Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the functioning of the endocrine system, that control hormones. In this video ...

hormone-disrupting-chemicals-and-the-crisis-of-low-testosterone-in-men

Hormone Disrupting Chemicals and the Crisis of Low Testosterone in Men!

have you ever heard of endocrine disrupting chemicals and did you know that they can actually affect your testosterone production and your sperm in terms of fertility I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to talk all about endocrine disrupting chemicals what they are how they cause problems with our hormones and what you can do to avoid them so the reason we talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals or microplastics which are two separate categories but they affect the body's production of testosterone and particularly in men this can cause issues of infertility and issues of low testosterone which can affect brain health bone health muscle mass sexual function and even mood so a lot of factors are associated with having low testosterone and we know that testosterone levels are declining we know that partly this is because there's more people with comorbidities like metabolic problems including high blood pressure diabetes High lipids or high cholesterol ol and having issues with plaque formation or heart disease but there's also this exposure to increased environmental disrupting chemicals and so today I want to talk about exactly what those are how you can avoid them and what you should worry about now this is not a video to make you very scared because in reality these products are everywhere and so we have to do the best we can to limit the exposure in our environment but realizing that you're never going to get down to zero it's virtually impossible possible and that stress is actually probably going to cause more problems to your testosterone or your other hormones than the exposure to a lot of these things so we want to be careful in terms of not getting too anxious or stressed about the fact that these are sort of everywhere endocrine disrupting chemicals are essentially external compounds that affect with the body's normal functioning hormones and specifically in testosterone let's think about how testosterone is made so first the pituitary which is a part of our brain gets signals from the hypothalamus that tells it to produce hormones called LH and FSH that then activate the testicles to produce testosterone so one there's a blockage that can occur right there then the LH and FSH send signals to these cells called seminiferous tubules in the testicles that then produce testosterone now these tubules have different types of cells the ladig cells produce testosterone giving the body the signal to make sperm and the CI cells create substances that sort of nurture and nurse the sperm to keep them healthy so you can see problems in these Pathways as well these can include the receptors themselves that see the LH and FSH sort of being abnormal or the compounds can disrupt the production of testosterone now this can be because some of these endocrine disrupting chemicals can act like estrogen which then is a negative feedback tells the body hey there's enough estrogen here because testosterone is ultimately converted to estrogen which tells the brain then to reduce the production of these LH and FSH products that signal testosterone so essentially these products can mimic estrogen or be anti-androgen so they can prevent the Ling cells from making more testosterone they can also damage the ctol cells because they create oxidative stress which then make it more difficult to reduce sperm and they can even disrupt mature sperm or sperm that are sitting in the epidemis so ultimately these endocrine disrupting chemicals can affect the body in a multitude of different ways the good news is these endocrine disrupting chemicals are generally present in really small concentrations it's typically the repeated exposure or the high amounts of exposure over time that results in problems so what are the most common endocrine disrupting chemicals well the first one is bisphenol a or BPA this is what you can find in certain plastic Goods or toys in the manufacturing processes for can Goods or plastic Goods or plastic containers and these have anti-androgenic effects and estrogenic effects and you can also find these BPA resins when things are exposed to really high heat now the US has some safety limits on how much exposure a person can get from a product and that's 50 micrograms per kilogram per day interestingly the European guidelines have an even lower level which is for m microG per kilogram per day so likely we probably should be below that level and you can actually measure amounts of BPA in blood or more commonly urine and 93 to 97% of people can find BPA in their urine at any given time meaning that we're all exposed to it so ultimately it was found out that BPA was a problem because people who worked in epoxy resin factories particularly men who were exposed to high rates of BPA were found to have troubles with erectile dysfunction reduced ejaculatory volume reduced libido and they ultimately found that these problems were correlated with the level of BPA people had in their urine now in terms of studies there's been a handful of studies that have looked at BP exposures in humans and we found that higher levels of BP exposure are related to lower levels of free testosterone in men as well as an increase in sex hormone binding globulin which is an a chemical that actually binds up testosterone in our bodies making it less available for the actions it need to do if you want to learn more about sex hormone binding globulin make sure you check out my video where I go into detail about that now other observational Studies have also found when looking at infertile men those that had higher rates of BPA were more likely to be infertile or have lower sperm Couts or sperm motility now because these are all observational studies one can be 100% sure that just because you're finding High BPA rates and you're finding High rates of infertility or lower rates of free testosterone that that's the actual cause so when you combined all these studies in a meta analysis of over 2,000 men they found that yes there was a correlation with higher urinary levels of BPA and sperm motility so ultimately there's quite strong observational data that BPA is linked with changes and fertility parameters as well as free testosterone so ultimately it's a good idea to try to avoid the products generally look for things that are BPA free and also look for Alternatives so don't use plastic water bottles use glass or metal water bottles try to warm up food in glass plates or things like Corning wear which are safer than using plastic takeout or plastic reusable containers which leads us to the next endocrine disrupting chemicals which is a category called phalates phalates are found in plastic tubing and plastic tubing is used in a lot of different things particularly in processing where you'll put things into plastic tubes while you're processing them and these phalates have been found ubiquitously not only in blood and urine but also in breast milk salades can also be found in some personal care items like Cosmetics or even sex toys and because they're so ubiquitous when you look at urine of individuals in the United States you find that about 75% of people have some phalates in their urine this was first introduced as polyvinyl chloride or PVC which was really a great product that made things soft and easy and pliable so you could use plastic for a variety of different things now the average adult eats phalates because of exposure to these items 1 nanogram per kilogram per day so it's not a huge amount but certainly if you have more kilogram meaning you have more fat then you can accumulate more and this is because these compounds are what's called lipophilic meaning that they like fat and they like to stick around when there's more fat on so they can absorb more readily when you have more fat cells so generally speaking if you are overweight your exposure to salades will be more than someone who is the same height as you but maybe Le has less fat cells now phalates affect the body's production of hormones particularly in the thyroid pathway so they can block the conversion of T3 to T4 in the thyroid pathway and they can also cause increased oxidative stress and if you've watched my videos on fertility or testosterone before you'll understand that the testicles are a very safe environment for sperm to be produced meaning they are specifically outside the body because they have a very unique temperature they need to have a very perfect environment to produce sperm and when you have things that cause oxidative stress you are disrupting that environment and when you have oxidative stress you can then disrupt that beautiful gentle environment where sperm can be produced interfering with sperm production so in order to study this people looked at the enh data so this is a nationally representative sample of us adults who receive blood and urine testing over the course of several years and they can assess any sort of crosssectional information so in that moment in time is there any association so what this group looked at was the level of urinary phalates and the production of sex hormones so specifically free testosterone bioavailable testosterone and total testosterone there was actually two studies done about this but the second study that was done wanted to look at the whole group of phalates so when you think about phalates there's different types of phalates and the initial phalates that created all the buzz about causing problems in endocrine disrupting chemicals were called DP they were then replaced by other type of phalate products called D NP p d NCH and D NP so these are all different phalate metabolites and so they want to study and see Are there specific phalates that were creating problems so in this group they found about 1,400 men who had these investigations done during the Nan study a third were 20 to 39 a third were 40 to 59 and a third were 60 and older and they were on average a BMI of 28 and as I mentioned before 38% were obese the large majority had high school education so interestingly they found a uh Association by age so they found that low molecular weight salads such as those found in cosmetics or lotion products caused low testosterone in younger men whereas High molecular weight phalates like PVCs which are found in packaging were more likely to cause low testosterone in older men and the interesting finding was that while they saw these lower numbers it was really often less than 5% however there were some outliers there was some changes in testosterone that were around 8% change in either reduced free testosterone or reduced total testosterone when looking particularly at Deep phalates where can you find these Plastics so as I mentioned before certainly plastic water bottles plastic bags in tupperware food containers in some some types of insulation and packaging materials and certain toys so ultimately I think the things that you can control are avoiding plastic bags use a cloth cotton bag avoid plastic water bottles don't use plastic Tupper wear and then ultimately when you're buying products that you can control like toys try not to buy things that are made of plastic for your kids as much as possible particularly if they're going to put them in their mouth the next endocrine disrupting chemical is called DDT DDT or DDE which are essentially insecticides or pesticides that are synthetically made and these typically cause what's called anti-androgenic effects at the receptor interestingly these were actually identified as a problem in alligators they found that in a certain lake Lake Apopka where there was a chemical spill including some of these ingredients alligator penis sizes were about 25 5% less in length compared to alligators in other surrounding laks that's sort of where the initial interest in these compounds being endr disrupting chemicals came from it has been shown that these DDT pesticides can affect human hormone levels particularly in terms of seeing higher levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone in humans being exposed to higher rates of DDT there's also been a linkage with poor sperm Health again with the movement of the sperm and the appearance or morphology of the sperm that are in humans exposed to DDT now the good news is that DDT has been banned from the US since 1972 however in certain parts of South Africa and Asia they may still use these types of insecticides or pesticides now how can you avoid these so should you buy organic well interestingly organic does not mean that it's free of pesticides it means that it's free of synthetic pesticides so they use natural pesticides and I know people always think natural means better but it doesn't necessarily mean that because it's all about the dosing right so if you use a small amount of synthetic pesticides and you need to use a significantly higher amount of natural pesticides to get the same result which is having your crops not be eaten by insects then you may be actually having a more higher exposure to a certain toxin in organic products so what is organic EX exactly mean it means that these particular fruits or vegetables have been grown on soil that have had no exposure to synthetic pesticides for the last 3 years ultimately while there have been some small studies showing some improvement in nutrients it hasn't been shown on a large scale that organic produce or vegetables are any better than those that are non-organic and organic farming is a huge industry as of 20122 is actually $181 billion industry and so this is certainly a moneymaking venture and I think it's important essentially if you're going to eat anything that you buy from a farm is to wash it and you can even use vinegar to wash the outside if you're very concerned but ultimately wash the ingredient that you bought and ultimately that should be sufficient in terms of safety for eating it I mean the best thing you could do if you have access to it is to farm your own vegetables and fruits and someday I hope that we can all do that because that would be great for the environment the last endocrine disrupting chemical I'm going to talk about is dioxin so dioxins are found in manufacturing processes called smelting as well as in herbicides and also in natural processes like volcanoes or forest fires and long-term exposure to these dioxins can result in issues with hormone production as well as sperm morphology and ultimately these products get found in high fat containing foods like milks and cheeses and that's essentially the most common route for exposure is eating these contaminated milk or cheese or high fatty food items but what they found is that the exposure to this is most detrimental when it occurs in younger individuals so little boys for example and what they looked at was they looked at dioxid exposure in three age groups 1 to 9 10 to 17 and 18 to 26 and they found in these young men or prepubertal men that when they were exposed to dioxins at a young age when they were adults they saw the most significant impact on total sperm motility or Progressive motility total sperm concentration and sperm counts however men who had exposures in teenage years or adulthood did not have the same findings so there's sort of a critical window where you need to be thoughtful about what you're exposed to next endocrine disrupting chemical is Organo phosphates these are things found in flame retardants plasticizers and additives to engine oil meta analyses studies putting together all the data on our Organo phosphates have found linkages with Organo phosphate exposure to decreased sperm count decreased sperm morphology and decreased motility as well as ejaculate volume so ultimately there are some linkages but likely the people who are most at risk are those who are working in agricultural or chemical environments especially those working in Plastics personal care products or chemical manufacturing now again a large majority of these studies are looking at OB observational data because you can't really do a randomized control trial where you take the take two groups of people and expose someone to something that might be harmful and someone to something that is not and a lot of times they're done in men who are already seeking care for infertility so they're taking these observations from men who are in infertility clinics so I think take everything with a grain of thought but certainly trying to reduce your exposure um and trying to limit exposure to the manufacturing processes of these can be very helpful and lastly heavy metals the most important implicated heavy metal in terms of endocrine disruption is cadmium so they found people who live in more either rural or industrial areas where they may be exposed to cadmium were found to have more likely have higher levels of cadmium in the semen itself and having lead or cadmium in the semen was more detrimental to sperm parameters particularly motility ultimately I think trying to limit your exposure to plastic items in the environment and it reducing your consumption of plastic items uh will actually improve the environment overall but also reduce your exposure if you are uh working in these environments then certainly identifying ways to reduce your exposure by certain types of masking or protecting your inhalation exposure can be really helpful and ultimately knowing that these things do exist in everybody everyone is exposed to some degree and it's the dose that really creates the problem so ultimately do the best you can realizing that these products are are everywhere and being thoughtful for what you purchase and consume when it comes to uh things with plastics or that could be made or manufactured in manufacturing processes that might not be as safe as possible again this is very difficult to parse out for the large majority of people even for myself and so this is more of an educational sort of content for you uh I think the best thing you can do again is try to avoid eating and drinking from Plastics I hope you guys found this helpful if you guys are enjoying my content please be sure to share my channnel with your friends and family and check out my podcast where I go into deeper detail on a whole host of topics uh and I have great guess on if you want to learn more about this topic please comment below maybe we'll get someone who's an expert on endocrine disrupting chemicals so thank you guys so much I appreciate you all so very much and always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it

Dr.

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