Dr. Casey Means: Total infertility rates are going up 1% per year at a sustained rate.

"Total infertility rates are going up 1% per year at a sustained rate. Sperm counts are declining 1% per year. This is what happened since the 1970s. This is why we're at about 50% less sperm count on average.

A Harvard study recently showed that men who are obese have an 80% higher chance of having zero sperm in their semen. So this is a real issue. And it seems to be driven in large part by metabolic disease as well as the way that these endocrine hormone disrupting chemicals or affecting our hormone levels that are required to generate a healthy fertility in both men and women.

When we look at women the key cause of female infertility is polycystic ovarian syndrome, a misnomer. It's a metabolic reproductive syndrome. The NIH tried to change the name to metabolic reproductive syndrome about 10 years ago that was shut down.

This is a disease driven by high insulin levels which is a key element of metabolic dysfunction. Insulin is the hormone that takes sugar out of the bloodstream. High levels tell the ovaries to produce too much testosterone. This disrupts the delicate balance of sex hormones.

Women don't ovulate and therefore can't get pregnant. This is affecting up to 26% of women worldwide today.
When we look at men, low testosterone is a key cause of why we're not making sperm. But one of the reasons that we have low testosterone is because the abdominal fat around the midline that, of course, is growing every year with 74% obesity and overweight, this fat around the midline is actually metabolically active.

It has an enzyme on it called aromatase that actually converts testosterone to estrogen in men. So the fat around the midline in men is like a giant ovary that is converting to estrogen. This of course disturbs the balance of spermatogenesis and sperm council declining every year in proportion to how obese we're getting.

On top of all of this we are living in a world where it is ubiquitous that there are microplastics and pesticides on every single thing we touch, the air we breathe, the water we're drinking, and pesticides like Atrazine, which is illegal in other countries, but we spray about 70 million pounds of it on American farmland every year, it is an estrogenic compound.

It is impacting estrogen receptors. So in both men and women, it's driving extra estrogen load, and similarly with plastic, they are xenoestrogens, so they are estrogenic-like molecules that act on the receptors. So for all of these reasons, we are dealing with a species-level event where if these rates continue at the rate that they are, we can only imagine what's going to happen to our ability to reproduce in American society."