increase in infant mortality. (Back in the bad old days, city folk produced plenty of babies, but those babies just kept dying.) But yes, if you pack humans into cities, they simply will raise fewer children on average (whether due to few births or due to many infant deaths). Sure, a few thousand years of cultural and biological adaptation *might* change that, but then we're not talking about this generation, or the one after that, or the one after that.
As far as I'm concerned, population contraction is inevitable for the foreseeable future, I see it as more good than bad (good because there are too many humans on the planet, and bad because an inverted age pyramid causes all sorts of problems), though it is desirable to prevent catastrophically fast contraction a la South Korea. But South Korea is probably something of an outlier, having culturally cornered itself into a situation in which childhood is a miserable affair, raising a child is very expensive and very stressful, and if the child "fails" (i.e. does poorly one that one big exam), it's far worse than if you'd never had children to begin with. A cautionary tale for everyone else, though other (sub)cultures are inching in that direction.
Well put; it's inevitable, and I think the only parallel that makes sense is the mass migration 'debate': mass deportations won't happen, so it's kinda pointless to engage in shadow-boxing about it. I think it's far better to discuss consequences and how to address the complications for, say, elder care, the implications for the work life (too few hands on the shop floor), and, well virtually everything else.
Also, there's the issue of ever-smaller fields that are discussed with fewer and fewer people learning about correlated things, such as the abortion numbers mentioned by Rikard.
Yes, I agree with this. Here's the thing: much of our cultural technology is optimized for a large supply of young people. This includes both a very long education for the masses, and generous old age retirement for people who aren't all that old. This doesn't really work when the average person lives 80 years or so, and when every year there are fewer 20-somethings than there were the year before that. Also, to the extent that the economy changes rapidly (hello, AI, with all that it might entail), and 20-somethings become fewer and fewer in number, employers will need to get better at teaching new tricks to old dogs (y'know, 30- and 40- and even 50-somethigs). Some nations will adapt better than others, and those that adapt best will inherit the earth (so to speak). In the past few decades, Western countries have adapted by simply importing ready-made 20-somethings from other countries, and that kinda worked for a while, but it is working less and less well now. There is no Eastern Block waiting to collapse and send a large number of Western-ish young people to do the jobs that Western employers would like 20-somethings to do. (Suuure, there are plenty of Somalis who'd like to move to Europe, but y'know...)
It's not merely the 'optimisation' for more and more young people; any 'system' (ahem) that requires new adepts to pay for the existing members is, at best, what is called 'multi-level marketing', a scam, or a Ponzi scheme.
That's the most apt description of 'capitalism', classical, liberal, or neo-liberal.
It is, indeed, pretty funny when the most enthusiastic free market enthusiasts suddenly become anything but when it means that *they* have to pay more. So, when young people are in short supply, they don't conclude that they might just need to pay their workers more in order to attract and keep them. No, sir! It's them womyn who need to be forced to produce the missing babies. Or better yet, import ready-made young adults from elsewhere (and then throw a tantrum when those young adults turn out not to have been produced to the receiving country's cultural specifications).