Well, he is a lunatic for different reasons, but the reason for declining testosterone is not because of a crime, a plot, or correlating to a lack of masculinity, heavily masculine individuals still exist en masse, rather the average is being brought down by associated factors including average USA population increases in weight, diabetes, and of course age (See the Table below). Other factors that haven’t necessarily been proven to effect us on this scale, but probably do, is the move away from meat. While strictly veganism and vegetarian demographics have declined in recent years depending on who you ask, meat-replacement markets have grown massively in the last two decades.
There is no current widespread deficiency or emergency. Even with lower Testosterone levels most males are sufficient to remain healthy, even the chart shows that all but one blip of the collected data is above the 350 mark which is considered safe.
EDIT: Looks like consumption of fat contents in meat inversely correlates with testosterone, so vegans might actually be more masculine by that definition.
A quick literary search suggests there is no evidence linking a vegan diet with a reduction in testosterone. In fact, most studies found an small but significant increase in testosterone with specifically vegan men.
A simple google search shows nothing that backs up your claim, odd that you would have made it.
I used words like “not proven to” and “probably” as reasons to express doubt, but yeah it looks like it was a recent controversy with men’s health magazine and several studies going back about at least a decade disprove it citing a very clear inverse correlation with higher fat concentration in meats.
Odd that you would concentrate on the one claim OP himself says is a weak link, especially when the influence of veganism would be so much less than age and obesity. Odd that you wouldnt look into the connection of age/obesity and T-levels.
Being a vegan, I like to stay abreast of the literature, and I’d never heard of a link between veganism and low T-levels. I quickly checked it, there’s no link (in fact the opposite seems more likely), so it seemed like an unnecessary dig at veganism for no reason. I don’t have a vested interest in any of the other claims OP made, so that’s why I picked at that one. You don’t have to fact check an entire comment to have an issue with one point.
EDIT: Looks like consumption of fat contents in meat inversely correlates with testosterone, so vegans might actually be more masculine by that definition.
Could you please provide your source for that? I would like to read more on that.
To be clear the fat contents correlate with the lower testosterone, but the same was not true for high carbohydrate diets, so it’s a correlation specifically with high fat meats.
Oh come on, everyone in normal countries knows that gun and tiny-penis truck ownership is directly correlated to miniscule genitalia, there’s not really a surprise here
A useful approximation of normal T levels in humans can be seen in present day hunter gatherers in Africa. The Hadza tribe was shown to have an average level of 151pmol/l, well below that of what we see in societies such as America. We can, therefore, argue that the reduction of T levels in modern man over the last few years is a shift back towards the norm.
However, both populations experience suboptimal access to energy, and consequently maintain minimal levels of body fat and low BMI
You are citing a malnourished population.
Previous studies of non-western populations have revealed inconsistent associations between men’s testosterone levels and paternal or marital status. | Twenty-seven Hadza participants | Eighty Datoga participants
This is a comparitively small study, and one which contradicts other bodies of research.
As with male birds, it seems likely that testosterone facilitates reproductive effort in the form of male–male competition and mate-seeking behaviour, both of which interfere with effective paternal care.
Given the increasing social atomisation of the west (see:average age of fatherhood, number of children had, divorce rates), the hypothesis proposed by this paper implies testosterone levels in the west should be increasing not decreasing.
Look, I get the desire to debunk redpillers, but when we’re talking about a worldwide trendline in basic biology you’re going to need more research than this to do so. The Male infertility crisis is a genuine problem field experts are extremely worried about, hence the need for research and coverage by the mainstream (to stop snake oil salesmen being the main point of contact for this issue).
i think male infertility is probably less of an issue when we consider that most people born now, do not want to have kids, based on the pure fact that it’s too expensive, time consuming, and grueling in the modern era.
Unless that’s what you mean by male infertility. But last i checked that’s not what that means. Perhaps even male infertility is going up because people want less children? Sign of the times sort of a deal, who knows, science is fucked! Or actually, it might be a result of better medical services, allowing people with worse fertility to have children now, when they previously wouldn’t have been as likely to have children. Perhaps a result of decreasing infant mortality. Though i frankly doubt that’s a significant factor.
that’s just what happens when you become a highly educated society. They have less children, and since they have less children, there is less productivity.
Most people born now do still want to have kids. Even in my famously childless country (UK) 50% of women will have a child by the age of 30 (and a great many more afterwards.). Antinatalism remains a fringe belief.
What people do want is fewer children later. This actually makes the fertility crisis (which is very much more than a behavioural phenominon, you can jizz onto a microscope slide to get hard empirical data) a more significant issue. Since fertility decreases with age, changes that might’ve gone unnoticed when people had kids at 25 become catastrophic when people instead chose 35.
Perhaps you don’t want kids, that’s fine, I respect your choice. Most people actually still do! If this health effect is the result of (as some experts suspect) micro-plastic leached EDC’s (an environmental pollutant we have no suitable method of removing, which has a significant lag from production to release, and whose associated industry continues to expand) then saying “it’s no big issue we don’t need to worry about it” is (in essence) endorsing the forced sterilisation of many hundreds of millions, without their consent.
That is still a maybe, the evidence is far from conclusive, but do we really want another global-warming scale crisis on our hands just to dunk on Ben Shapiro?
i mean yeah, this is true, but one thing that you have to be careful of as a society, especially when you have a significant population, is keeping your general population swing balanced. If 80% of one generation has kids, and then 50% of those kids have kids, That original generation is going to be a significant burden on society, purely because they outnumber the working class of the society.
Fewer children would definitely have that knock on effect, but what i still see being a significant problem is the social incentive for people to have kids. And when you have a society that is generally not conducive to having children, people are going to be less likely to have children. That’s not a bad thing i suppose, but i don’t think it’s safe to rely on people who do want to have children, regardless.
Just to be clear here, anti-natalism is the belief that humanity as a whole, should collectively stop having children, as the lack of suffering would outweigh gained positive experience. It has almost nothing to do with this conversation, other than being an extreme side, much like forcing women to get pregnant and have children, would also be an extreme.
And i also never said that infertility wasn’t an issue, i just think it’s probably less pressing than building a society that people want to have children in.
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