🚨 Crazy Talk 🚨

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the way birthrates are collapsing all over the place and this is often associated with higher income people wanting fewer children.

However that doesn’t really make sense, unless income is negatively correlated with sexual activity and I doubt it is, or it hasn’t ever been shown.c

So why are birth rates collapsing and why do wealthy countries lead this?

1). Sperm counts have collapsed. Everywhere that births are down, sperm counts are down. It’s not some choice, it’s not abstinence or contraceptive. It’s sperm. The data is in and wealthy sperm is bad sperm.

Why does sperm go bad in wealthy countries when poorer countries don’t have this issue?

2). Nanoplastics are everywhere. Nanoplastics are smaller than microplastics, nanoplastics are actually small enough to diffuse across the cell membrane and into cells. Whilst your skin is good at defending your body from this kind of stuff by dropping dead cells, it’s much tougher on the inside.

Last year medical studies measured that mice who ingested nanoplastics would become infertile because nanoplastics accumulates in the testes! They observed nanoplastics accumulating in mice testing and this correlated with infertility.

More recently scientists discovered that bottled water measurably contains 100,000x more nanoplastic than previously thought…

This seems like a smoking gun, it seems like lung cancer and smoking.

It seems that plastic packaging of food and drinks causes infertility we now have a mechanism for the hypothesis and this hypothesis is very strongly correlated with data of national wealth, sperm counts, and fertility rates across world population groups.

So fellas… no plastic bottles, no plastic packaged food.

But perhaps more so… boys and young men should definitely not be eating / drinking this stuff.

I think some governments are going to put all this together and figure this out in the next couple of years. But no need to wait for that.

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Discussion

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We're so screwed. Here in Japan everything is double wrapped, it's ridiculous.

found that odd too when visiting. especially as in my head japan is all about functionalism and not overdesigning things.

any idea why is it done so over there?

Probably to achieve perfection, preserve flavor and freshness.

Someone should like… send the university of Tokyo geniuses a hint …

hmm, maybe there's also the psychological part of excitement included when initially unboxing something new, and the satisfying feeling of that.

Plastics are the new cigarettes

I think not.

Birth rate in humans is not related to fertility. Humans get hundreds or thousand chances to reproduce over their lifetime. Sperm counts number in the millions even if they are less viable. The chances that fertilisation happen and a successful pregnancy follows are super super high anywhere.

The way I see it: Richer people have better access to contraception, higher child survival rate, higher costs of education and have children at an older age. So they have fewer kids and fovus more resources per kid.

The trend is the same as poor countries turn into developed countries everywhere on earth.

The better predictor for number of kids per woman is whether the woman attended primary school. It shapes how she views family and contraception.

If microplastiscs are the problem we would see enormous lines in the fertility clinics around (people want to have babies but they can't for some reason). That's not the case, though. In fact, we see more and more people going to fertility clinics to freeze their eggs/sperms and not to get help in having babies.

Maybe microplastics are affecting the unplanned pregnancies. But I would argue that is a good thing. No body wants **unplanned** pregnancies.

I am not disputing that microplastics are bad for you or that it is affecting fertility. But the idea that they are the cause of the birth rate collapse is overblown. The effect of microplastics in the total birth rate is tiny.

People just don't want babies. Period.

So pleasant to see rationally constructed takes in a calm, collected tone. Thanks

You missed the fact that sperm counts are down by 70%. Are men choosing to have lower sperm counts?

He did not miss it: „I am not disputing that microplastics are bad for you or that it is affecting fertility.„

Do you have any evidence that poorer countries have less exposure to plastics?