Sunlight, nicotine, and sex help too. Avoid too much alcohol and weed. Low T is a crisis that has resulted in soy boys and Karens turning our institutions into dysfunctional longhouses.
the sunlight one makes me wonder about sunscreen as a culprit. it went from "occasionally at the beach" to "every day obsession." this has led to widespread vitamin D deficiency. also likely drops T production. and many suncreens had (and have) chemicals, particularly thickeners, that are known or suspected to be endocrine disruptors.
personally, i hate the stuff and pretty much never wear it so i have not really looked into it, but seems like it could be a meaningful factor and the timing lines up.
yeah sunscreen seem to be for the most part a scam at best or even a scheme to harm us. . Most, not all sunscreen blocks UVb which only effects the outer layers of skins. This is what cause you too burn, and can cause squamous cell and basal carcinomas. But it also is what fuel your vit (really a hormone) D production. All this does is allow people to stay in the sun longer than they should without burning, without getting the benefits of the sun.
Its UVa that causes melanomas as they are deeper in the sun. This is why sunscreen sales correlate nicely with skin cancer rates.
Or it's just not giving a f*** for profit. I don't think J&J was gunning for intentional depop. If we're all dead, who would buy their stuff?
I'll be honest, this is one area where the libertarian crowd has failed to convince me. Profits are seductive. Competition makes them irresistible. Without guardrails, this kinda stuff happens.
They want us dead because of overpopulation and "The Limits to Growth."
They've concluded that too many humans are consuming too few resources. How can anyone who survived the past 4 years of forced GENE-EDITING injections (under threat of job loss) doubt this?
> They want us dead because of overpopulation, limits to growth
Sure, some people do, but conspiracies don't work if lots of people are in on it. Most people are just following natural incentives: profit, self-promotion, etc., and the incentives are arranged such that they serve the interests of the elite.
Also, sunscreen was popularized in the 1970s. People were only starting to think about things like Limits to Growth in that decade. Sunscreen is not a psy-op from the Vietnam era. It's just another example of profit-hungry companies selling shitty products without any concern for human welfare.
What kind of "guardrails" are you talking about? "Regulation" or prohibition of products? This always gets corrupted or leads to crime (as in the classic "Prohibition"). The real solution is knowledge. No one is forcing you to buy sunscreen or anything else. Pushing responsibility off on the State is always a bad idea.
In short, "without guardrails, this kinda stuff happens; with guardrails, other stuff happens."
Pushing responsibility onto consumers also gets corrupted and has an equally terrible track record. I recommend the archives of Matt Stoller's BIG substack for a primer on what that looks like.
The problem with "free markets" is that they are an idyll, a fantasy; similar (in that respect) to communism. Markets tend to concentrate capital in a few hands: early success leads to investments, leading to size and surplus, and eventually anti-competitive monopoly power. At first the surplus is used to develop each industry, but eventually the wealthy realize their next-best investment is government policy and officials. In short, the end-state of a free market system is always government capture. If the state is weak, all the better. The wealthy will buy it up, make it strong in ways that benefit their business interests, and keep it weak where that helps them.
There is no silver-bullet solution. Excess state power is bad, but so is excess market power. Eventually, excess market power *becomes* excess state power. This unholy fusion rules us now. I don't know what the solution is, but I know what it's not: allowing corporations to self-regulate. That's how you get Dutch East India.
I read an article in outdoor magazine a few years ago calling out sunscreen as bad for you, and have adopted the authors approach to sun exposure. I live at a moderate latitude so in the springtime i try to start getting sun around the equinox, and basically build a base. I have yet to burn with this approach.
Bingo. The only time i have burned is when we took a vacation to Florida in early March and i hadn’t factored in how strong the Florida sun is at that time of year vs my mid-Atlantic sun.
I am a Florida resident and I rarely use sunscreen. The general rule I follow is to never ever apply anything to my skin that is inedible. Have you looked at the ingredients on sunscreen? Toxic! Limit your time in the sun and wear clothes that screen the harmful rays - you’ll get a generous dose of vitamin D.
In one of his books Kendrick writes about the values of sun exposure. His focus is on heart health, but he makes several interesting comments apparently supported by studies. Among those is that sunlight provides benefits not solely explained by Vitamin D production.
He cites a Swedish study where the life expectancy of non-smoking women who avoided the sun was roughly the same as smoking women who did get sun. From this he opines that inadequate sunlight (Vitamin D) is a health risk equivalent to smoking.
His general counsel is to get some sunlight when available and to take supplemental D in the winter months. And, I would add, perhaps quit smoking.
Another is the incidence of skin cancer: many tumors appear on parts of the body that get little to no exposure to the sun. That would seem to weaken the case that UV is a direct cause of skin cancer.
I too live in Florida and rarely use sunscreen. I say that, however with the disclaimer that I’ve had bad cases of sunburn in my life. If I were to spend all day at the beach, or worse, on the water, I would probably be more cautious with protective clothing or sunscreen. A bad case of sunburn is, at the least, painful and debilitating for a few days. And while rare, excess sun is no laughing matter. You can end up in the hospital or worse.
I’m a fair skinned redhead who had always sunburned easily, until I adopted a carnivore diet. I spent more time in the sun this past summer than I had in years, and never burned once. Apparently the chronic inflammation created by the grains and seed oils in our diets plays a major role.
I also eat (mostly) carnivore. I thought it was my imagination or that my skin was just not susceptible to burn anymore because I had so thoroughly burned it as a kid (Haha). I am out in the sun most days for at least 4 hours - in the desert. No burning. I stopped the sunscreen in 2020 when I was trying to up D3 naturally. A nice side effect from the plandemic - I started examining everything I put in and on my body.
There was a recent carcinogenic kerfuffle over sunscreens, they had to reformulate most of them.... sorry, I didn't keep notes, because it didn't affect me. I cherish every drop of the sun I take in.
And now they're deliberately blocking the sun on a regular basis, at least here in Sweden where I've documented chemtrails which spread out and end the day in wall to wall grey with not a sunbeam in sight. Sweden said "No" to Gates when he quipped "I could always block out the sun" so am guessing the gov either lied or Gates decided to ignore their response. Either way the grey skies continue, a marked difference to last year when we had plenty summer sun in our very short growing season. This year, summer was cancelled...
with all that implies...no crops of note, people's gardens came to nothing, and the effect on mood overall was considerable in a nation where we're facing some long months of no sunlight due to the Polar Night.
I am aware I'll come across as a nutcase. That's ok. Am too old to care. ;)
But geoengineering, coupled with every other thing they are doing to us, and which includes spraying with heavy, toxic metals along with lipid hydrogels and nano matter, is probably contributory to not only falling testoserone levels but overall poor health and mental and emotional issues.
And if you want proof of it, look no further than here, Sweden. Where that bottom lion pic meets it's match in just about every Swedish young man of a certain generation. Bun included...
Metaphorically, our world is screwed up because the Emperor would rather attempt to alter the weather at great expense, so that he may prance about naked without incurring the risk of sunburn. More humble and perhaps realistic methods such as wearing clothing, sun block or limiting his hours in the sun never occur to him. Or if they do, those are options for the Proles, not the elite of the Inner Party.
I think, if you look closely, you'll see "them" spraying 'X's. I've been wondering if this is the cause of their so-called 'Disease X', and intend to write a post about it. If I bike or hike on days they spray I get sniffly. So I don't, which rather pisses me off. And what is it doing to the water and soil?
Yes, and I've shared it around (which is how I know others think I'm a nut) as well as following the site on sites like Brighteon and the hateful YT. I also have my own tiny channel where I post occasional videos of the skies over our part of Sweden. Not something I do too often or it'd be daily uploads of same old same old! But I have many vids of "five minutes after, here's one chemtrail" followed by "fifteen mins after, see it fatten and spread" followed by "one hour later, let's play spot the sun" when it's wall to wall grey and dirty looking. I've zero doubt they're blocking the sun, and this winter's almost record level low temps already reinforce that for me.
As an aside, I did contact the Swedish Meteorological Agency, which used to have pages devoted to "weather manipulation" which are now defunct. I asked them about the planes spraying and the weather changing. They denied they ever dealt with it (even though you can still see the links to their pages on it that lead nowhere) and gave me the contact details of something military. Given I'm an old woman in the last stages of my life, I've declined to contact any military. Not out of fear for myself but because I am not stupid. I know they'd lie about it if they addressed it at all, and I don't want to attract unwanted attention to my husband and daughter (who is autistic thanks to the MMR she had in her teens, incidentally).
Humans have always thrived in the sunlight. All animals do, as well as plants of course. This year we had so little sunlight and for the first time ever in this area, so many "rain dumps" that commercial farmers' crops were ruined which will have a knock on food chain affect, and in my area at least, the only gardeners who could harvest home grown food were those who grew under cover in greenhouses.
Do I think it's intentional? Absolutely. They're coming at us from all angles, and removing such a basic as sunlight from us will be devastating.
Sadly, most Swedes spend their days with their eyes glued to their smartphones. Few bother to look up.
Me neither, though based on substack microscopy researchers, I have a good idea. And still we harvest, boil and filter it and use it for drinking, cooking etc. Because I know what is in the tap water and that's worse.
If you don't already, consider also going without your sunglasses at least part of the day. Your eyes absorb D3 and it is good for your pupils to fully constrict in the sun. When you wear sunglasses, the pupils don't fully constrict - when they should.
Eat enough of saturated fats and sunscreen is unnecessary. Every year I send my boys to summer camp and they always list sunscreen as one of the items to bring from home. My boys never use it and they never burn, just tan. It is the polyunsaturated fats that get incorporated into cellular walls that burn, just like they do if you try to fry your foods in them.
When I was a vegetarian I was almost radioactive after the briefest exposure to sunlight. Now that I cook everything with beef dripping my tolerance is much better, although being an English rose I can't say that I ever properly tan.
How long ago were you a vegetarian? It can take years to replace all the cells in your body. I think I once read seven, but I could be mistaken. My wife is of Scandinavian decent and some of our boys are blonde, almost white haired, light skinned and they don't burn unless it's really prolonged sun exposure. I'm glad your sun tolerance is better. Also, just curious, and you don't have to elaborate if you don't want to, but what caused you to abandon vegetarianism?
I haven't been a vegetarian for almost 20 years, and I stopped being a vegetarian because I had the sense that it wasn't great for my health. It wasn't!
When I was a vegetarian I was plagued with chronic health problems even though I was in my 20s and I should have been glowing with health.
Nearly a year ago I did a quick PubMed search on the topic and concluded* that vegan/vegetarian will extend life expectancy, but the effect is modest (in my opinion.) That seems to be a common trait of many such health factors; even if a benefit or harm can be documented, when you do the math and look at how it shortens or lengthen life expectancy, often you would lose (gain) just weeks or months.
I'm glad you figured it out! My mom decided to go vegetarian in her late 60s. Her health declined rapidly. Her idea of vegetarian was tater tots and cheese pizza. Everything came out of a box or a can. Very little fresh vegetables or fruit. She developed dementia and I am left caring for her. I warn everyone, eat real food!
This is how so many of my friends are with their children. And it horrifies me because I know my children are swimming in the same pool with that junk. (I like your name.)
Sunscreen is creepy. The only time I’ll use it is if I’m on the water in the tropics (eg, surfing) and a hat isn’t sufficient (I’m a white girl from New England; no natural defenses!), and, even then, I’m super careful what I use.
Apparently, early morning sun sets the skin up for the rest of the day. Something to do with the infra-redness... If this is done, then maybe you have lunch or whatever then go back in to the sun at 2pm, you won't burn.
But hot sun at 2pm with no morning sun to prep the skin, it'll burn. I'm no master of these ideas but Jack Kruse is.
"it went from "occasionally at the beach" to "every day obsession." this has led to widespread vitamin D deficiency."
Interesting...
I'm very fair skinned and got some bad sunburns when I was young. I'd never been able to stay on the beach in the sun all day even with ubrellas, long-sleeved T-shirts, all manner of covered up - my face, feet, and random uncovered spots got scorched.
Then I recall being on vacation and we found this amazing SPF4 sunscreen, maybe 1975 or so, and it was a miracle! I have two skin tone options: Red or White. But I can sleep and basicallly just do regular stuff when I'm white.
As sunscreen got "better" and SPF30, 40, Eleventy!! was available for just a few dollars more, I bought it up.
Despite some excesses in the non-prescription pharmaceuticals to include alcohol department, I was in really good health, lean and active eating well. But out of the blue in my mid-30s my doctor told me to start taking Vitamin D supplements. One thing, another, and I take 1000 units a day. I'd like to think it was helpful against COVID - surely “this correlation proves that my hobbyhorse is causal” - and maybe it was. But I have other Vit D-related issues to include more recently in this 58 year-old of late including some sleep and fatigue issues and recent, late onset rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis. They're still trying to decide. But I've been in remission following some lifestyle changes including dietary and reduced beer intake.
... I also take _TWO_ blood pressure meds...
I do not know my T readings but this is really some food for thought. Thank you.
When my now 27 year-old daughter was about 10, we were out and I made some comment about how I was Young at Heart and she quipped to the group, "Mom says the problem is that you're Young at Brain."
It might be the sort of thing my wife might've said but I think it was off the cuff. It was hilarious.
“Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking.”
The study was done in Sweden where the women enrolled presumably had low vitamin D levels at baseline. No mention of concurrent vitamin D levels in the study.
Residing in Puerto Rico you might be aware of some endocrine history. Original birth control research was carried out there with whopping great doses of oestrogen in the formulations.
Further study was undertaken when it was noted that the incidence of reduction mammoplasty had increased in PR. Non-intuitively, the causal agent was found to be another endocrine disruptor, diethylphthalate, widely used as a plasticizer in almost everything. It fits the oestrogen receptor quite well and produces the expected outcomes.
Stephanie Seneff's "Toxic Legacy", concerning glyphosate("RoundUp"), also reviews some of the endocrine disruption at the protein level.
Increased blood glucose, diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, also suppresses testosterone and would correlate fairly well (inverse relationship) with testosterone decline.
As you note, MultiFactorial, our usual comment when we really don't know what's going on.
-Without grains I no longer burned in the sun. Burning in sun was partly the grain perhaps, partly the grain's ten applications of round-up/glycophosphate/ glyphosate (same thing, they keep changing the names) from seed to harvest ON/IN the grain... together with the glyphosate present in vaccinations telling the auto-immune system to recognise a deadly poison, creating coeliac disease or whatever one chooses to call vaccine-inflicted auto-immune disease.
-Light from screens mimicking sunlight will mess a bodily system up. If someone stares at a screen from 4pm until midnight, cascading hormones (via eyes) are telling the body to get out and hunt an elk for lunch constantly (GO-GO-GO! HUNT THAT ELK MAN!) because the screen is often stuck on bright 12pm daylight. Get f-lux or similar to mimic firelight.
-For higher T, eat like your great-grandparents, take BORON, and avoid all dentistry & pharma like the plague it is.
Absolutely. I feel the same. Just waiting for the big scandal when they realise sun ream is doing harm. Children are slathered in it from birth. I work outside and never use the stuff.
The men in this generation are SISSIS, not all but majority of them. They are eating too much GMO foods, smelling in the air of CHEMTRAILS filled with toxic chemicals like aluminium, barium, nano particles, graphene oxide…., hanging around 5G areas and getting their brain cells microwaved, listening to DEMONIC MUSIC, getting too many Quantum inked tattoos that opens up portals for demonic entities. The list can go on but you get what I am saying?
They are starting to look more like the zombies that the cdc had already announced on their website. This goes for the majority of the women as well.
We live in a sick, evil, fallen world, the god of this world is satan and he uses his minions (demons), to mess with mankind with souls.
God Almighty’s wrath is about to pour upon all the wicked, ungodly and unrighteous very soon. Do not get left behind!
Jesus Christ is the only way to Heaven, there is no other way.
Today is the day of your Salvation because tomorrow is not promised.
I was hesitant to spend much time in the sun after a bout with melanoma. Then I started reading more and more about sunlight. Now, it's 5 minutes standing barefoot in my front yard with my coffee in hand, facing the sun. My kids think I am the neighborhood weirdo now. At least when it isn't freezing out. Long pants, sleeves, and a broad brimmed hat are much better for extended periods in the sun anyway. No more sunscreen for me.
From what I could find doing a quick search for "testosterone levels nicotine", smoking tobacco and chewing tobacco (and snus I guess) seem to raise testosterone levels.
Big but: not all nations allow or have the same contents in their tobaccoe/cigarettes. What is standard practice in producing a cigarette in China and one in the US need not be the same.
Also, e-fags seem to work as well as long as it's nicotine in them. Do a search, there's loads of research on the topic and results/abstracts are usually free.
As Tucker would say, Zyn is not a sin! Here's my data point: Testosterone levels significantly higher than 10 years ago despite natural declines with age and having a baby. No sunscreen on 10,000 steps per day outdoors, a few light workouts and drinks a week, and a Zyn or two a day. The bonus is that it helps with writing too.
Nicotine salt pouches you pack in your lip, available in 3mg or 6mg tins at your local tobacconist or gas station. It’s nicotine without the carcinogens and other ill effects of traditional delivery methods.
As someone who quit smoking and dipping years ago, they feel like cheating. I put one in with my morning coffee, stand at my desk, and have what I like to call “gunfighter vision” for the first hour of my day.
I've never had my T levels checked, but just comparing myself to the modal man physically and temperamentally I'm pretty sure I'm well above. It's mostly the weight-lifting and long walks, but the cigs aren't hurting either. And as you say, a writer's best friend.
Here are more tips. I'm a woman, but take it from me - my man has very high T levels. (No, I haven't had him tested in a lab. Call it "women's intuition.")
1. Like Yuri says, moderate your weed. If you can, get your hands on a mild strain and grow your own - the stuff they sell in the cannabis stores is deadly.
2. Avoid prescription medications like the plague. If you have to take something, make sure you are getting optimal nutrition - detoxing pharmaceuticals costs your body in the currency of vitamins and minerals. Even if you have to take aspirin, dose up on some vitamin C. This can also help reduce side effects.
3. Don't use skin "care" products. Simple (edible) products like olive oil make great skin moisturizers - they work better and are far cheaper than the bottled toxic waste from the store.
4. If you live in a area with pine/spruce trees, keep an eye on when the pollen starts to fly in spring time. Spend a morning or afternoon harvesting the pollen-filled cones (they'll still be soft) and store them in the freezer. Have a little pine pollen every day for the rest of the year. The pollen contains phytoandrogens that will up your T levels.
And then don't forget to have fun enjoying all that man juice flowing through your veins.
This message has been a free service from the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun League.
I found the Badger brand to be fairly clean. For the record, I get full unprotected skin exposure for at least 30 minutes a day during the warmer months. I'll apply screen after that if I want to play outside in the full sun.
That we call them "soy boys" suggests that on some level we realize all the soy in processed foods, as well as soy-based baby formulas, may play a significant role in this low T crisis. I would add more red meat and less processed food to your list (sunlight, nicotine and sex).
In my 40s I started increasing soy intake vs animal proteins while following a work out & cardio regimen. I stopped the soy once I noticed I was developing "tits" and that ended that.
Phytoestrogens in soy are a no-no for men...even those in top physical shape!
Pharma is probably one factor. As you said, it's likely multifactorial: dude weed probably plays a role; the witch's brew of xenoestrogens and endocrine disruptors in pesticides, herbicides, industrial chemicals, and plastics; sedentary lifestyles and processed foods contributing to obesity (as you noted, a double-whammy there); and also probably sociological factors. By the latter I mean that we live in a feminized gynarchy that punishes masculine behavior as "toxic", which probably acts as a psychological toxin. It's hard to feel highly masculine when you're constantly tiptoeing around the delicate emotions of bitter scolds whom you know full well hold all the economic and legal cards.
If I had to pick one as the major factor, though, I'd probably go with chemicals and plastics, as this has the most universal effect, and they've been in the environment going back to when T first started to plummet.
where it gets really tricky is in the feedback loops.
if you drop T, you get a less masculinized society whose norms increasingly push against high T behavior which, in turn, probably drops T. starts to become a bit of a chicken and egg issue.
the chemicals and plastics idea seems like it could hold some water, but it does not explain the change in the shape of the curve where those over 70 start to see an absolute plummeting in a way they did not used to. it seems like a profound change and one with a sharp curve angle. that seems to point to something exogenous focused on that age group.
Indeed, and the hypermedicalization of society almost certainly plays a role. It was only in the last couple generations that we started feeding olds a diet of novel pills, and the last generation that the young started to be fed the same.
As you said, it's multifactorial. When you go looking for plausible causes, you find them everywhere. A perfect storm of hormonal effeminacy.
apart from the well documented side effects, i'm hearing about a huge (and entirely predictable) outbreak of depression which given the GI links to serotonin and general sense of well being is unsurprising. so, stay on them, get mood suppressed, go off, immediately gain back the weight.
it's going to wind up being a really bad situation. watch.
I admit I didn’t know what GLP-1 was. I Googled it and the very first entry started, "See a doctor online in 15 mins & get Semaglutide (GLP-1) at your preferred pharmacy”. And people wonder why we have a problem.
I used to tell people to “Make hunger your friend.” When you feel hungry, welcome your friend back and move on to something else. As you say, preferably something that makes you sweat.
Yes, forego the sweets and ultraprocessed carbs & seed oils, eat foods that would have been recognized 100+ years ago.
Calories are not equal. The bomb calorimeter measure of energy content is not the same as the biologically available energy content, and that is before even looking at the micronutrients associated with the energy values.
And in more areas of life then just diet. No more bailouts, no more mommy government. Over time we've given up all our responsibility, kinda like after Augustus came to power in Rome. They pretended they still had a republic........
Interesting. I’m on Ozempic, the lowest dose possible, and that and TRT has helped me immensely. I found that it helped quiet the “food noise” and allow me to get out of the food cycle spiral of death. However, to your point, i am not sure what the exit strategy is, and what happens when i get off.
From what i've heard, when you quit it, you'll put it all back on. I think people should start considering starving the beast. You don't need all the pills, you don't need all the self help books. It makes me think of a documentary i watched about R. Crumb. At one point he talks about how before the invention of the radio, each town or city had tons of musicians. You'd see them coming it to the city when people got off work and leaving in the morning. He also mentioned how people would sit on their front porches and sing or play music and how it was a neighborhood kind of thing. I can only imagine what TV did. Everything industrial society offers gives you convenience but it also takes away a bit of your humanity each time you accept it. A deal with the devil? Heck, most of us would be talking about this stuff at bars if it wasn't for the internet. Think about it.
We have the luxury of not having to work for it anymore.
I think the process gained purchase there and was on a slow-roll runaway (but with a floor) until it started getting dosed with the "luxury" of exogenous factors, resulting in a self-iterating "catalysis", with a dank cellar as a floor support.
Try having to kill your meal to eat. That might work over a couple of generations if we don't become cellar gimps first
Well, that'd depend on where the well got its water from and if and how it was well-supplied with new water.
My brother is a hydro-geologist so I've gotten an earful or three about "clean water". He did check up on ours - pristine. At eight meters depth, it's 200 years old or more, so it's completely free of pollutants of any kind.
And the water in the lake the village gets its supply from is cleaner than store-bought bottled water.
Meanwhile, on the island of Öland (which literally translates to "Island", imaginative they aren't) the otherwise perectly clean groundwater happens to run through layers of uranium-laced shale, and in Scania there's so much chalk/lime in the water supply you can literally scrape chalk-powder out of your pots and pans after boiling water.
Belaboured point - which you already knew - wellwater can mean a heckuvva lots of stuff.
Among my brother top ten horrors from work is the rainwater-based well of a village which was downhill of a cemetary.
That is pretty terrible!! Then there are the cultures who do not bury their dead in coffins... People in TX backed their right to follow this custom...
I take not using coffins doesn't mean air burial then, where the remains are dsiposed of by buzzards and such?
I one looks at burial mounds from Stone-Brinze-Iron Age Scandinavia, they are always away from a settlement and almost on/in hills, some artificially improved. Not to mention that burning was common.
The real scary graves are the ones where people 12 000 years ago used bogs as burial grounds. The corpses are exceptionally well-preserved, grayish-blue of hue, look emaciated and hair and nails are bright crimson - they look as if they could get up and walk.
"Then there are the cultures who do not bury their dead in coffins..."
We were at a party near this time of year and I made a joke about about how 'shovels and lime' might be difficult and my next door neighbor said, "Not a problem when your next door neighbor has a backhoe."
"there's so much chalk/lime in the water supply you can literally scrape chalk-powder out of your pots and pans after boiling water."
Our old water treatment getup introduced some mineral that i assume is the calcium from the softener. The house was built in 1984 and we just replaced the system a couple summers ago with some other non-salt method. But the damage has been done: Faucets and valves and I'm sure all the plumbing is coated in a white mineral coating.
We've gradually been replacing fixtures, some because they were ugly, some because they froze shut, or in one case broke when I was changing something else.
I see a hormone specialist. I take estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. I feel pretty darn good. I have no desire to become Karenized. Hormone balancing is villianized. I am glad I listened to the person who recommended I see someone. Just sharing my personal experience
I don't take hormones myself. I just try to eat right, lift weights, get plenty of sleep. And I don't take any medications. Almost certainly my T levels are much higher than most guys in my cohort ... though I suspect I wouldn't fare well compared to same-age men from a couple generations ago.
I get it. My levels are regularly checked; the hormones are almost always decreased as my body comes into balance. Bad habits,meds, etc throw the system out if whack. I am trying to get back to equilibrium. It’s working.
I have have been on Bio Identical HRT (progesterone, estrogen and testosterone) for over 20 years...started at post menopause and have never looked back. Mine is made by a compounding pharmacy and are in a cream form, No Big Pharma oral HRT. I first was prescribed them from my family medicine physician in the early 2000’s, who shifted into a specialized practice of HRT for men and woman and thyroid issues. (He was an independent practice physician.) Fortunately I have a primary care nurse practitioner now, that works with the compounding pharmacy I use. I have never gone to an endocrinologist for my prescription and I never would. It’s the one ‘medication’ (the other is a natural thyroid I use), that has been quite beneficial for my health as I get older. I will never stop using the bio identical HRT.
I too am ‘chronologicallly’ elderly…I was very strong even five years ago and have always been a fairly physically active person, but my strength and ability to lift things, is not as great now. Thinking of getting into a low key weight training program. To build back some upper body mass.
Oops, my bad. Women obviously could go to Gyn. My Internist and Urologist both on staff at UCSF and smarter than this old beat-up FP/ER doc. I thought the ER boards were harder than FP boards but interestingly, the Internist who took the ER boards with me said ER was 50% easier than Internal Med boards. >:-O
I love chemistry. Organic chemistry is a passion. In my mind, chemistry is the manifestation of physics that we can touch, smell, feel, see and taste. I love being a geek.
Yes!!! I am still disappointed that I didn't discover organic chemistry back when I was in high school! I like physics but chemistry was a revelation. The labs were lots of fun, too.
The only class I really had a hard time with was Accounting. It was a high school level class at a JC and it kicked my @$$. I have never worked so hard in a class in my life! I got an A but it was a LOT harder than science or math classes! It was a Pre-req. Never, ever again! Give me Algebra - it makes more sense (and its fun).
Card-carrying nerd here, BS Physics. Never took Organic, regrettably, but had a couple of semesters of Chemistry and know my way around The Periodic Table.
Could be all of that....or is it just a case of men generally used to live harder physical lives which made them FEEL more masculine (and more differentiated from women)....plus their hugely younger life span?
My instinct tells me that a much clearer mental-societal division between the sexes will have also made a difference....not having to give any mental space to things like 'should men be....? Blah Blah and 'gender' Blah Blah etc.
Life span: I'm not a statistician but it seems incontovertible to me as a 72-year-old that there's a lot more 80+ and 90+ folks around than in my parents' and grandparents' time.
What's wrong with 70? Still physically able from what i've seen, not sure why people want to live forever. Perhaps another sign of the selfishness of our society? I don't want to be shitting myself in some home surrounded by strangers.
"...constantly tiptoeing around the delicate emotions of bitter scolds..."
Oh yes. It affects your posture, too. I noticed this long ago - might have mentioned I had a real life with a real job before going into academia and teaching. Meant I was (am still) built like a man, looked like a man and moved like a man: head high, shoulders wide, chest out, striding along and not sashaying or dragging my feet.
One day, a friend (forklift-driver) and I am out having a coffee at a café overlooking the Teachers' College in the city we live in. There's construction work going on at the new part of the building and I notice all the male teacher-students are lanky of build, partly hunched over with an almost sunken chest and stooped shoulders, and walk with a rubbery swaying gait.
All the construction workers carry themselves like my friend and I do.
And it hits me: 85% or more of all teachers in Sweden are women. Already when I was a teen, it was over 50%, more in the lower levels and the non-STEMish subjects, fewer in the "hard" stuff.
My friends quips when I mention my random thoughts:
"Yea-up. They look like filleted anchovies trying to stand up. Imprinting maybe?"
I don't know, but "moneky see, monkey do" isn't just an old saw - there's truth to it. Probably the issue is as you lay it out: multi-factorial, one factor feeding the other reciprocatively.
I'm 66 and my experience with female teachers in grade school was not good. Grades 2-6 got me four whack jobs who were also bullies. The one male teacher (5th grade) was so much better than the women! He worked with me instead of punishing me for not paying attention. We made a deal - he said I could draw in class but that I had to draw what he was talking about. Mischief managed!
I did NOT like female teachers. They didn't like me either. My 7th grade math teacher was my all-time favorite teacher. He had me bring transfer students up to speed (kinda like 5th grade - he worked WITH me, not against me). I really, really wish I had thanked him! I remember walking home from the bus and crying one time because I only got a 99 on a test. It only happened that one time. Yes, the other kids hated me because I wrecked the grading curve. Good times!!
High school geometry...sucked because proofs. I didn't need to do 20+ of each kind to understand them so I refused to do the homework. I failed the class so I had to go to summer school. I did all of those proofs in two weeks. Lesson learned!
"all the male teacher-students are lanky of build, partly hunched over with an almost sunken chest and stooped shoulders, and walk with a rubbery swaying gait."
I've noticed exactly the same thing. This physiognomy is universal everywhere feminism has conquered.
After working in a pharmacy storeroom for a large teaching hospital for nearly 10 years, I know just how little medical people know about pharmaceuticals! It doesn't take all that long to order and stock the shelves, even at a large teaching hospital in SoCal, so I started reading package inserts. You ought to see the preservatives in ALL of it! Because of that, and medication mistakes I got wind of, I realized that doctors don't know much about drugs. They don't have to - they have apps now!! I had nurses complain that we were out of something when we weren't because I had to go to a different manufacturer and the COLOR OF THE LID of the vial wasn't the same as usual! The PDR is basically useless but they all rely on it! I tell everyone who has questions about their prescriptions to ask a PHARMACIST. Doctors don't know jack about drugs!! People taking psych meds should definitely follow up with a real pharmacist. The SSRI antidepressant meds in mass shooters surely hasn't escaped anyone's notice has it? If it has, they are not paying attention! Wake up, people. Your doctor is not only not God, he or she is probably not as well-educated as they used to be. DEI is doing terrible things in medical schools (and everywhere else, obvi). Harvard medical school has or had a mandatory class on transgender INFANTS.
Thank you for addressing a huge problem!!! Sorry/not sorry for the long diatribe, Gato, but people need to KNOW! Their doctors are ignorant and they have no idea!!
True. That is why Purdue-Frederick is being sued. They lied to doctors about Oxycontin being addictive. Which is EXTREMELY addictive; far more so than Vicodin or Percocet.
Also true about the sales reps! There were a few who took my boss (a pharmacist) out to lunch a lot. There were ski trips too but the hospital put a stop to that. One brought in doughnuts quite often. I asked her to please bring fruit or something else instead if possible. I had just lost about 60 lbs. and I did NOT want it to come back. (It did but it wasn't her fault. It brought friends along with it, too.)
What is also interesting is that no one, not even pharmacists, knows WHY pharmaceuticals work. They can see HOW they work (blood-brain barrier, etc.) but not why!! I have a few prescriptions myself. Because China manufactures most of our medications, I wanted to taper off of the SNRI (akin to SSRIs) I take but I got too depressed to function. Have tried several times. I do NOT like being dependent on China for anything and definitely not for medication! Many of the supplements / vitamins are made there, too.
SSRI Prozac is a classic example of how fuct the system truly is. It has a black box warning (the most severe) because even as an 'anti-depressant' it increases the risk of suicide.
A big, big problem with the SSRIs is that even if they work, it can take 6-8 weeks to take effect! Which means someone who is horribly depressed beyond what they can cope with, is also immature with poor impulse control...is turned loose without any help and probably no guidance. And taking a medication that can probably hurt them badly. With all of those things going on, add weapons to the mix and you have a disaster! Having given it a lot of thought, I think it is absolutely amazing that the murdering isn't far more frequent!!
Besides pollutants, sunscreens and bad diet, statins are the likeliest contributor from pharma to testosterone falling off a cliff.
We see it all the time clinically:
Man who used to work out now comes in with a soft body and soft voice, after his pharma-crazed wife exhorted him to start a statin Rx with, 'But I don't want to lose you, Dear!'
The mechanism is that 1) cholesterol was vilified, and the gullible swallowed the lie, and 2) cholesterol is a necessary precursor of reproductive hormones, and testosterone is downstream.
So the man's doctor & wife unwittingly killed his testosterone.
My husband’s doctor, who replaced his recently retired doc, insisted he take statins. When he said he absolutely would not, she guilt-tripped him: “We call men like you widow makers!”
He replied, “If I take them, I’ll definitely make her a widow, because my wife told me she’d kill me if I took statins.”
I have not looked into cholesterol and statins in a few years (is a rabbit hole,) but recall they were approved based on small reductions in absolute risk with side effects basically ignored. Somewhat similar to the covid shot statistics.
Ivor Cummins has done some great work on the Widowmaker Heart Attacks, here is a documentary on youtube for more info:
The Widowmaker - it could save your life ! #KnowYourScore #CAC
I did away with statins after i developed a clogged vein in my groin, after 18 years of use. Clearly didn’t do what was claimed by my prescribing GP. Started reading up on studies from the skeptic side, notably also dr. Malcolm Kendrick, and stopped altogether. No regrets. 71 and no medication other than a pain killer. Same for hubby, who in his heyday was a masculine, handsome, hairy and well-muscled man and is still in fine shape. Not one of those clean-shaven man-bun-sporting, gym-and-steroid-muscled guys. Women must have changed just as much hormonally, to like this type of man.
The Elite class is addicted to "tinkering" with humanity. I am focused on living in a way that reduces my risk of becoming a victim from the collateral damage which results from their actions.
I am currently in a proxy war with my husband's primary care physician.
My hubs was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in January(after sitting all day in hospital with a presumptive diagnosis of vertigo--go figure). Anyway, he NEEDS insulin. That's why his body lacks. But PCP wants him to do all these novel diabetes drugs. The side effects of these things are not benign and some just ruin quality of life.
The latest he wants him on is Ozempic---he survived thyroid cancer at a young age--and that is a specific risk factor noted even in TV commercials.
When you said most docs don't understand pharmacology, you hit the nail on the head.
Before I prescribe meds to my dog and cat patients, I investigate the mechanism of action, drug interactions and side effects. My patients can't talk...so it's up to me.
I haven't had my current kitteh vaccinated in over ten years. She's doing great! She's about 12 years old and has been known to jump from the top of a six-foot bookcase to the top of an eight-foot armoire OVER MY HEAD. She's a tortie and they do stuff like that. I've never seen a 12-year-old cat do that though!
I have a 17yr old who's had issues that I now know were caused by injections 😡. The mama I brought in is a tortie... can't wait for the shenanigans 😻. She's still a little shy but I've see her jump 12ft when she was a feral. Her inner badass will come out eventually!
My Mom's tortie used to jump off of the roof onto her shoulder. I watched her do it! They're badass to the bone!! Persephone loved the 9-foot-tall wall unit at my last apartment and spent many happy hours up there monitoring the yard.
Thanks for sending this! My instincts say don't do it! Unfortunately most vets require vaxs to fix any animal... I'll figure it out. I'd opt out of fixing them but I have two males and their mama. Don't need any more cats!
I’ve been saying this for 30 years-- synthetic estrogen from birth control pills did not filter out of our water treatment facilities and men and boys have been ingesting this for over a generation and a half. And of course the hormones fed to chickens - there was a study years ago of little boys growing breast in Mexico from the excess hormones in meat.
I know producers say they don’t give hormones to meat anymore but the damage had already been done, and after the last 3 years who even believes these greedy people anymore?
Is it any surprise that the numbers for LGBTQLMNOP people have skyrocketed as well? Or that a population of weak, effeminate men is far easier to keep under control than so-called "toxic" men? (Not trying to leave the ladies out; it's a comment, not an essay. 😉)
At 67 and despite 2 bouts with melanoma , I am happy to say that I am on no prescription drugs. Just supplements for the cancer. And FWIW, I got off drugs my doctor prescribed…. the biggie being statins.
Interesting! Also, men respond to fertile females by increasing T. With widespread use of The Pill, we have huge numbers of non-fertile females. Another factor to consider.
This is the first comment here that I had never considered before. Good idea. Hormonal birth control also leads to women preferring “safer” partners, which will presumably select for lower T men over generations, as well.
Very interesting take on the pharma angle, señor. Definitely a major contributor.
My money is on the estrogen-dominant seed oils—particularly canola and soy—that have hijacked our diet for decades. No surprise they are also heavily subsidized.
Also, there's the Xenoestrogens found in detergents, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, linings of food and beverage cans, off-gassing household materials and just about anything (synthetically) scented. These toxins imitate estrogen and can dramatically increase estrogen dominance symptoms.
There’s one factor we never read about in explaining low testosterone, and that is masturbation.
This is impossible to compare across generations, so it will have to remain a working hypothesis. But we can safely assume that the advent of printed porn, followed by today’s HD porn on demand, has tremendously increased masturbation. I have a close relative who literally died of masturbation (autoerotic asphyxia).
One study found that after a week of neither sex nor masturbation, men’s testosterone suddenly increased by a multiple of what it was on day one (sorry I don’t have the citation but you’re welcome to google it). This is equivalent to the effect of sunbathing one’s testicles, a tactic that I enthusiastically endorse.
Furthermore, various modern factors preventing healthy sexual relationships, which have a benign effect on androgens, also drive men into habitual masturbation.
At the risk of oversharing, I have been unwillingly celibate in marriage for several years, and when I gave up masturbation as well, my testosterone really went through the roof. It is still compounding. I can safely say that I have far more testosterone in middle age than my father or grandfathers had in their prime, and this is plainly evident in my body composition, psychology and behavior.
Evolutionarily speaking for men, a total lack of sexual activity is a serious survival threat on par with starvation, and invokes extremely powerful adaptations mediated by a sharp increase in androgens. If you really want testosterone, all you have to do is not fuck around and find out.
But be careful what you ask for. Testosterone is not, contrary to popular belief, the feel-good hormone. That’s oxytocin. Living with high testosterone and low oxytocin is like clinging to the roof of a bullet train. You’re getting somewhere fast, but it’s hardly a joy ride. Even so, in my experience, low T is worse.
Please excuse me now as I slept in almost to dawn and have a full day of shoveling, boxing and sprinting ahead of me with large amounts of raw bison organs consumed throughout. If you would pray for my soul, that would also be appreciated.
"The results showed a significant between-condition difference in free testosterone concentrations. Masturbation (p < 0.01) and a visual stimulus (p < 0.05) may seem to counteract the circadian drop of free testosterone concentrations over the day. However, no statistical change was observed in the ratios between total testosterone, free testosterone and cortisol."
But as the study itself says, it is limited and a greater study, over time and more in-depth is needed for more definite answers.
Still, it'd be strange if frequent masturbation didn't have /some/ measurable effect(s), good or bad.
Personally, I think real food free of chemical crap, sunshine and fresh air and physical labour is key in improving things, spiritually mentally and physically, but that's a bit "re-discovering fire", isn't it?
good thing oxytocin is super cheap, also hugs are free 🤗
I do find a correlation to what you're saying with masturbation and t levels. It's a theory and I have no evidence but so far I'm able to manipulate bloodwork with certain activities in close timing proximity to said labs.. take that for what it's worth.
I was going to point out that frequent ejaculation lowers your risk for prostate cancer, then I remembered that high testosterone raises your risk for prostate cancer. This aligns with what you’re saying...
Awesome! I waited years and years and finally saw a Cowboy Cerrone interview where he said something along the lines of "guys (speaking to fighters) when you're done, get on that stuff and put your old lady in a bind" and something clicked.
He's not lying either.
When I started my test first tested in the 600s then again in the 300s
They started me on 120mg/week, 25mg clomiphene 2x weekly, Anastrozole 1mg 2x weekly
I'm currently on 160mg/week ,37.5mg clomiphene 2x weekly, Anastrozole 1mg 2x weekly
I like being at 1100-1200 it feels absolutely incredible. My first shot was in July.
We are done having kids, first and foremost. Started on the cream/gel in July, did that for two months. I noticed some improvement, but not much. Also, having to apply it to my balls was inconvenient for a number of reasons. So i asked about switching to injections. Started daily cypionate injections in September. Started at .25ml and just bumped up to .30ml. Logic being that daily allows the levels to stay even.
As i have said I’ve noticed a huge improvement in energy, focus and drive both sexual and life in general. Still tweaking it, but the person i am today vs the start of the year is night and day.
Sunlight, nicotine, and sex help too. Avoid too much alcohol and weed. Low T is a crisis that has resulted in soy boys and Karens turning our institutions into dysfunctional longhouses.
the sunlight one makes me wonder about sunscreen as a culprit. it went from "occasionally at the beach" to "every day obsession." this has led to widespread vitamin D deficiency. also likely drops T production. and many suncreens had (and have) chemicals, particularly thickeners, that are known or suspected to be endocrine disruptors.
personally, i hate the stuff and pretty much never wear it so i have not really looked into it, but seems like it could be a meaningful factor and the timing lines up.
yeah sunscreen seem to be for the most part a scam at best or even a scheme to harm us. . Most, not all sunscreen blocks UVb which only effects the outer layers of skins. This is what cause you too burn, and can cause squamous cell and basal carcinomas. But it also is what fuel your vit (really a hormone) D production. All this does is allow people to stay in the sun longer than they should without burning, without getting the benefits of the sun.
Its UVa that causes melanomas as they are deeper in the sun. This is why sunscreen sales correlate nicely with skin cancer rates.
It's intentional depopulation for profit.
Johnson and Johnson sunscreen causes the exact type of cancer for which they also manufacture a cancer drug.
Or it's just not giving a f*** for profit. I don't think J&J was gunning for intentional depop. If we're all dead, who would buy their stuff?
I'll be honest, this is one area where the libertarian crowd has failed to convince me. Profits are seductive. Competition makes them irresistible. Without guardrails, this kinda stuff happens.
They want us dead because of overpopulation and "The Limits to Growth."
They've concluded that too many humans are consuming too few resources. How can anyone who survived the past 4 years of forced GENE-EDITING injections (under threat of job loss) doubt this?
> They want us dead because of overpopulation, limits to growth
Sure, some people do, but conspiracies don't work if lots of people are in on it. Most people are just following natural incentives: profit, self-promotion, etc., and the incentives are arranged such that they serve the interests of the elite.
Also, sunscreen was popularized in the 1970s. People were only starting to think about things like Limits to Growth in that decade. Sunscreen is not a psy-op from the Vietnam era. It's just another example of profit-hungry companies selling shitty products without any concern for human welfare.
Remember Occam's Razor.
What kind of "guardrails" are you talking about? "Regulation" or prohibition of products? This always gets corrupted or leads to crime (as in the classic "Prohibition"). The real solution is knowledge. No one is forcing you to buy sunscreen or anything else. Pushing responsibility off on the State is always a bad idea.
In short, "without guardrails, this kinda stuff happens; with guardrails, other stuff happens."
Pushing responsibility onto consumers also gets corrupted and has an equally terrible track record. I recommend the archives of Matt Stoller's BIG substack for a primer on what that looks like.
The problem with "free markets" is that they are an idyll, a fantasy; similar (in that respect) to communism. Markets tend to concentrate capital in a few hands: early success leads to investments, leading to size and surplus, and eventually anti-competitive monopoly power. At first the surplus is used to develop each industry, but eventually the wealthy realize their next-best investment is government policy and officials. In short, the end-state of a free market system is always government capture. If the state is weak, all the better. The wealthy will buy it up, make it strong in ways that benefit their business interests, and keep it weak where that helps them.
There is no silver-bullet solution. Excess state power is bad, but so is excess market power. Eventually, excess market power *becomes* excess state power. This unholy fusion rules us now. I don't know what the solution is, but I know what it's not: allowing corporations to self-regulate. That's how you get Dutch East India.
I cannot exist in the south without sunscreen, I burn within 15 minutes when I am in Spain or Italy. Need my sunscreen.
sunblockers eg hat longsleeves + stay in shade at midday = preferred method
IIRC European sunscreen has tighter standards and also protects against UVA.
I read an article in outdoor magazine a few years ago calling out sunscreen as bad for you, and have adopted the authors approach to sun exposure. I live at a moderate latitude so in the springtime i try to start getting sun around the equinox, and basically build a base. I have yet to burn with this approach.
This is the key. Build up exposure little by little every day from Spring.
The trouble comes when people go from sitting in an office getting zero sunlight to two weeks of full on tropical sun.
Bingo. The only time i have burned is when we took a vacation to Florida in early March and i hadn’t factored in how strong the Florida sun is at that time of year vs my mid-Atlantic sun.
I am a Florida resident and I rarely use sunscreen. The general rule I follow is to never ever apply anything to my skin that is inedible. Have you looked at the ingredients on sunscreen? Toxic! Limit your time in the sun and wear clothes that screen the harmful rays - you’ll get a generous dose of vitamin D.
I was told they also contain PFAS.
In one of his books Kendrick writes about the values of sun exposure. His focus is on heart health, but he makes several interesting comments apparently supported by studies. Among those is that sunlight provides benefits not solely explained by Vitamin D production.
He cites a Swedish study where the life expectancy of non-smoking women who avoided the sun was roughly the same as smoking women who did get sun. From this he opines that inadequate sunlight (Vitamin D) is a health risk equivalent to smoking.
His general counsel is to get some sunlight when available and to take supplemental D in the winter months. And, I would add, perhaps quit smoking.
Another is the incidence of skin cancer: many tumors appear on parts of the body that get little to no exposure to the sun. That would seem to weaken the case that UV is a direct cause of skin cancer.
I too live in Florida and rarely use sunscreen. I say that, however with the disclaimer that I’ve had bad cases of sunburn in my life. If I were to spend all day at the beach, or worse, on the water, I would probably be more cautious with protective clothing or sunscreen. A bad case of sunburn is, at the least, painful and debilitating for a few days. And while rare, excess sun is no laughing matter. You can end up in the hospital or worse.
I would love to have that article… Just had a conversation last night at church with a lady who is a sunscreen fanatic. Just ugh… 😱🤦🏽♀️
It’s a fascinating article. Basically the premise is that the health benefits of sunshine outweigh the consequences, and if done in moderation the consequences are almost negligible. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/sunscreen-sun-exposure-skin-cancer-science/
Especially helps your immune system. Seems like something recently really pounded the immune system.. hmm what was it?
That was a great read. Thanks for posting it!
Ch- ch- chur- 😨?
I’m a fair skinned redhead who had always sunburned easily, until I adopted a carnivore diet. I spent more time in the sun this past summer than I had in years, and never burned once. Apparently the chronic inflammation created by the grains and seed oils in our diets plays a major role.
I also eat (mostly) carnivore. I thought it was my imagination or that my skin was just not susceptible to burn anymore because I had so thoroughly burned it as a kid (Haha). I am out in the sun most days for at least 4 hours - in the desert. No burning. I stopped the sunscreen in 2020 when I was trying to up D3 naturally. A nice side effect from the plandemic - I started examining everything I put in and on my body.
Aye Lassie! Respect the wisdom o' yer forebears, who learnt 'tis best to malt and distill the grains not to eat them. 😁
🤣
I find taking a good quality krill oil helpful, too.
There was a recent carcinogenic kerfuffle over sunscreens, they had to reformulate most of them.... sorry, I didn't keep notes, because it didn't affect me. I cherish every drop of the sun I take in.
And now they're deliberately blocking the sun on a regular basis, at least here in Sweden where I've documented chemtrails which spread out and end the day in wall to wall grey with not a sunbeam in sight. Sweden said "No" to Gates when he quipped "I could always block out the sun" so am guessing the gov either lied or Gates decided to ignore their response. Either way the grey skies continue, a marked difference to last year when we had plenty summer sun in our very short growing season. This year, summer was cancelled...
with all that implies...no crops of note, people's gardens came to nothing, and the effect on mood overall was considerable in a nation where we're facing some long months of no sunlight due to the Polar Night.
I am aware I'll come across as a nutcase. That's ok. Am too old to care. ;)
But geoengineering, coupled with every other thing they are doing to us, and which includes spraying with heavy, toxic metals along with lipid hydrogels and nano matter, is probably contributory to not only falling testoserone levels but overall poor health and mental and emotional issues.
And if you want proof of it, look no further than here, Sweden. Where that bottom lion pic meets it's match in just about every Swedish young man of a certain generation. Bun included...
I don't think your a nut. It's clear as day 😆 what they are doing
Weather manipulation? Are you saying out loud that the Emperor has no clothes?
Metaphorically, our world is screwed up because the Emperor would rather attempt to alter the weather at great expense, so that he may prance about naked without incurring the risk of sunburn. More humble and perhaps realistic methods such as wearing clothing, sun block or limiting his hours in the sun never occur to him. Or if they do, those are options for the Proles, not the elite of the Inner Party.
I think, if you look closely, you'll see "them" spraying 'X's. I've been wondering if this is the cause of their so-called 'Disease X', and intend to write a post about it. If I bike or hike on days they spray I get sniffly. So I don't, which rather pisses me off. And what is it doing to the water and soil?
Have you seen the geoengineeringwatch .org documentary "The Dimming?"
It is a great rabbit-hole to explore.
Yes, and I've shared it around (which is how I know others think I'm a nut) as well as following the site on sites like Brighteon and the hateful YT. I also have my own tiny channel where I post occasional videos of the skies over our part of Sweden. Not something I do too often or it'd be daily uploads of same old same old! But I have many vids of "five minutes after, here's one chemtrail" followed by "fifteen mins after, see it fatten and spread" followed by "one hour later, let's play spot the sun" when it's wall to wall grey and dirty looking. I've zero doubt they're blocking the sun, and this winter's almost record level low temps already reinforce that for me.
As an aside, I did contact the Swedish Meteorological Agency, which used to have pages devoted to "weather manipulation" which are now defunct. I asked them about the planes spraying and the weather changing. They denied they ever dealt with it (even though you can still see the links to their pages on it that lead nowhere) and gave me the contact details of something military. Given I'm an old woman in the last stages of my life, I've declined to contact any military. Not out of fear for myself but because I am not stupid. I know they'd lie about it if they addressed it at all, and I don't want to attract unwanted attention to my husband and daughter (who is autistic thanks to the MMR she had in her teens, incidentally).
Humans have always thrived in the sunlight. All animals do, as well as plants of course. This year we had so little sunlight and for the first time ever in this area, so many "rain dumps" that commercial farmers' crops were ruined which will have a knock on food chain affect, and in my area at least, the only gardeners who could harvest home grown food were those who grew under cover in greenhouses.
Do I think it's intentional? Absolutely. They're coming at us from all angles, and removing such a basic as sunlight from us will be devastating.
Sadly, most Swedes spend their days with their eyes glued to their smartphones. Few bother to look up.
Spot on, bun included❤️
Yes, and I never thought I would be nervous about "what is in the rain?"
Me neither, though based on substack microscopy researchers, I have a good idea. And still we harvest, boil and filter it and use it for drinking, cooking etc. Because I know what is in the tap water and that's worse.
You are NOT a nut! 💖🙏🏽
If you don't already, consider also going without your sunglasses at least part of the day. Your eyes absorb D3 and it is good for your pupils to fully constrict in the sun. When you wear sunglasses, the pupils don't fully constrict - when they should.
My father always said something similar.
You guys are full of it. The major cause of lower T levels is men who have had to listen to CNN in airports the past 20 years.
Have you ever listened to Brian Stelter? Good Lord! There is your culprit.
And in the past three years it is the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland.
(NPR) "and I'm David Grreeeeeuhhnn" makes my skin crawl. go back to your men's room, Dave
Eat enough of saturated fats and sunscreen is unnecessary. Every year I send my boys to summer camp and they always list sunscreen as one of the items to bring from home. My boys never use it and they never burn, just tan. It is the polyunsaturated fats that get incorporated into cellular walls that burn, just like they do if you try to fry your foods in them.
True.
When I was a vegetarian I was almost radioactive after the briefest exposure to sunlight. Now that I cook everything with beef dripping my tolerance is much better, although being an English rose I can't say that I ever properly tan.
How long ago were you a vegetarian? It can take years to replace all the cells in your body. I think I once read seven, but I could be mistaken. My wife is of Scandinavian decent and some of our boys are blonde, almost white haired, light skinned and they don't burn unless it's really prolonged sun exposure. I'm glad your sun tolerance is better. Also, just curious, and you don't have to elaborate if you don't want to, but what caused you to abandon vegetarianism?
I haven't been a vegetarian for almost 20 years, and I stopped being a vegetarian because I had the sense that it wasn't great for my health. It wasn't!
When I was a vegetarian I was plagued with chronic health problems even though I was in my 20s and I should have been glowing with health.
Nearly a year ago I did a quick PubMed search on the topic and concluded* that vegan/vegetarian will extend life expectancy, but the effect is modest (in my opinion.) That seems to be a common trait of many such health factors; even if a benefit or harm can be documented, when you do the math and look at how it shortens or lengthen life expectancy, often you would lose (gain) just weeks or months.
*Available on my pathetic Substack.
I'm glad you figured it out! My mom decided to go vegetarian in her late 60s. Her health declined rapidly. Her idea of vegetarian was tater tots and cheese pizza. Everything came out of a box or a can. Very little fresh vegetables or fruit. She developed dementia and I am left caring for her. I warn everyone, eat real food!
Phthalates too.
My colleagues all wear Factor 50 every day (in the UK!!). It's mixed in with their foundation.
I told them I never wear sunscreen and they looked at me like I was insane. They are terrified of getting wrinkles.
This is how so many of my friends are with their children. And it horrifies me because I know my children are swimming in the same pool with that junk. (I like your name.)
Sunscreen is creepy. The only time I’ll use it is if I’m on the water in the tropics (eg, surfing) and a hat isn’t sufficient (I’m a white girl from New England; no natural defenses!), and, even then, I’m super careful what I use.
Apparently, early morning sun sets the skin up for the rest of the day. Something to do with the infra-redness... If this is done, then maybe you have lunch or whatever then go back in to the sun at 2pm, you won't burn.
But hot sun at 2pm with no morning sun to prep the skin, it'll burn. I'm no master of these ideas but Jack Kruse is.
You ever tried a rashguard top or skins while surfing?
I just mean for my face, with the reflection. Definitely wearing long sleeves when I’m in that tropical sun!
"it went from "occasionally at the beach" to "every day obsession." this has led to widespread vitamin D deficiency."
Interesting...
I'm very fair skinned and got some bad sunburns when I was young. I'd never been able to stay on the beach in the sun all day even with ubrellas, long-sleeved T-shirts, all manner of covered up - my face, feet, and random uncovered spots got scorched.
Then I recall being on vacation and we found this amazing SPF4 sunscreen, maybe 1975 or so, and it was a miracle! I have two skin tone options: Red or White. But I can sleep and basicallly just do regular stuff when I'm white.
As sunscreen got "better" and SPF30, 40, Eleventy!! was available for just a few dollars more, I bought it up.
Despite some excesses in the non-prescription pharmaceuticals to include alcohol department, I was in really good health, lean and active eating well. But out of the blue in my mid-30s my doctor told me to start taking Vitamin D supplements. One thing, another, and I take 1000 units a day. I'd like to think it was helpful against COVID - surely “this correlation proves that my hobbyhorse is causal” - and maybe it was. But I have other Vit D-related issues to include more recently in this 58 year-old of late including some sleep and fatigue issues and recent, late onset rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis. They're still trying to decide. But I've been in remission following some lifestyle changes including dietary and reduced beer intake.
... I also take _TWO_ blood pressure meds...
I do not know my T readings but this is really some food for thought. Thank you.
PS: I f#@&ing love charts and graphs.
Classic, I thought you were in your twenties. :)
I _identify_ as a 23 year-old, though.
My wife identifies me as much younger than that...
When my now 27 year-old daughter was about 10, we were out and I made some comment about how I was Young at Heart and she quipped to the group, "Mom says the problem is that you're Young at Brain."
It might be the sort of thing my wife might've said but I think it was off the cuff. It was hilarious.
Thing is, it's mostly true. *sigh*
“Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking.”
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/860805?form=fpf
The study was done in Sweden where the women enrolled presumably had low vitamin D levels at baseline. No mention of concurrent vitamin D levels in the study.
Just asking, but did you read the actual study or the Medscape article's summary? The full study is free to read here, if you're interested:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496
Standard procedure is to test and disqualify anyone with abnormal values, unless the study looks at abnormalities specifically.
I imagine putting sunscreen on your fur makes a mess too.
Residing in Puerto Rico you might be aware of some endocrine history. Original birth control research was carried out there with whopping great doses of oestrogen in the formulations.
Further study was undertaken when it was noted that the incidence of reduction mammoplasty had increased in PR. Non-intuitively, the causal agent was found to be another endocrine disruptor, diethylphthalate, widely used as a plasticizer in almost everything. It fits the oestrogen receptor quite well and produces the expected outcomes.
Stephanie Seneff's "Toxic Legacy", concerning glyphosate("RoundUp"), also reviews some of the endocrine disruption at the protein level.
Increased blood glucose, diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, also suppresses testosterone and would correlate fairly well (inverse relationship) with testosterone decline.
As you note, MultiFactorial, our usual comment when we really don't know what's going on.
-Without grains I no longer burned in the sun. Burning in sun was partly the grain perhaps, partly the grain's ten applications of round-up/glycophosphate/ glyphosate (same thing, they keep changing the names) from seed to harvest ON/IN the grain... together with the glyphosate present in vaccinations telling the auto-immune system to recognise a deadly poison, creating coeliac disease or whatever one chooses to call vaccine-inflicted auto-immune disease.
-Light from screens mimicking sunlight will mess a bodily system up. If someone stares at a screen from 4pm until midnight, cascading hormones (via eyes) are telling the body to get out and hunt an elk for lunch constantly (GO-GO-GO! HUNT THAT ELK MAN!) because the screen is often stuck on bright 12pm daylight. Get f-lux or similar to mimic firelight.
-For higher T, eat like your great-grandparents, take BORON, and avoid all dentistry & pharma like the plague it is.
Absolutely. I feel the same. Just waiting for the big scandal when they realise sun ream is doing harm. Children are slathered in it from birth. I work outside and never use the stuff.
The men in this generation are SISSIS, not all but majority of them. They are eating too much GMO foods, smelling in the air of CHEMTRAILS filled with toxic chemicals like aluminium, barium, nano particles, graphene oxide…., hanging around 5G areas and getting their brain cells microwaved, listening to DEMONIC MUSIC, getting too many Quantum inked tattoos that opens up portals for demonic entities. The list can go on but you get what I am saying?
They are starting to look more like the zombies that the cdc had already announced on their website. This goes for the majority of the women as well.
We live in a sick, evil, fallen world, the god of this world is satan and he uses his minions (demons), to mess with mankind with souls.
God Almighty’s wrath is about to pour upon all the wicked, ungodly and unrighteous very soon. Do not get left behind!
Jesus Christ is the only way to Heaven, there is no other way.
Today is the day of your Salvation because tomorrow is not promised.
I was hesitant to spend much time in the sun after a bout with melanoma. Then I started reading more and more about sunlight. Now, it's 5 minutes standing barefoot in my front yard with my coffee in hand, facing the sun. My kids think I am the neighborhood weirdo now. At least when it isn't freezing out. Long pants, sleeves, and a broad brimmed hat are much better for extended periods in the sun anyway. No more sunscreen for me.
"Now, it's 5 minutes standing barefoot in my front yard with my coffee in hand, facing the sun."
Endorsed.
"My kids think I am the neighborhood weirdo now."
Every so often I vaccuum my driveway dressed like Eddie from Christmas Vacation with my coffee in hand, facing the street.
https://tinyurl.com/yc52kjym
It doesn't help any with the sun but it's great for keeping the neighbors thinking about whether they want to borrow my chain saw.
They don't know why people get melanoma. People get them where the sun never hits - like the bottom of their feet.
Repeatedly getting sunburned is bad, but sun exposure that doesn’t lead to a burn is very beneficial, and preventative against cancer.
Back of the calf for me. Weird.
You need to get at least 15 minutes, and doing it naked is best to get most benefits.
I wonder how much smoking contributed to high T levels. Smoking is way down on about the same schedule T levels started dropping.
Tobacco is known to raise testosterone, yes, so this is probably a factor.
Tobacco or nicotine?
From what I could find doing a quick search for "testosterone levels nicotine", smoking tobacco and chewing tobacco (and snus I guess) seem to raise testosterone levels.
Big but: not all nations allow or have the same contents in their tobaccoe/cigarettes. What is standard practice in producing a cigarette in China and one in the US need not be the same.
Also, e-fags seem to work as well as long as it's nicotine in them. Do a search, there's loads of research on the topic and results/abstracts are usually free.
Thanks, I will. There's probably loads of other compounds in the tobacco plant besides nicotine, best not to conflate them.
The tobacco component doesn't get talked about nearly often enough.
As Tucker would say, Zyn is not a sin! Here's my data point: Testosterone levels significantly higher than 10 years ago despite natural declines with age and having a baby. No sunscreen on 10,000 steps per day outdoors, a few light workouts and drinks a week, and a Zyn or two a day. The bonus is that it helps with writing too.
What is Zyn? Thanks
I am also wondering
Nicotine salt pouches you pack in your lip, available in 3mg or 6mg tins at your local tobacconist or gas station. It’s nicotine without the carcinogens and other ill effects of traditional delivery methods.
As someone who quit smoking and dipping years ago, they feel like cheating. I put one in with my morning coffee, stand at my desk, and have what I like to call “gunfighter vision” for the first hour of my day.
Thanks
I've never had my T levels checked, but just comparing myself to the modal man physically and temperamentally I'm pretty sure I'm well above. It's mostly the weight-lifting and long walks, but the cigs aren't hurting either. And as you say, a writer's best friend.
You are spot on, Yuri.
Here are more tips. I'm a woman, but take it from me - my man has very high T levels. (No, I haven't had him tested in a lab. Call it "women's intuition.")
1. Like Yuri says, moderate your weed. If you can, get your hands on a mild strain and grow your own - the stuff they sell in the cannabis stores is deadly.
2. Avoid prescription medications like the plague. If you have to take something, make sure you are getting optimal nutrition - detoxing pharmaceuticals costs your body in the currency of vitamins and minerals. Even if you have to take aspirin, dose up on some vitamin C. This can also help reduce side effects.
3. Don't use skin "care" products. Simple (edible) products like olive oil make great skin moisturizers - they work better and are far cheaper than the bottled toxic waste from the store.
4. If you live in a area with pine/spruce trees, keep an eye on when the pollen starts to fly in spring time. Spend a morning or afternoon harvesting the pollen-filled cones (they'll still be soft) and store them in the freezer. Have a little pine pollen every day for the rest of the year. The pollen contains phytoandrogens that will up your T levels.
And then don't forget to have fun enjoying all that man juice flowing through your veins.
This message has been a free service from the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun League.
I found the Badger brand to be fairly clean. For the record, I get full unprotected skin exposure for at least 30 minutes a day during the warmer months. I'll apply screen after that if I want to play outside in the full sun.
That we call them "soy boys" suggests that on some level we realize all the soy in processed foods, as well as soy-based baby formulas, may play a significant role in this low T crisis. I would add more red meat and less processed food to your list (sunlight, nicotine and sex).
In my 40s I started increasing soy intake vs animal proteins while following a work out & cardio regimen. I stopped the soy once I noticed I was developing "tits" and that ended that.
Phytoestrogens in soy are a no-no for men...even those in top physical shape!
Avoid EMF. Although god knows how that could be accomplished, unless one goes live in a deep mountain cave...
Extremely Low Frequency-Electromagnetic Fields (ELF-EMF) Can Decrease Spermatocyte Count and Motility and Change Testicular Tissue https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10111108/
Effect of Radiation Emitted by Wireless Devices on Male Reproductive Hormones: A Systematic Review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8497974/
Effects of paternal electromagnetic pulse exposure on the reproductive endocrine function of male offspring: a pilot study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220719/
Nicotine on the list sounds like justification for smokers. Lol. I think the same when wine and coffee drinkers expound upon the health benefits.
Veeeeery interesting. Source on the nicotine?
Pharma is probably one factor. As you said, it's likely multifactorial: dude weed probably plays a role; the witch's brew of xenoestrogens and endocrine disruptors in pesticides, herbicides, industrial chemicals, and plastics; sedentary lifestyles and processed foods contributing to obesity (as you noted, a double-whammy there); and also probably sociological factors. By the latter I mean that we live in a feminized gynarchy that punishes masculine behavior as "toxic", which probably acts as a psychological toxin. It's hard to feel highly masculine when you're constantly tiptoeing around the delicate emotions of bitter scolds whom you know full well hold all the economic and legal cards.
If I had to pick one as the major factor, though, I'd probably go with chemicals and plastics, as this has the most universal effect, and they've been in the environment going back to when T first started to plummet.
where it gets really tricky is in the feedback loops.
if you drop T, you get a less masculinized society whose norms increasingly push against high T behavior which, in turn, probably drops T. starts to become a bit of a chicken and egg issue.
the chemicals and plastics idea seems like it could hold some water, but it does not explain the change in the shape of the curve where those over 70 start to see an absolute plummeting in a way they did not used to. it seems like a profound change and one with a sharp curve angle. that seems to point to something exogenous focused on that age group.
Indeed, and the hypermedicalization of society almost certainly plays a role. It was only in the last couple generations that we started feeding olds a diet of novel pills, and the last generation that the young started to be fed the same.
As you said, it's multifactorial. When you go looking for plausible causes, you find them everywhere. A perfect storm of hormonal effeminacy.
wait until you see the effects of GLP-1's.
those are NOT safe drugs.
apart from the well documented side effects, i'm hearing about a huge (and entirely predictable) outbreak of depression which given the GI links to serotonin and general sense of well being is unsurprising. so, stay on them, get mood suppressed, go off, immediately gain back the weight.
it's going to wind up being a really bad situation. watch.
I admit I didn’t know what GLP-1 was. I Googled it and the very first entry started, "See a doctor online in 15 mins & get Semaglutide (GLP-1) at your preferred pharmacy”. And people wonder why we have a problem.
People need to stop looking for easy fixes and embrace the pain.
Want to lose weight? Eat less and sweat more.
I used to tell people to “Make hunger your friend.” When you feel hungry, welcome your friend back and move on to something else. As you say, preferably something that makes you sweat.
Or in some cases change what you are eating.
Yes, forego the sweets and ultraprocessed carbs & seed oils, eat foods that would have been recognized 100+ years ago.
Calories are not equal. The bomb calorimeter measure of energy content is not the same as the biologically available energy content, and that is before even looking at the micronutrients associated with the energy values.
And in more areas of life then just diet. No more bailouts, no more mommy government. Over time we've given up all our responsibility, kinda like after Augustus came to power in Rome. They pretended they still had a republic........
Interesting. I’m on Ozempic, the lowest dose possible, and that and TRT has helped me immensely. I found that it helped quiet the “food noise” and allow me to get out of the food cycle spiral of death. However, to your point, i am not sure what the exit strategy is, and what happens when i get off.
From what i've heard, when you quit it, you'll put it all back on. I think people should start considering starving the beast. You don't need all the pills, you don't need all the self help books. It makes me think of a documentary i watched about R. Crumb. At one point he talks about how before the invention of the radio, each town or city had tons of musicians. You'd see them coming it to the city when people got off work and leaving in the morning. He also mentioned how people would sit on their front porches and sing or play music and how it was a neighborhood kind of thing. I can only imagine what TV did. Everything industrial society offers gives you convenience but it also takes away a bit of your humanity each time you accept it. A deal with the devil? Heck, most of us would be talking about this stuff at bars if it wasn't for the internet. Think about it.
The older you are, the more drugs they push on you! Statins are another bad one. I haven't heard anything good about any of them!
It's economics:
We have the luxury of not having to work for it anymore.
I think the process gained purchase there and was on a slow-roll runaway (but with a floor) until it started getting dosed with the "luxury" of exogenous factors, resulting in a self-iterating "catalysis", with a dank cellar as a floor support.
Try having to kill your meal to eat. That might work over a couple of generations if we don't become cellar gimps first
First thought:
https://youtu.be/S8kPqAV_74M?si=fwopzN_XSDSgm0jw
Lord, I apologize...
It's the fluoride.
I've spent more time on well water than not in my life. I wonder if that would show up in the stats.
Well, that'd depend on where the well got its water from and if and how it was well-supplied with new water.
My brother is a hydro-geologist so I've gotten an earful or three about "clean water". He did check up on ours - pristine. At eight meters depth, it's 200 years old or more, so it's completely free of pollutants of any kind.
And the water in the lake the village gets its supply from is cleaner than store-bought bottled water.
Meanwhile, on the island of Öland (which literally translates to "Island", imaginative they aren't) the otherwise perectly clean groundwater happens to run through layers of uranium-laced shale, and in Scania there's so much chalk/lime in the water supply you can literally scrape chalk-powder out of your pots and pans after boiling water.
Belaboured point - which you already knew - wellwater can mean a heckuvva lots of stuff.
Among my brother top ten horrors from work is the rainwater-based well of a village which was downhill of a cemetary.
That is pretty terrible!! Then there are the cultures who do not bury their dead in coffins... People in TX backed their right to follow this custom...
I take not using coffins doesn't mean air burial then, where the remains are dsiposed of by buzzards and such?
I one looks at burial mounds from Stone-Brinze-Iron Age Scandinavia, they are always away from a settlement and almost on/in hills, some artificially improved. Not to mention that burning was common.
The real scary graves are the ones where people 12 000 years ago used bogs as burial grounds. The corpses are exceptionally well-preserved, grayish-blue of hue, look emaciated and hair and nails are bright crimson - they look as if they could get up and walk.
"Then there are the cultures who do not bury their dead in coffins..."
We were at a party near this time of year and I made a joke about about how 'shovels and lime' might be difficult and my next door neighbor said, "Not a problem when your next door neighbor has a backhoe."
So I got that going for me. Which is nice.
"there's so much chalk/lime in the water supply you can literally scrape chalk-powder out of your pots and pans after boiling water."
Our old water treatment getup introduced some mineral that i assume is the calcium from the softener. The house was built in 1984 and we just replaced the system a couple summers ago with some other non-salt method. But the damage has been done: Faucets and valves and I'm sure all the plumbing is coated in a white mineral coating.
We've gradually been replacing fixtures, some because they were ugly, some because they froze shut, or in one case broke when I was changing something else.
But no fluorides!
This whole side-topic brought general Jack D. Ripper to mind.
"We must preserve the essence and purity of our natural bodily fluids"
Man might have started WW3 but he did have a point re: water.
In the “olden days,” it was rare for 70 yr olds to be on 7-8 Rxs. Now it is the rule.
I see a hormone specialist. I take estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. I feel pretty darn good. I have no desire to become Karenized. Hormone balancing is villianized. I am glad I listened to the person who recommended I see someone. Just sharing my personal experience
: )
I do the same. Feel fantastic! BTW, I adore masculine men;-)
Ditto, ditto, ditto. I am a girlie girl with a gun. : )
Yup. Same here.
And I already like both of y'all.
I don't take hormones myself. I just try to eat right, lift weights, get plenty of sleep. And I don't take any medications. Almost certainly my T levels are much higher than most guys in my cohort ... though I suspect I wouldn't fare well compared to same-age men from a couple generations ago.
I get it. My levels are regularly checked; the hormones are almost always decreased as my body comes into balance. Bad habits,meds, etc throw the system out if whack. I am trying to get back to equilibrium. It’s working.
I have have been on Bio Identical HRT (progesterone, estrogen and testosterone) for over 20 years...started at post menopause and have never looked back. Mine is made by a compounding pharmacy and are in a cream form, No Big Pharma oral HRT. I first was prescribed them from my family medicine physician in the early 2000’s, who shifted into a specialized practice of HRT for men and woman and thyroid issues. (He was an independent practice physician.) Fortunately I have a primary care nurse practitioner now, that works with the compounding pharmacy I use. I have never gone to an endocrinologist for my prescription and I never would. It’s the one ‘medication’ (the other is a natural thyroid I use), that has been quite beneficial for my health as I get older. I will never stop using the bio identical HRT.
Cool, well said! I am with you. I just did a personal best dead lifting today; 84kilos. I am chronologically elderly.
: )
I too am ‘chronologicallly’ elderly…I was very strong even five years ago and have always been a fairly physically active person, but my strength and ability to lift things, is not as great now. Thinking of getting into a low key weight training program. To build back some upper body mass.
Dr. Linda, Should I presume that by 'hormone specialist' you do not refer to an endocrinologist?
My Internist defers Testo Mangement to my Urologist, a more common practice.
Not with women
Oops, my bad. Women obviously could go to Gyn. My Internist and Urologist both on staff at UCSF and smarter than this old beat-up FP/ER doc. I thought the ER boards were harder than FP boards but interestingly, the Internist who took the ER boards with me said ER was 50% easier than Internal Med boards. >:-O
No, he is an ex-ER doc to specialized on men only for write a while but gas expanded to women. I have been with him for over a year.
Better living through chemistry, I always say!
I love chemistry. Organic chemistry is a passion. In my mind, chemistry is the manifestation of physics that we can touch, smell, feel, see and taste. I love being a geek.
Yes!!! I am still disappointed that I didn't discover organic chemistry back when I was in high school! I like physics but chemistry was a revelation. The labs were lots of fun, too.
The only class I really had a hard time with was Accounting. It was a high school level class at a JC and it kicked my @$$. I have never worked so hard in a class in my life! I got an A but it was a LOT harder than science or math classes! It was a Pre-req. Never, ever again! Give me Algebra - it makes more sense (and its fun).
Card-carrying nerd here, BS Physics. Never took Organic, regrettably, but had a couple of semesters of Chemistry and know my way around The Periodic Table.
I also love being a geek.
*fist bump*
Right back at ya!!
Could be all of that....or is it just a case of men generally used to live harder physical lives which made them FEEL more masculine (and more differentiated from women)....plus their hugely younger life span?
Yes, physically harder, less sedentary lives probably raise t levels. That's one reason lifting is essential.
As to shorter life spans, that isn't really true once infant mortality is accounted for.
My instinct tells me that a much clearer mental-societal division between the sexes will have also made a difference....not having to give any mental space to things like 'should men be....? Blah Blah and 'gender' Blah Blah etc.
Life span: I'm not a statistician but it seems incontovertible to me as a 72-year-old that there's a lot more 80+ and 90+ folks around than in my parents' and grandparents' time.
As someone who's had her head in BMD stats for years (family tree stuff), I have seen lots and lots of folks 70+ at time of death.
You had to survive your first year to make it, though
Sure, but slight extensions in life expectancy don't have much first-order impact on the T levels of young men.
What's wrong with 70? Still physically able from what i've seen, not sure why people want to live forever. Perhaps another sign of the selfishness of our society? I don't want to be shitting myself in some home surrounded by strangers.
In your parents and grandparents generation people were worn out with hard repetitive physical work in factories etc.
There is a happy medium with physical work.
"...constantly tiptoeing around the delicate emotions of bitter scolds..."
Oh yes. It affects your posture, too. I noticed this long ago - might have mentioned I had a real life with a real job before going into academia and teaching. Meant I was (am still) built like a man, looked like a man and moved like a man: head high, shoulders wide, chest out, striding along and not sashaying or dragging my feet.
One day, a friend (forklift-driver) and I am out having a coffee at a café overlooking the Teachers' College in the city we live in. There's construction work going on at the new part of the building and I notice all the male teacher-students are lanky of build, partly hunched over with an almost sunken chest and stooped shoulders, and walk with a rubbery swaying gait.
All the construction workers carry themselves like my friend and I do.
And it hits me: 85% or more of all teachers in Sweden are women. Already when I was a teen, it was over 50%, more in the lower levels and the non-STEMish subjects, fewer in the "hard" stuff.
My friends quips when I mention my random thoughts:
"Yea-up. They look like filleted anchovies trying to stand up. Imprinting maybe?"
I don't know, but "moneky see, monkey do" isn't just an old saw - there's truth to it. Probably the issue is as you lay it out: multi-factorial, one factor feeding the other reciprocatively.
I'm 66 and my experience with female teachers in grade school was not good. Grades 2-6 got me four whack jobs who were also bullies. The one male teacher (5th grade) was so much better than the women! He worked with me instead of punishing me for not paying attention. We made a deal - he said I could draw in class but that I had to draw what he was talking about. Mischief managed!
I did NOT like female teachers. They didn't like me either. My 7th grade math teacher was my all-time favorite teacher. He had me bring transfer students up to speed (kinda like 5th grade - he worked WITH me, not against me). I really, really wish I had thanked him! I remember walking home from the bus and crying one time because I only got a 99 on a test. It only happened that one time. Yes, the other kids hated me because I wrecked the grading curve. Good times!!
High school geometry...sucked because proofs. I didn't need to do 20+ of each kind to understand them so I refused to do the homework. I failed the class so I had to go to summer school. I did all of those proofs in two weeks. Lesson learned!
"all the male teacher-students are lanky of build, partly hunched over with an almost sunken chest and stooped shoulders, and walk with a rubbery swaying gait."
I've noticed exactly the same thing. This physiognomy is universal everywhere feminism has conquered.
After working in a pharmacy storeroom for a large teaching hospital for nearly 10 years, I know just how little medical people know about pharmaceuticals! It doesn't take all that long to order and stock the shelves, even at a large teaching hospital in SoCal, so I started reading package inserts. You ought to see the preservatives in ALL of it! Because of that, and medication mistakes I got wind of, I realized that doctors don't know much about drugs. They don't have to - they have apps now!! I had nurses complain that we were out of something when we weren't because I had to go to a different manufacturer and the COLOR OF THE LID of the vial wasn't the same as usual! The PDR is basically useless but they all rely on it! I tell everyone who has questions about their prescriptions to ask a PHARMACIST. Doctors don't know jack about drugs!! People taking psych meds should definitely follow up with a real pharmacist. The SSRI antidepressant meds in mass shooters surely hasn't escaped anyone's notice has it? If it has, they are not paying attention! Wake up, people. Your doctor is not only not God, he or she is probably not as well-educated as they used to be. DEI is doing terrible things in medical schools (and everywhere else, obvi). Harvard medical school has or had a mandatory class on transgender INFANTS.
Thank you for addressing a huge problem!!! Sorry/not sorry for the long diatribe, Gato, but people need to KNOW! Their doctors are ignorant and they have no idea!!
The only thing most doctors know about drugs is what their salesperson tells them and what commercial catches their eye.
And usually the Rep doesn't know anything either, and wears raveling cloths, and is female ;)
I remember a big scandal about that in the early 2000's, might have been pushing oxycotin or something.
True. That is why Purdue-Frederick is being sued. They lied to doctors about Oxycontin being addictive. Which is EXTREMELY addictive; far more so than Vicodin or Percocet.
Also true about the sales reps! There were a few who took my boss (a pharmacist) out to lunch a lot. There were ski trips too but the hospital put a stop to that. One brought in doughnuts quite often. I asked her to please bring fruit or something else instead if possible. I had just lost about 60 lbs. and I did NOT want it to come back. (It did but it wasn't her fault. It brought friends along with it, too.)
What is also interesting is that no one, not even pharmacists, knows WHY pharmaceuticals work. They can see HOW they work (blood-brain barrier, etc.) but not why!! I have a few prescriptions myself. Because China manufactures most of our medications, I wanted to taper off of the SNRI (akin to SSRIs) I take but I got too depressed to function. Have tried several times. I do NOT like being dependent on China for anything and definitely not for medication! Many of the supplements / vitamins are made there, too.
SSRI Prozac is a classic example of how fuct the system truly is. It has a black box warning (the most severe) because even as an 'anti-depressant' it increases the risk of suicide.
A big, big problem with the SSRIs is that even if they work, it can take 6-8 weeks to take effect! Which means someone who is horribly depressed beyond what they can cope with, is also immature with poor impulse control...is turned loose without any help and probably no guidance. And taking a medication that can probably hurt them badly. With all of those things going on, add weapons to the mix and you have a disaster! Having given it a lot of thought, I think it is absolutely amazing that the murdering isn't far more frequent!!
Besides pollutants, sunscreens and bad diet, statins are the likeliest contributor from pharma to testosterone falling off a cliff.
We see it all the time clinically:
Man who used to work out now comes in with a soft body and soft voice, after his pharma-crazed wife exhorted him to start a statin Rx with, 'But I don't want to lose you, Dear!'
The mechanism is that 1) cholesterol was vilified, and the gullible swallowed the lie, and 2) cholesterol is a necessary precursor of reproductive hormones, and testosterone is downstream.
So the man's doctor & wife unwittingly killed his testosterone.
My husband’s doctor, who replaced his recently retired doc, insisted he take statins. When he said he absolutely would not, she guilt-tripped him: “We call men like you widow makers!”
He replied, “If I take them, I’ll definitely make her a widow, because my wife told me she’d kill me if I took statins.”
I have not looked into cholesterol and statins in a few years (is a rabbit hole,) but recall they were approved based on small reductions in absolute risk with side effects basically ignored. Somewhat similar to the covid shot statistics.
Ivor Cummins has done some great work on the Widowmaker Heart Attacks, here is a documentary on youtube for more info:
The Widowmaker - it could save your life ! #KnowYourScore #CAC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSPcuGjstN4
Funny--that was essentially the same argument I used on husband some 25-30 years ago to get him OFF statins.
I did away with statins after i developed a clogged vein in my groin, after 18 years of use. Clearly didn’t do what was claimed by my prescribing GP. Started reading up on studies from the skeptic side, notably also dr. Malcolm Kendrick, and stopped altogether. No regrets. 71 and no medication other than a pain killer. Same for hubby, who in his heyday was a masculine, handsome, hairy and well-muscled man and is still in fine shape. Not one of those clean-shaven man-bun-sporting, gym-and-steroid-muscled guys. Women must have changed just as much hormonally, to like this type of man.
Does anyone else really, really want to cut off all of those man buns? They look so freaking STUPID!
Excellent! Definitely some wives' advice is lifesaving.
How’s he doing 30 yrs later? :)
I took myself off of my statin Rx as I do not have a death wish.
Are statins generally given to younger folk?
Major changes to the CDC Vaccine schedule back in the late eighties as well.
It's not a good idea to tinker about with a complex system, taking pharmaceuticals willy-nilly, when we have no clue about the broader repercussions.
And the body is an extremely complex system.
The Elite class is addicted to "tinkering" with humanity. I am focused on living in a way that reduces my risk of becoming a victim from the collateral damage which results from their actions.
"Tinkering"--essential part of the progressive mind, --that humans are 'perfectible'.
Meh. Just take good notes so people know what you've learned. Institutional knowledge, and all that.
That's how we learned about mushrooms: https://tinyurl.com/5h2a5hns
I am currently in a proxy war with my husband's primary care physician.
My hubs was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in January(after sitting all day in hospital with a presumptive diagnosis of vertigo--go figure). Anyway, he NEEDS insulin. That's why his body lacks. But PCP wants him to do all these novel diabetes drugs. The side effects of these things are not benign and some just ruin quality of life.
The latest he wants him on is Ozempic---he survived thyroid cancer at a young age--and that is a specific risk factor noted even in TV commercials.
When you said most docs don't understand pharmacology, you hit the nail on the head.
Before I prescribe meds to my dog and cat patients, I investigate the mechanism of action, drug interactions and side effects. My patients can't talk...so it's up to me.
What are your thoughts on vaxs for kittens? I have two 13wk olds and it breaks my heart to think of ruining their health.
My cat died this summer at age 20.
I never vaccinated her and she never needed to visit the vet.
I haven't had my current kitteh vaccinated in over ten years. She's doing great! She's about 12 years old and has been known to jump from the top of a six-foot bookcase to the top of an eight-foot armoire OVER MY HEAD. She's a tortie and they do stuff like that. I've never seen a 12-year-old cat do that though!
I have a 17yr old who's had issues that I now know were caused by injections 😡. The mama I brought in is a tortie... can't wait for the shenanigans 😻. She's still a little shy but I've see her jump 12ft when she was a feral. Her inner badass will come out eventually!
My Mom's tortie used to jump off of the roof onto her shoulder. I watched her do it! They're badass to the bone!! Persephone loved the 9-foot-tall wall unit at my last apartment and spent many happy hours up there monitoring the yard.
I saw this piece on vaccination of puppies recently. It may be applicable to kittens as well.
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/taking-the-risk-out-of-puppy-shots/
Thanks for sending this! My instincts say don't do it! Unfortunately most vets require vaxs to fix any animal... I'll figure it out. I'd opt out of fixing them but I have two males and their mama. Don't need any more cats!
Researched Type 2 diabetes quite a bit for my wife who was pre-diabetic during pregnancies.
Dr. Jason Fung is a great resource: https://www.doctorjasonfung.com/
Many videos on youtube, etc. How to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally | Jason Fung https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAwgdX5VxGc
Much more money in selling drugs and perpetual treatments than in fasting (free) and dietary changes (very small market at best.)
I’ve been saying this for 30 years-- synthetic estrogen from birth control pills did not filter out of our water treatment facilities and men and boys have been ingesting this for over a generation and a half. And of course the hormones fed to chickens - there was a study years ago of little boys growing breast in Mexico from the excess hormones in meat.
I know producers say they don’t give hormones to meat anymore but the damage had already been done, and after the last 3 years who even believes these greedy people anymore?
Soy is implicated, imho.
Is it any surprise that the numbers for LGBTQLMNOP people have skyrocketed as well? Or that a population of weak, effeminate men is far easier to keep under control than so-called "toxic" men? (Not trying to leave the ladies out; it's a comment, not an essay. 😉)
At 67 and despite 2 bouts with melanoma , I am happy to say that I am on no prescription drugs. Just supplements for the cancer. And FWIW, I got off drugs my doctor prescribed…. the biggie being statins.
That is AWESOME!!
Big pharma, soy, processed food, seed oils, sugar. The list rolls on.
Exercise, meat, fish, eggs healthy fats for the win.
Interesting! Also, men respond to fertile females by increasing T. With widespread use of The Pill, we have huge numbers of non-fertile females. Another factor to consider.
This is the first comment here that I had never considered before. Good idea. Hormonal birth control also leads to women preferring “safer” partners, which will presumably select for lower T men over generations, as well.
Very interesting take on the pharma angle, señor. Definitely a major contributor.
My money is on the estrogen-dominant seed oils—particularly canola and soy—that have hijacked our diet for decades. No surprise they are also heavily subsidized.
Also, there's the Xenoestrogens found in detergents, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, linings of food and beverage cans, off-gassing household materials and just about anything (synthetically) scented. These toxins imitate estrogen and can dramatically increase estrogen dominance symptoms.
I'm with you on the seed oils.
There’s one factor we never read about in explaining low testosterone, and that is masturbation.
This is impossible to compare across generations, so it will have to remain a working hypothesis. But we can safely assume that the advent of printed porn, followed by today’s HD porn on demand, has tremendously increased masturbation. I have a close relative who literally died of masturbation (autoerotic asphyxia).
One study found that after a week of neither sex nor masturbation, men’s testosterone suddenly increased by a multiple of what it was on day one (sorry I don’t have the citation but you’re welcome to google it). This is equivalent to the effect of sunbathing one’s testicles, a tactic that I enthusiastically endorse.
Furthermore, various modern factors preventing healthy sexual relationships, which have a benign effect on androgens, also drive men into habitual masturbation.
At the risk of oversharing, I have been unwillingly celibate in marriage for several years, and when I gave up masturbation as well, my testosterone really went through the roof. It is still compounding. I can safely say that I have far more testosterone in middle age than my father or grandfathers had in their prime, and this is plainly evident in my body composition, psychology and behavior.
Evolutionarily speaking for men, a total lack of sexual activity is a serious survival threat on par with starvation, and invokes extremely powerful adaptations mediated by a sharp increase in androgens. If you really want testosterone, all you have to do is not fuck around and find out.
But be careful what you ask for. Testosterone is not, contrary to popular belief, the feel-good hormone. That’s oxytocin. Living with high testosterone and low oxytocin is like clinging to the roof of a bullet train. You’re getting somewhere fast, but it’s hardly a joy ride. Even so, in my experience, low T is worse.
Please excuse me now as I slept in almost to dawn and have a full day of shoveling, boxing and sprinting ahead of me with large amounts of raw bison organs consumed throughout. If you would pray for my soul, that would also be appreciated.
It may be the opposite:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8697462/
"The results showed a significant between-condition difference in free testosterone concentrations. Masturbation (p < 0.01) and a visual stimulus (p < 0.05) may seem to counteract the circadian drop of free testosterone concentrations over the day. However, no statistical change was observed in the ratios between total testosterone, free testosterone and cortisol."
But as the study itself says, it is limited and a greater study, over time and more in-depth is needed for more definite answers.
Still, it'd be strange if frequent masturbation didn't have /some/ measurable effect(s), good or bad.
Personally, I think real food free of chemical crap, sunshine and fresh air and physical labour is key in improving things, spiritually mentally and physically, but that's a bit "re-discovering fire", isn't it?
good thing oxytocin is super cheap, also hugs are free 🤗
I do find a correlation to what you're saying with masturbation and t levels. It's a theory and I have no evidence but so far I'm able to manipulate bloodwork with certain activities in close timing proximity to said labs.. take that for what it's worth.
I was going to point out that frequent ejaculation lowers your risk for prostate cancer, then I remembered that high testosterone raises your risk for prostate cancer. This aligns with what you’re saying...
Highly recommend getting tested.
I'm done having kids and just recently got on TRT and it has changed my life.
No more joint pain, I couldn't even get a workout in from the pain.. it's gone.
Adipose fat liquified and gone.
Lean muscle mass piling on faster than it was in my 20s.
I'm 41
I just posted a similar experience. I am still dialing in the regimen, but it’s wild how much better i feel.
Awesome! I waited years and years and finally saw a Cowboy Cerrone interview where he said something along the lines of "guys (speaking to fighters) when you're done, get on that stuff and put your old lady in a bind" and something clicked.
He's not lying either.
When I started my test first tested in the 600s then again in the 300s
They started me on 120mg/week, 25mg clomiphene 2x weekly, Anastrozole 1mg 2x weekly
I'm currently on 160mg/week ,37.5mg clomiphene 2x weekly, Anastrozole 1mg 2x weekly
I like being at 1100-1200 it feels absolutely incredible. My first shot was in July.
What does your treatment currently look like?
We are done having kids, first and foremost. Started on the cream/gel in July, did that for two months. I noticed some improvement, but not much. Also, having to apply it to my balls was inconvenient for a number of reasons. So i asked about switching to injections. Started daily cypionate injections in September. Started at .25ml and just bumped up to .30ml. Logic being that daily allows the levels to stay even.
As i have said I’ve noticed a huge improvement in energy, focus and drive both sexual and life in general. Still tweaking it, but the person i am today vs the start of the year is night and day.