US Testosterone Levels Continue to Tank

Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.

And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn’t need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.

https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/allinthefamilylyrics.html

“…when men were men, and women were sort of men, too, and even babies had chest hair.”
-Cressida Cowell, The How To Train Your Dragon Series

Well, there is one thing shown to increase testosterone if engaged in often enough, but many studies show married people have more of it. Men are delaying marriage and single people apparently have a lot less of that particular thing than in the past.

I don’t claim to know which of many possible reasons for this is most important; but the Big Story is that it is not a story at all.

There is a striking, sustained lack of Establishment concern about this long-term, well established observation (confirmed e.g. by reducing sperm counts) – which I understand as meaning that This is a change that the Establihsment thoroughly approve-of.

Medically speaking, a couple of things are worth bearing in mind. Low testosterone reflects some kind of disease process – non-adaptive.

Most obviously, it could be due to some kind of toxicity in the environment – eg in food, perhaps from veterinary antiobiotics, growth supplements etc – which I would regard as a prime suspect behind the obesity epidemic – which may be linked.

If adulteration of food is pervasive, global, unavoidable – then the confounding of low testosterone with obesity cannot be removed from the data, because everybody suffers it.

But low testosterone could also reflect a decline in genetic-biological ‘quality’ of men (e.g. due to mutation accumulation, which must-be happening); because (as a generalisation) testosterone is bad for cellular health, so a man will only secrete as much testosterone as he can ‘bear’.

This is why the signs of high testosterone are an ‘honest advert’ of genetic health. If a genetically-unfit man were to secrete high testosterone, it would cause signs of disease that would make him unattractive to mates.

Testosterone-induced changes are therefore like the peacock’s tail, attractive to females and also increasing the risk of death (from predation) – so that only the fittest peacocks can both have a large and high quality tail, and survive. To be a still-alive peacock with a big and high quality tail is an honest advert of high genetic quality.

My point is that while testosterone loevels can easily be raised by takiing testosterone supplements, it is possible that this may do more harm than good – becuase, after all, it is not difficult for the body to secrete more testosterone – and there must be a reason why this is not happening.

If the reason is something local and specific to impair testosterone production, then low testosterone is a cause of problems and supplements may well help.

But if low testosterone is an *effect* not a cause, e.g. an effect of poor genetic quality; then supplements would overall harm, not help.

@Bruce Charlton,

your big story is absolutely right. This is one of those big obvious things–birth rates are another example–that by any sensible measure would be society’s top concerns. They aren’t. So we must assume the people and processes in charge are either malicious or historically incompetent or, my favorite, both.

Obesity–I am not so sure that removing obesity as a confounder means the cause can’t be environmental. For some types of metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance for example, you get people who have insulin resistance and a lot of the related issues without being obese. Which means that you could have some environmental issue that causes both obesity and testosterone drop but you still see the testosterone drop when you control for obesity.

Mutational load has to be part of the story. But–and I say this without having followed the link or read the study–I don’t see how by itself it would explain that big of a drop in less than 20 years.

Probably a lot of factors. Are there any studies with links to plastics in the environment?

Other ones, unlikely but it’s a complex system, could be:
– microwave emissions (cell phones) adding just enough thermal energy
– self-fulfilling biological feedback: lack of opportunities, being taught it’s bad to be male from infancy, feminism
– ADHD/other medications. How much of young men are on *some* medication?

lol losers

Sorry, I got a bit carried away with the comment! My point was really just that this may Not be something that can be ‘corrected’ by testosterone supplements.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the causes of long-term increase/ decline, and national differentials, for most serious medical illnesses are not known. Not known is the norm.

Examples of not known are coronary heart disease (for the mid 20th century by far the biggest killer in the west) (note: it was not caused by diet or smoking); and severe schizophrenia which arose around 1800 to become quite common (especially among the middle classes) and is dwindling fast over about the past 20 years – especially in women.

PD Mangan writes a lot about these issues and links to studies about them:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Mangan150

I wonder what the T levels are among the tens of millions of “excess men” (the number of men which exceeds the number of women) in China and India.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/

Dr C, aren’t illicit drugs and psycho-active prescription medications known for reducing T levels? Marijuana, opioids, SSRI’s ?

The is near zero validity to ninety-plus percent of modern medical research data, so answering this is not possible without inside knowledge of any real (honest and competent) scientists who are working in this field (and there may not be any).

But reducing T goes back a long way, several decades – and seems to be either happening in all the West, or maybe globally.

If I was tasked with sorting it out; I would look for counter-examples – cohesive groups of men whose T has been rock solid or risen (without androgen supplementation, obviously) and see what was different about them.

Could it come down to something in the mass consciousness? Perhaps Western men are simply utterly defeated in some enormous way.

Perhaps. Perhaps T production is like muscle – it grows as needed and used, and the opportunities to use it are diminishing. The long list of examples isn’t needed

Me, I think its probably literally true that your testosterone varies based on your perception of your situation. Dunno if that explains the mass decline though.