Why Are Sperm Counts Declining? (Episode 468)

Full Transcript: Episode 468

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Today I’m sharing my interview with Joe Whittaker. And in today’s episode, we are diving into sperm quality. And it’s a really interesting conversation. We get into the issue that many of you have heard of with the declining sperm counts. We get into what it is, how bad it is, and why it’s happening. And in this episode, I feel like we shed some light on some of the factors that you may have thought of, but other factors that you may not have considered. So a really interesting episode, of course, I focus on sperm quality a lot around here because after all, men are responsible for about 50 percent of infertility. And that’s something that we don’t necessarily think about, I mean, unless you’ve been listening to the podcast and you’ve heard that stat before. Generally speaking, people wouldn’t think that male factor infertility would be a factor, either the whole sole factor or contributing factor, 50 percent of the time for couples who are struggling to conceive, but that’s actually the case. So certainly I love highlighting sperm health at any opportunity I can because it’s so important in the equation of successful conception.

So before we start, I’ll share a little bit about Joe. Joe Whittaker is a nutritionist, personal trainer and researcher. His scientific work is focused on the effect of diet on men’s fertility and testosterone levels. His work has been published in top academic journals and widely featured in the media. He holds an MSc in nutritional therapy from the University of Worcester and is currently working towards his PhD. He also runs a private clinic helping clients optimize their health and well-being using diet and lifestyle strategies. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and tune into today’s episode with Joe Whittaker.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And I’m really excited to be here once again with Joe Whittaker. We had a really interesting, fascinating conversation a couple of years ago on male fertility, and I’m thrilled to have you back. I know you’ve been in the weeds with research, publishing a variety of papers, and I’ll make sure to link your recent research to today’s podcast page, but welcome back to the show.

Joe Whittaker: Thanks, thanks for having me on. You’re obviously not sick of me yet.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: No, I’m not, actually. I think your research is fascinating, and I always like the opportunity to talk about male fertility. You know, in the work that I do, I’m looking at the menstrual cycle and I’m working with women primarily and what I’ve found to be fascinating over the many years that I’ve been doing this work is that I’ve seen these women’s cycles, they’re trying to conceive and we can see when they’re fertile. You can see if they’re timing sex correctly. And it’s something else to see women have sex at the right time, cycle over, cycle over, cycle over, and to have nothing happen. And so this is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about talking about male fertility because we need to be discussing it. So yeah, so you recently released a paper and that is where I’m zoning in first, addressing or at least examining the question of this male fertility decline. So maybe share with us a little bit about that. I think the listeners have a bit of background there, but talk to us a little bit about what the research has said in terms of male fertility decline, like what’s going on, how much, well, I think people probably aren’t even, I don’t think people take this seriously enough to be honest with you.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the paper is kind of, it’s a beast really. I mean, it might deter anyone from actually reading the thing, but I can give you a synopsis at least. So yeah, I mean, I’m sure your listeners are probably aware of this. The main, there’s several meta-analyses, meta-analysis is just a combination of different studies. So it’s like a higher quality of evidence. There’s several of these now showing a decline in sperm concentrations. They basically just take the individual data points across time and then see if there’s a trend. And they all find this downwards trend. And it starts in about, the earliest data is like the 1930s. And then obviously it continues to present day. But the decline itself is pretty shocking. It’s about, they’ve roughly halved from kind of pre-World War II to present day. Well, the units, it’s about 100, 100 million per milliliter sperm concentration. That was kind of like the original pre-World War II. And now it’s like below 50. And if you want some kind of reference for that, below 15 is classed as kind of clinical subfertility. But actually, if you look at the data, fertility starts to decline below 50 million per milliliter. So it’s basically saying that like half of men now have impaired fertility compared to their counterparts earlier in the century.

And then this kind of sperm data is not isolated. It’s more limited, but there are several studies showing a decline in testosterone levels. They started in the ’70s, but who knows, maybe it was going on longer than that. And I know there are some researchers working on some bigger data sets in terms of that to really thoroughly examine it. And then, so you can see this sperm decline, testosterone seems to also be declining. It seems there’s also been like an increase in kind of male reproductive pathologies. So ones with very long and difficult to pronounce names, but like things like testicular cancer and cryptorchidism, which is kind of like a birth defect. And some limited data on gynecomastia, which is essentially man boobs in the common terminology. So those are also increasing. So the overall picture is that men’s fertility, men’s reproductive system, the health of that, has greatly suffered over the 20th century. And it doesn’t appear to be stopping, it just kind of appears to be continuing onwards.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and the birth defect that you mentioned, that’s the word for undescended testes, is that correct?

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Just to give a kind of a concrete example, some of the basic things that when I’m working with clients and we talk about how male fertility works, the testes are on the outside for a reason. It’s not just a fun feature, because the testes need to be a couple degrees cooler than the body in order to have optimal sperm production. So it’s a serious problem that can lead to serious issues if the testes aren’t functioning properly. So even just the increase in birth defects and it’s very interesting. I think the natural question of course is why, right? Like that question can take us the whole rest of our interview. Yeah, share with us some of the findings, some of the findings. Why is this happening? Why is there such a significant decline in male fertility? It is very significant to think that the average man back in the 40s had sperm concentration of 100 million sperm per milliliter or more. And in today’s day and age, the average man has less than 50 million. And the research is what it is, and that’s that. I wrote that stat in The Fifth Vital Sign coming from those. When you look at the data, the data is data, right? So if you and I are both looking at the data, we’re going to come to the same conclusion. Hopefully we’ll come to the same information. So why is that happening? I mean, for anyone, like, sorry, I feel like going on this tangent for just a second here, I feel like the gravity of the situation can’t be understood because if we continue on this trend, like what happens in 50 years? What happens in 100 years? If it continues on this downward trend, what’s the average man’s sperm concentration going to be in a hundred years? Like is it going to be zero because like that’s where we’re trending?

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, I mean it might be zero. I mean, who knows. Yeah, that’s why it’s trending. I mean it’s difficult to say with any certainty what will happen. Yeah, there used to be some initial skepticism with this but like the studies have piled on top of one another so there’s increasingly less and it’s increasingly hard to make a counter argument. I can talk about the causes like what I think is, because I mean I think why would it just be men? I mean there’s some suggestion of, you know, maybe they’re more susceptible like sperm are very fragile and the testes are kind of a fragile system in themselves. But I do think there may be a decline in female reproductive health, but it’s a lot more difficult to study because sperm, testosterone, that’s easy to measure. So you have to kind of look at it through different angles. So women on average, pre-industrial age, so like back in, I don’t know, it varies for different countries, but back in like the 18th century or something, in Europe, women on average would have five children. And now on average, they have two in kind of modern industrialized countries. And of course, a lot of that is behavioral, you know, people make different choices. They use artificial contraception to achieve the number of children that they want.

But some researchers are now kind of thinking maybe there was a decline in the ability to reproduce as well, because we’ve got that data from the men, but then maybe also there’s something with the women as well. What was probably the most interesting thing when I was doing this research is that I started looking at twinning rates because they’re a really good marker of fertility. So they do like twins per 1000 live births, so it’s kind of standardized like that. And in the literature, they noticed that from like the early 20th century to the 1980s that there’s this decline in twinning rates, and it’s not really explained why that’s happening. So you know, it might suggest, well, it might be something to do with sperm, like you know, only one’s getting up there, not two, but it also might be a combination of the females as well. But then, after 1980, they go up. It’s because, I’m sure you know this, medically assisted reproduction takes off, so you get IVF but also all the other techniques which now interestingly, those techniques, medically assisted reproduction, IVF and intrauterine insemination, they account for about 3.8 percent of European births now. So that also makes you think, you know, I mean, I’d be interested to hear your clinical perspective on this, if you think more and more couples are struggling to conceive, if you think there’s a temporal increase, you’re seeing more and more people.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I think that, I mean, the rate of infertility, they say, is one in six couples, about 15 percent. I think that there is, so my personal thoughts on that are that I do think there is an increase, as to why, is it because of an inherent drop in fertility? I think it’s more complicated than that. I think that social trends have changed and I’ve had this conversation with many clients and on certain interviews and things like that, but the current climate in our culture is not one that is favorable to young women who want to start families early, we all know this. So unfortunately, biologically speaking, the best time biologically, you know, don’t yell at me, I’m just saying, for a woman to have a baby is when she’s like literally early 20s or late teens. Like that’s when we are biologically like the egg quality is the highest, right? Like all of the things are kind of working in our favor. And it doesn’t even mean that there aren’t women in that age group who have challenges conceiving because there are. But biologically speaking, that is the kind of prime time. Ironically, that is also the time that we are like heavily not trying to have baby culturally from a societal perspective. And if you think about it, our culture doesn’t support it. It doesn’t. When you think about what is life like for a 19 year old woman, right? What is life like for her? She hasn’t started her career. She probably doesn’t have a lot of money, not a lot of stability. We’re not really even encouraged to get married that young. So it’s really, really hard. So what happens, I think you can see where I’m going with this, is that then our culture says, well, you have to have it all together, you have to have a stable relationship, you need to have your career, you need to have a home, you need to have all of these things. And so by the time we’re getting to this place where we’re self-perfect, all the t’s are crossed, i’s are dotted, we are in our 30s. We’re fully midway in our 30s too, a lot of women now. And so is it that there’s an inherent decline in fertility? Maybe, but also that we have to consider if you’re not even trying to start a family until you’re in your 30s, then the chances of you conceiving easily and having however many kids you want, like if you wanted to have four kids but you start when you’re 35, the chances of that happening are less than if you had started when you were 25. That’s my take on it. There’s obviously a lot more that could be said about that, but that’s a starting point to what I see is happening.

Joe Whittaker: That’s a fair point. I think that probably accounts for the lion’s share, definitely. Well, there was this group of researchers, and they pitted women in 1900 versus today, and they pitted them per age group of when they have children. And even then, they did see, so you started a family at 35 in 1900 versus today, they still saw a decrease. But it was obviously, it was five to two, not that figure, it would be like three to two or something, or three to two and a half. So maybe like the biological bit accounts for like one or one and a half of that and the majority is behavioral and cultural.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, I feel like I resonate with that. I would be hesitant to say that it’s all biological, the reason that people are having more difficulty conceiving, but there is definitely a component. So we have kind of a perfect storm of challenges for people. So it seems like it potentially could be harder for people because of these issues. Obviously with the sperm decline, I will beat that dead horse for the rest of my career because people really need to get on top of this and understand how important male fertility is to the equation because it does account for half, 50 percent, of the issues when couples are struggling with infertility, whether it’s solely male factor or a combination of male and female factor, it’s still 50 percent. And so from that perspective, we’ve got two challenges. One of the challenges is that the prime time to reproduce culturally is not prime time biologically. So we already have this situation where we’re both older and we do know that there’s some level of age-related decline that plays into fertility. But then we also have whatever it is that’s going on that’s causing male fertility to drop by 50 percent. So we also have this biological factor. And then, like you said, there has to be, it’s not like it’s only men out here. Obviously this decline has to be happening to both of us, but we just don’t have the same ability to measure it simply. So I’m there with you. And I think that we are seeing the issues with it. I wouldn’t have a career, right? If everything was just fine, if everyone could just easily conceive when they needed to, I wouldn’t need to be doing this podcast.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, I agree. It’s a thorny issue, but you’re well versed in it. You asked me about the causes. I can go into those if you want. Well, at least what I think, not just what I think, of course, it’s backed by evidence and other people. Well, if I stick to the, I know the male side best, but a lot of this may apply to women as well. An obvious thing is that rates of metabolic diseases, things like obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, they have just skyrocketed at the same time as this decline has taken off. And there’s no, the links, you know, they’re more than known. They’re becoming, as one would say, well-established. The obesity and diabetes, they’re well known to decrease testosterone levels. They also probably decrease sperm counts and there are some recent RCTs on it showing like when obese men lose weight, they have a large increase in their sperm concentrations. So that’s one obvious thing. And it’s not like a light problem. In terms of obesity, the current worldwide obesity rate is about 12 percent. But boy, if you just take quote unquote Western countries, so like Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, it’s like 30 percent. Although that figure is 2016. So I was doing this earlier, thinking what happens if you extend the line to 2023? And it’s like 35 percent. So it’s roughly like over a third of people in Europe and North America are obese. And then the figures for the other metabolic diseases, metabolic syndrome is estimated about 30 percent of the worldwide population has metabolic syndrome. It’s difficult to describe. It’s almost like a hybrid of obesity and diabetes. It’s kind of like a classic sign is like fat around the middle, but not elsewhere. Like skinny fat, like a dad bod almost. That’s kind of the metabolic syndrome. So that’s one obvious thing. And what’s underpinning that is not that hard to figure out. It’s the change in diet in combination with decreased physical activity.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Can I ask a question about obesity? Because I feel like when, as a person in the world, when I hear the word obesity, I picture someone who is on TV, right? Like who’s like 600 pounds. You kind of picture that. But then the medical definition of obesity is a little bit different. Like, are you able to define that a little bit for us? So we have a sense of like, who are we really talking about? 30 percent, we know that 30 percent of people are not like 600 pounds. So how are they defining obesity?

Joe Whittaker: So it’s a BMI of over 30. So I don’t know, what’s that for the average man? It’s like, probably like 90 kilograms for the average man or something like that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, so like almost 200 pounds, depending on the height and everything. But I guess I think you could see the point that I’m making where there’s a medical definition of obesity that is not the same as a social definition of obesity. And so when we’re looking at those rates, it’s like a different body composition than what you might think. So there’s a lot of people who would meet that definition, but you would see them and you wouldn’t think that they’re obese. But that also, it’s because we are living in a different time now. And we’re used to seeing people that are a lot larger than they ever could, like in the 1900s, there just were not people that were that large. So a person who is just considered a normal, kind of heavier weight, heavier set today, would potentially have been considered obese back then.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, well, almost like well over half in Western countries are overweight, so that’s outside the normal range. I suppose if above 30 BMI is clinically obese, probably what people imagine is obese is like 40, like the extreme kind of cases. And in 1900, there was like barely anyone, probably just a few rich people. They were the only ones who could even afford enough food to get obese.

It’s obviously the change in diet. They use this term, it’s called nutrition transition, which is like the transition from pre-industrial kind of agricultural unrefined diet. So you’re thinking like, what would a farmer eat, kind of like that. And then it shifts to the semi-refined diet where you start getting increases in sugar and vegetable oils, refined ingredients that people can use. And then eventually it transitions to our diet now, to highly refined modern processed foods, in kind of the late industrial stage. And obesity does seem to rise in the initial stages. But it’s really that late stage where you get the ultra-processed foods, which is not just, you know, it’s the things you’re thinking about like candy bars, chocolate, and soft drinks, but it’s also the prepackaged meals, like pizzas, just very ready to consume, easy to eat. And the reason they stimulate obesity is that they’re basically hyper-palatable. So your body normally has a way of regulating its appetite, but that kind of gets deranged when you eat these hyper-palatable, very calorie-dense foods. And so it enables you to overeat essentially. And obviously if you overeat in the long term, you’ll put on the weight. So that’s why it’s very key. It’s almost like the common notion of obesity is the willpower theory. It’s just a lack of willpower. But it doesn’t really add up if you think these rates are skyrocketing. Everybody’s not losing their willpower. It’s almost like these foods, as I said, they increase your appetite, and they enable you to eat more. So it’s quite hard to eat those foods in moderation, especially in the long term.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, and it’s not incidental. So I don’t have a lot of background in food science, but there’s a field where these companies, so it’s not incidental. It’s not like you just buy these candy bars and they just happen to taste the way they do. There are entire departments in these companies where they research flavors and spend millions of dollars to get the flavors just right to get you addicted to the foods. I don’t know if you know anything about that, we don’t need to go into that rabbit hole. But just to put it out there, to your comment of it’s not just about willpower. I don’t think that the average consumer really knows how much effort, money, education goes into that food that you buy, that thing that you pull out of that bag or whatever, that treat that you have. We don’t really realize how much thought has gone into making it as addictive as possible so that we spend as much money as possible with these companies.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like David and Goliath. You’ve got these massive multinational corporations. Yeah, they have scientists. I remember, I mean, there’s loads in terms of that, you know, they’ll balance exactly the amount of fat, the amount of salt, the amount of sugar, the density of the foods to get the perfect flavor combination, which is, you know, it way surpasses anything you could really create naturally. Although on the other hand, professional chefs actually use very similar techniques, especially in the desserts, to kind of create this candy-like intensity of flavor.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, it’s not just the flavor. Like I remember hearing something about getting the crunchiness just right so that it makes the right sound. It’s this whole thing. So that’s a big piece of it. I mean, that’s a whole, maybe I should find a food scientist and interview, that would be really interesting. So I mean, we don’t have to go totally down the weeds there, although it is really fascinating. But I think that it is useful to think about that for a moment, because I think, especially for the listeners of this podcast, or if you’ve been consuming content about food, it’s easy for us to be like, “Yeah, yeah, we know food.” But sometimes I think we’ve got to take a pause and think about it. It’s not just food. Like this is a multi-trillion dollar business. And these companies are actively doing everything they can to make us want to eat more. And none of that is related to health and making us healthier. It’s not part of the equation. The food isn’t even food anymore. It’s a product. So it’s worth thinking about. And I think that it’s really interesting to think about how, like what you said about the chart and how it’s going up. And to be honest with you, when I’m thinking about the sperm dropping, that’s not the first thing that comes to mind, yet it is likely one of the absolute most, if not the most, relevant factors in the gradual sperm decline.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah. The chemicals are a major cause as well, obviously, they’re purported to be. But with those ultra-processed foods, if you think about the foods they displace, so they displace the more nutrient-rich foods: fruits, vegetables, nuts, meat, fish, and they’re replaced by these highly refined foods that most of the nutrients are stripped out of. And there’s quite a bit of evidence in terms of vitamins and minerals and the micronutrients and then phytonutrients, the chemicals in plants, improving men’s fertility, like sperm concentrations, when they give them supplements of these nutrients to isolate the effects. And it makes you think, because these processed foods are displacing the more nutrient-rich foods, so you would think that our nutrient intake may be lower, although you have to balance that with people actually eating more. So it’s kind of like a Catch-22. But I mean, it’s plausible that we had more nutrients in the past and that supported male fertility and now we have less and it doesn’t support as much.

There’s some other interesting stuff in terms of even the way the foods have grown. So over the last 100 years, they’ve increasingly selected high yield crops. So crops that they grow on the same amount of land, but they grow bigger than their predecessors. And it’s interesting actually what happens because when you grow more of the food, you get more calories, but you actually don’t get more minerals. It’s kind of like it dilutes them, you know, like blowing up a balloon. There’s still the same amount of balloon there. It’s just taking up a bigger space. So even trends like that, and then you’ve got the pesticides or agrochemicals, it’s the broader term of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and it’s something pretty well studied in mice. High doses of them will cause outright male infertility. Of course, we don’t get high doses, we just get very small doses, unless you’re eating organic foods. And so it’s more controversial whether that has an effect, because it’s properly difficult to study. I mean, you can do it in mice, but how are you going to do it in humans? But there may be some link in terms of we’re now exposed to all these chemicals that we weren’t before. And yeah, they’re not doing gonads any good.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, it’s so interesting to think about all the different reasons why the sperm is declining. And I’m glad that you focused on the metabolic issues and the obesity issue and really talked a little bit about the food aspect. For me, it’s not about necessarily eating more food in a general sense, but it’s about adding in specific foods that tend to be more nutrient dense. And so for anyone who listens to the podcast, I’m the one talking about, you know, liver and organ meats and looking at some of those ancestral type foods that when you look at the micronutrient makeup, they’re a lot higher, they’re a lot denser. And then taking some inspiration from what people did before all of this industrialization. They ate all the bits. So back in the day, they would cut up the animal and eat all of it and make broth with the bones and all of that. So it wasn’t just selective eating of only muscle meats or whatever the case was.

And so it is really interesting to think about that and the way you described making it so that we can grow more food on the same piece of land, but having that food then come out not to have the same nutrient density. So just as an anecdote, you know, when I was growing up, my dad had this big garden. He still has it. I think it’s big for the size of a regular home, right? In a small city or whatever. And he always made more food than what we could handle and he would always have to give away food. And so my husband and I have this whole thing where he likes to buy frozen peas and I can’t stand to eat frozen peas. And he’s kind of like, “Oh, you don’t like peas?” And I’m like, “No, no, those aren’t peas.” So we could laugh about this all day, but the peas that my dad grew in his garden, they taste like, to me, that’s what peas taste like. They taste so good. They’re just delicious. I can eat them all day. And when I eat the frozen peas, sorry, whoever makes these peas and freezes them for mass consumption, they don’t taste like peas to me. And so I often wonder for those individuals, a lot of people who just never really had that experience of having fresh food from the garden, garden to plate kind of scenario, and you’re eating this manufactured food that’s being grown on this one piece of land pumping out all this extra food with the help of petroleum-based fertilizer, and giving us food that doesn’t taste as good. Honestly, it just doesn’t. And the taste is related to the nutrient profile, I’m sure. How many people don’t even know what food tastes like? I often wonder that. I don’t know if you’ve thought about that too, but it relates to what you were describing.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s typically the phytonutrient content, the plant chemicals that impart the flavors on the food. And they’re known to be higher in organic foods. It doesn’t necessarily have to have an organic label, but vegetables you’re growing in your back garden are going to have a lot more phytonutrients than the mass-grown ones. Yeah, they taste a lot better. It’s funny, you mentioned the liver thing, because I was talking to my sister-in-law the last time I was on, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I went on this podcast, it’s called Fertility Friday.” And she was like, “Oh my God, I love that podcast. That’s my favorite one.” And she told me, she actually, she used to be a vegan, or she went for a bout of veganism whilst they were trying to conceive, and then she started listening to your podcast and then like a day after, she was like telling her husband, “We need liver, get me liver.” And like two weeks later she got pregnant, but she got pregnant with twins.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well that’s incredible. I feel like that’s a hard one to be like, if you started two weeks ago, to say that it was directly related. But that is fascinating. That’s such a nice compliment. You’ll have to tell her thank you.

Joe Whittaker: The, when we’re talking about the causes, there’s another strand that’s kind of underappreciated. The general term I want to use is epigenetics. So genetics are heritable characteristics passed on through the genes. So those don’t change. Whereas epigenetics are environmental influences from your parents that are passed on to you. So it’s like the genes, you have the coded genes in each cell, and then around that, there’s the kind of epigenetic makeup. So it’s almost like a little jacket. Depending on if that jacket gets torn or if it’s well looked after, it’s like passed on.

In mice, they use mice a lot because it’s really easy to study this kind of thing, whereas in humans, it’s much more difficult. They find that if you have obese parents, then you’re vastly predisposed to obesity. It’s worse if you’ve got two obese parents than one. And then, even if they give the mice a normal diet, the children mice still overeat. And if they give them a quote unquote obesogenic diet, so like the McDonald’s diet or something, they overeat even more. And then if the mother mice, the maternal mice, if they’re obese, the male offspring will have poor sperm, even on a normal diet. So I think part of this decline in sperm is, it’s progressively, each generation is kind of getting weaker and weaker. And so when the male babies are coming out of the womb, to some extent, they’re already kind of a step behind their fathers.

And one of the most pressing studies, you probably, I’m sure you’ve read this study, it’s called Pottenger’s Cats. So this guy in the 1940s called Francis Pottenger, he took loads of cats, hundreds of cats, and he bred them for successive generations. And he put some cats on the optimal diet for cats, like raw meat and raw milk. And then he put others on increasingly refined diets. And he found the ones on the optimal diets, they bred successfully over the generations, and there wasn’t any deterioration. But the ones on the worst diets, they increasingly got reproductive problems. And they also got all sorts of other problems like autoimmune diseases and allergies. But those cats on the worst diet, when he bred them, he could only breed them three generations. And then they just could not breed anymore. Which is kind of crazy. But on a more positive note, he did find that if you gave the worst cats the optimal diet, that in three generations, the three generations went back up, they’re back to the health that they should be.

I’ll just say one last thing on that study, because a lot of people use it and say that it shows that humans should eat a raw food diet, which it doesn’t, because obviously humans and cats have different diets. But you can take the principle that it’s showing cats on worse diets, because basically when you cook foods, the amino acid taurine gets broken down and cats can’t synthesize that, whereas we can. So it doesn’t quite translate, but you can take that principle of degeneration on a suboptimal diet. And then actually, interestingly, if you’ve heard of Weston A. Price and his studies, the cats also got the same, you know, they get overlapping teeth and stuff, which is very interesting.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, I have his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. So the cat study sounds very similar. I mean, if anything, it should give us pause. So what’s interesting, as I’m sure you know from the research, we talked about this decline and how the average man from the 40s versus the average man today, what would be interesting is to look at the data set and to look at the percentiles. So you have the average, but you’d have the percentile, like the 97.5, the highest and the lowest. Because even today, if the average is that, you still have men who have really high sperm. You still, if you were to do a random sample, you would still have men that have the really high amount. I’m getting to a point with this. But I guess to put that out there, to say that there is hope. And if you do things differently, you don’t have to be the average. You can certainly do a lot of things to be beyond the average.

But to take it back to the cat study, which I’m going to track down and read now, and the whole concept of Weston A. Price. So for anyone who’s not familiar with that, he was a dentist, and he traveled the world. And he wanted to figure out why it was that some of these groups of people, these cultures, even though they were not touched by modern civilization, why they had perfect teeth, because he was a dentist. So he was looking at bone structure and he was trying to figure out, why is it that these people who are basically living outside of modern society, they’re living in low resource settings, living off the land, why is it that when he goes into these communities, these individuals have all their teeth, including their wisdom teeth, plenty of room in the jaw, no cavities at all, even though some of them didn’t even brush their teeth, because we’re talking about different cultures that were not touched by modern civilization.

So why is that? And he studied the foods and he did a whole thing about the nutrient profile of the foods and everything. And basically, like the cats, discovered that when you had populations that were eating no ultra-processed food or processed food, none of the sugary stuff that we eat all the time, and when they were eating predominantly off the land, and that was a combination of the whole animal nose to tail, lots of raw dairy products, basically the stuff you would eat if you literally didn’t live in a city and you actually had to produce your own food. And so it’s all very interesting and terrifying to think that these animals in the cat study lost their ability to reproduce in three generations. Obviously we’re human, we’re different, we have a broader variety of food, we’re not in a lab. But given that at the top of our call today, given that we started from the place of saying that fertility has dropped in half in terms of what men are putting out, obviously we’re down the wrong road. We’re the wrong cat group. We are eating the wrong stuff.

Joe Whittaker: Francis Pottenger, he died shortly after completing those studies, but him and Weston A. Price were going to do some research. There’s the Price-Pottinger Foundation, which provides a lot of that research. They’re really interesting. You can see the original papers from the 40s.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, if anyone is really like, if you’ve never heard of it before, or you didn’t know, the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, I’ll link it. But it’s a really interesting book because he did travel, and he took pictures. And so he shows you the difference of the teeth. I always say it’s like kind of not politically correct, right? But if I were to describe it, I would say, this was the time before everybody had, not everybody, but the majority of the population had access to modern dental work. So you see these pictures of people, and I often wonder, because we have all this amazing dental work, we have dentists and orthodontists, we have all of this stuff. So when you’re seeing people, most of the people, at least in Canada where I live, most people have, by the time they’re adults, if they have issues with their teeth, often they’re minimal. Well, I’ll just put it that way, because I do know that everyone doesn’t have access to dental care. But the point is that if we didn’t have modern dental care, what would everyone’s teeth look like?

Joe Whittaker: It’s the stereotype that British people have bad teeth, but they’ve been industrialized the longest out of everyone so they’ve had sugar. They were the first guys on the scene. Yeah, I wonder what it’d be like. I mean, if we didn’t have modern dentistry, we would have a lot worse teeth. Interesting, one of the places he went, it’s the first chapter in that book, is Stornoway, which is the Outer Hebrides, which is Scotland. That’s actually where my mum was actually born there. And yeah, I talked to her about the diet and there’s like an unrefined diet. One of the dishes was they’d bake oats and fish and then like a fish’s liver or something. And they’d bake all that up and that was a traditional dish. She loved it when I told her, “Oh Mum, your hometown is in this book.”

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s awesome. But yeah, it’s so interesting to think, but I guess to bring it all home, right? This conversation has been really fascinating. We’ve gone in a lot of different directions, but based on your research and even our conversation, where do we go from here? What is the solution? I think we’ve touched on a couple things, but for women who are listening who are concerned about their partner’s sperm health, maybe trying to conceive hasn’t been happening as quickly as they had hoped. I find that the stereotype for my experience is that the women, because we’re the ones who have the cycles, we’re the ones who carry the babies and have the visual evidence of fertility, we are often focused on what we can do to fix ourselves. So when I’m working with fertility clients, they are usually the ones coming to me with a supplement list that they’re taking a mile long. They’ve given up everything that they used to like to eat. They’re on board, they’re doing everything. They’re running the marathon themselves. And then stereotypically, tongue-in-cheek, their partner is like drinking beer on the couch. So not to throw the men under the bus. Obviously every man isn’t doing that. But just to go with the stereotypical example to drive the point home, is that we’re prepared as women to kind of do all the work. And it slips our mind. We don’t really even think about his contribution. So where do we start?

Joe Whittaker: It’s not a stereotype. Men are a bit lazy. Where you start with the guys, number one is weight loss. So you’ve got to get a healthy weight. And I mean, there’s loads of ways you can do it. So I won’t go into detail, but that’s number one, get into a healthy weight. That’ll boost your testosterone and it will increase your sperm count, particularly if you’re very overweight.

Then you can focus on the nutrient-rich foods. A particular one you want to pay attention to is omega-3 fatty acids found in oily fish. You could take them as a supplement. Then the most important minerals are selenium, zinc, magnesium. Selenium, like Brazil nuts, a few Brazil nuts a day. Zinc, things like red meat. Magnesium, most people are deficient in it, so I’d buy a supplement for that. Do like 200 milligrams a day, it’s like half the RDA, and then you’ll get the other half in your food.

Specifically for vitamins: B9, B12, C and E. So the foods for Vitamin C are fruits and vegetables, particularly fruits. E is things like avocados, nuts, the quite healthy fats. And the B vitamins you should get in your diet. Then I would suggest most of those nutrients you get in your diet. You can look at the different foods. You can take what’s called nutraceuticals, or just supplements in everyday parlance. The best ones for men’s fertility: CoQ10 and carnitine. Interestingly, carnitine, the only real dietary source is beef. So you can have loads of steaks and I’m sure it’ll do you good.

And then in terms of the diet, phytonutrients. So again, you can take supplements, the top ones being like lycopene, curcumin, or resveratrol. But you’re probably best just trying to get as many of those, a broad spectrum of those, in your diet. So lots of fruits and vegetables, colored plant food. That would be like one of the last supplements on your list, if nothing else was working. And then there’s a few studies on walnuts boosting sperm motility. So walnuts.

So that’s the diet. The other kind of just general housekeeping: exercise, decent sleep. You don’t have to quit alcohol, but limit it. No smoking and no drugs. And then the last thing your listeners will be very familiar with is try to reduce your exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemicals. So basically, those nasty chemicals, and where you’ll find those most in terms of diet is plastics. Avoid foods that are, especially liquids, that are contained in plastics. Never heat food in plastic. So try if you can, store it in glass and buy foods that are not in plastic. It’s okay if it’s just loosely in a plastic bag, like rice or something, but it’s the ones that are in contact.

And then I’d say you could do organic foods to avoid pesticides. I know that’s more expensive, so some people might not. And then, I keep saying this is going to be the last thing, I said there’s two last things, because it’s turning into a long list. Trans fats, they’re mostly phased out now, but avoid them. They’re normally found in processed kind of baked goods. And then mercury is not good. It’s not good for anyone. It’s also not good for men. And where you find that is in large fish. So if you want to get your omega-3s from fish, yeah, get them from fish, just choose the smaller fish like salmon, mackerel, anchovies, herring, or kippers, and avoid the large fish like tuna, swordfish. I think in the U.S. you have something called king mackerel or something. So avoid the large ones because they accumulate mercury. Focus on the small ones.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: So that’s a kind of a whistle-stop tour. Well, I think that the good news about male fertility is that there is often a lot of things you can do to see tangible improvements. It’s a little bit different. For example, for women working on egg quality, obviously you can track the menstrual cycle and see improvements there for someone who is into that. But it’s a little bit less, like you can’t pull out your ovary and just pull out a bunch of eggs. It’s just not a thing. So I think one of the positive things with tracking male fertility is that there is hope. And if the results are very, very bad, very poor, then it is important also to follow up with a medical professional to make sure that there’s no functional problems with the sperm production.

So it’s a big topic, but I feel like you covered a lot with your list and hopefully what the listeners are taking away from this conversation is just that, the way I often describe it to my clients is that when we talk about it in this macro kind of level, it’s not just to say, “Oh, your partner did something wrong, that’s why his sperm is low.” If you do a sperm test and the sperm isn’t ideal, it’s not just something your partner did. This is a worldwide problem. And like I said, I think it should be on the front page of every newspaper. We should be really concerned about this trend. I don’t know why we’re not more concerned about it to be honest with you. Maybe we’re distracted by all the things that are happening in the world, every day there’s a new thing. But this is a big one, because if we continue trending down this path, then at some point, we’re going to have a really big problem, a much bigger problem, where it’s going to be a lot harder for couples to conceive. So hopefully, through the work that you continue to do in the research and everyone else who’s working in this field will get some more attention to this topic.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, I think on an individual basis, there’s loads you can do to fix it, even if you’ve got terrible sperm quality. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s loads of resources out there. So you’ll be able to get adequate. On a societal level, I don’t know, maybe people just want to eat McDonald’s. In terms of the regulation of politicians, they should focus on the most impactful things. But it’s much more on an individual basis, you can do it, you can fix it, but yeah, it’s much harder on a societal scale.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, that’s a whole other thing. Well, this has been such a great conversation. Where can the listeners go to find out more about you? I’m going to make sure to link to the research papers that you’ve been working on and I’ll link to the previous episode we did together, because if you really enjoyed today’s conversation, you’ll definitely want to go back and listen to our first episode together. But tell us what you’ve been working on and where we can go to find more information about you.

Joe Whittaker: Yeah, well, there’s obviously the papers, as you said. Best place, just go to my website, joewhittakernutrition.com. You can find the information there. I’m not really on social media. It’s too crazy for me. So yeah, go to the website.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And when would you have time to do all of this research honestly if you were spending all your time on social media? I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much for being here. This has been such a treat.

Joe Whittaker: All right, cool. Thanks so much for having me on.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/468. I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode all about sperm quality. I find it just to be such an important topic. I’m sure you could tell by my responses. I just don’t understand why everybody isn’t talking about this and why it’s not on billboards. You know, it’s a pretty big deal that if we continue in this downward spiral trend in terms of sperm quality, then within a generation or two, the average man isn’t really going to have a whole lot of sperm to speak of, and it’s going to be exceedingly difficult for people to conceive naturally. And it’s certainly time to look at those numbers and start to question why and turn this cycle of declining fertility around.

And interestingly, I think that at least with men with sperm counts, we can quantify what’s going on, but with women, we don’t do a corresponding egg count. So what is the corresponding loss of fertility happening on the female side that we just can’t easily measure? So I’ll leave you with that interesting thought. I think fortunately we have the ability to support our fertility, improve our hormones in a variety of different ways. And so I think that’s the hope here. The first thing to do is to identify the problem. And then of course the second thing to do is to figure out what we can do to resolve it and improve the situation. So, with that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, weekend, whenever you’re tuning into the show. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.