Oh good a team. Welcome to another instorming the show. Tiffany and Cook, David James, Patrick Gillespie. It's me Jumbo, steering the ship as I do. Let's go with the lifeblood of the show.
Tip.
Hi, Hi, that's me.
Hello, Yeah, that's you. How are you really good?
Thanks? Been Ben sparring blind blokes again today.
I saw that. I saw that. Tell just tell our listeners who didn't hear that chat we had and tell Gillespo that you've been punching people with visual impairments in the face.
Yeah. I thought it'd be an easy win, but pretty good accuracy for someone who can't see. Ben Pettingill's been a guest on my show before and he's doing a boxing event against blindfolded opponents for an event called I'll give him a shout out because one of your listeners said that it was her nephew let Me Get It Out podcast Royale, Queensland this weekend.
Yeah, someone said that. I mean, I'm all four fundraisers and all four charity but I'm just I don't know that blind people fighting is I mean, I don't know. I just I just I just see traumatic brain injury. That's all.
I think, well, I was the only one with traumatic brain injury. Ben was doing just fine. You know, he's so sneaky. He can hear everything. I've got to breathe really quiet, and if I manage a moment where he hasn't heard where I've positioned, I just stay there and crouch and just take a minute.
Do you know how you have a tambourine which is kind of like a round circle the size of your head. I reckon you need to jam one of those around your forehead, in the back of your skull. So he's got at least he's got an auditory target, or at the very least a fucking bell around your Now.
He doesn't need it.
You can hear everything, certainly wouldn't hurt. Did he hit you?
It sure did.
Yeah, it goes, It goes, well, it goes.
Really the problem, I mean, even if you kind of knew where your head was. David's like, when am I on?
No, No, keep going, I've got nothing better to do. Listen to you to bang on about punching blind people.
Good point, good point. Hi David, how are you good?
How are you?
I'm good, I'm good. Well, I did read with interest today that you've got advice for me if in some alternate parallel universe, hypothetical universe, very unlikely universe, where I would be thinking about siren offspring, that you've got some tips for me that might help my chances. You wrote an article which went up on LinkedIn today or yesterday.
I don't know.
I think I put it up on substack a couple of days ago and then shared it on LinkedIn.
Yes, something like that. Yeah, but you.
Can see the original over on substack, over on raising Hell on substack, and yeah, that's what the one's one about. Well, it's a couple of different angles. I mean, we've talked before about the vomiting sperm count.
I think I'm not sure that we have.
Do you remember with the race horse that where they originally started counting sperm, you know, to try and fix that race horses problems and figured out that, oh, you know, this might actually work for humans too. That was back in the nineteen forties. But we've only really been worried about it, probably since the early seventies where people started to really notice that until probably about then, maybe a little bit earlier, but no one was really counting.
They were.
You could pretty safely say, when a couple lobbed in to the doctors unable to reproduce, unable to conceive, there was a pretty high probability that it was something to do with the female half of the equation, so it was relatively rare, and it often was related to something being wrong with the female's ability to reproduce. And this started to change sort of in the late nineteen sixties nineteen seventies, and it's now more than half of all problems at least are likely to be male oriented. And
the problem, it turns out, is plummeting sperm counts. And we've talked about this, as I said before, where we've gone from a situation where even the absolute best producers nowadays well below the worst in the nineteen forties, and when you take averages, average sperm counts have dropped about fifty percent since nineteen seventy three, and the rate is
accelerated since two thousand. So it's actually really really starting to be the point where we're not going to have a lot of viable mails left, probably within twenty years. And that's a bit of a concern, but that's not what I really talk about in this piece, which is
more focused on what we're doing about it. So obviously a sist of what they call a sist of reproductive technology or ART for short, or what most people call IVF is one of the things that have been done about it, which is that people say, okay, well, and you know, you probably all remember you probably remember reading the paper in nineteen seventy eight when the first IVF or test you baby was born. Yeah, good old Louise Brown, twenty fifth of July nineteen seventy eight.
First, I remember, I remember that, and I remember the first heart transplant or the first heart recipient, Fiona Cook.
Do you remember, yep, yeah.
Because that were two big, big medical things back in the day.
Yeah, yeah, Well, this was a very big thing because this was a real solution to female oriented infertility in that what you could do is fertilize the egg outside of the worm, so in a lab introduced the egg to a whole bunch of sperm and get it fertilized
and get it underway and then implant it back. And so in vitro fertilization really bypassed pretty much the whole female side of the equation as long as as long as you could because many of the female things, and particularly I think that woman Louise's mother had blocked fillopian tubes or something like that, and so that was a real concern. This bypassed and it solved the problem. So excellent,
great advance, great step forward. Trouble is, it didn't help you much if the problem was on the male site, because there was no point introducing male sperm that went up to it, whether they were in vitro or you know, where they should normally be. So it didn't really fix
anything from that perspective. So you know, the scientist says they are kept on working on such things, and probably towards the end of the century started coming up with so I think in nineteen ninety one or ninety two was the first commercial use of something called ICSI that's pronounced ixy now.
Icsi I.
Is where you select one sperm and you inject it directly into the egg.
So just one, You pick your favorite and you.
Put it straight in there, and none of this competition for the best, biting off the millions of others, none of that sort of rubbish. This is just straight in, guaranteed for at home, home run, okay, And so you would imagine it's probably it significantly solves the issue of well, if you've got a bloke who's either not producing enough or not producing enough that's viable, then that's no big
deal because you only need one. So you know, you get out of your microso out and you sort through all the millions that are there and you say, oh, that one looks good, and pick that one out and pop it in. So the problem with that is that you're doing it on the basis of what it looks like. So it's a little bit more than the example I used in the article, which is I said it's like picking the winner of one hundred meter race on the basis of his profile pick. But in essence, that's what
you're doing. You're deciding who what is the best most capable sperm to fertilize with on the basis of what it looks like. And no, that doesn't mean they have a mustache and they look pretty much.
Oh, it just.
Means this one swims well, it doesn't have any shape deformities, it doesn't it doesn't look like there's a problem with it. It looks good to go. So you're looking at those sorts of things. The problem is One of the most dangerous things about introducing sperm is something you can't see.
So there's thing called double strand breaks in DNA. So you know, our DNA is two strands, and we're pretty good at repairing errors in our DNA, So we're used to the concept that mutations happen, damage happens, sunlight exposure, radiation exposure, all manner of things can harm DNA, and
we're good at fixing it. You know, we've got built in capabilities for fixing it, and in fact, in the eggs there are pretty sophisticated built in capabilities because a woman is born with all the eggs she's ever going to have, so they've got to last a long time, and we're good at repairing them, keeping them up, keeping the DMA viable.
Sperm less of a concern.
They're not going to last that long anyway, so we have a lot less machinery around it, but we're still pretty good at keeping them going. The problem is that some things can introduce these double strand breaks or DSBs is what they're called, and if that happens, then the sperm can be totally non functional. Now that might be fine if what it does is cause it to just lie there and do nothing. Then they're not going to
pick that for ICSI anyway, are they? But sometimes the sperm can look perfectly fine, perfectly healthy, but still contain double strand brakes. And that's a problem because these things turn into or can turn into serious problems in the child that's eventually created. So and I'm talking brain damage, I'm talking childhood cancers, I'm talking autism, all manner of things.
In the range of birth defects.
It might produce nothing, but it can produce really really bad outcomes if it's not detected. So you don't you want to try and avoid picking the winner and injecting it directly in and having that winner be a sperm that has double strand breaks.
So that would almost make that protocol redundant, then, wouldn't it. I mean, because if you can't, like, if you can't tell by looking at it for one of the better term, then it's a gamble. Using that right that it is.
A gamble, it is a gamble, but it's a gamble that's got pretty well theoretically has reasonable odds in the sense that this could apply in general, you know, you know, I mean, there's nothing to stop a sperm that has double strand breaks making it all the way through. The problem is that in choosing a winner, you're eliminating a lot of the others that have already been disabled. So you're not letting nature take its course and let you know, ten minion compete for the honor and then the best
one gets through. You're just manually going in and saying that one looks good. The problem is that you're significantly increasing the risk of picking one that's got a problem because with other if we were if nature allowed to take its course, then they wouldn't have asked for ICSI in the first place. They would be perfectly happily getting pregnant all on their own without the need for this intervention.
So clearly nature is stopping something occurring at that point and preventing it happening, and what ICSI is doing is taking an end run on that and saying, okay, well, you know stuff nature, what would it know, Let's pick the winner and sort it out. It has become an
enormously popular procedure in Australia. It's gone from nothing in nineteen ninety two, obviously, because that was when it's just induced to now over sixty percent of all artificial in semina well artificial reproductive technology is used in Australia.
It's been a meteoric rise.
And that makes sense because this is the only one really that deals with the male side of the problem. So and if the male side of the problem is getting worse and worse and worse, which it is, then you need technologies if you're going to supply that market that deal with the male side. There's no point doing IVF if the problem is on the male side.
So so just quickly, right, I know, I know we covered a bit of this a while ago. I just want to I was thinking you said that, So the average sperm production or sperm counters down fifty percent since nineteen seventy three, right, yep, So that's fifty years, give or take. I mean, like even just statistically looking at that, looking at that on a chart would suggest that at some time, some stage in the not too distant future, the males of the species could be producing nothing.
Nothing useful, Yes, nothing useful, Like.
Based on fifty percent decline in fifty years, I mean that would.
Well, and it's accelerated since two thousand. Remember, so the last part of that had the slope has been much much greater. So it's now in Australia estimated to be about dropping about three percent a year in Australia.
Is this being spoken about with any level of buckety fuck? We better do something about this?
It is by some people.
It's particularly important in Israel, for example, which I think has amongst the worst sperm counts in the developed world because of particular dietary peculiarities which will come to They eat an awful lot of seed oil, and seed oil destroys sperm count and also introduces double strand breaks into sperm. So and I guess that brings us around to well, okay, this is all very bad news, But what can you do about it?
One of the.
Things you can do about it is the things that men were told to do about it in the nineteen seventies, which is they were told if you are planning to conceive, stop drinking and smoking. Now you might say, well, what a drinking and smoking have to do with each other, let alone to do with sperm? And I know, TIFFs, they're you know, barely able to stop herself laughing.
But where're you trying to keep it clean? Here? Tiff, all right, the relationship.
The things I've never heard in stutter.
So much, it's just giggling.
Fuck Now.
The thing that's in common between smoking and alcohol when it comes to sperm is that both of them produce significant amounts of aldehydes. And we've previously talked about aldehydes and particularly dangerous compounds that destroy DNA. In fact, aldehydes introduce double spram breaks into DNA, and that's why both drinking and alcohol it's recommended you not do a large amount of either if you want to avoid having things
like cancer. But this is taking it one step further, which is, if you want to avoid introducing these breaks into your sperm, then you shouldn't be doing that either, because they're particularly susceptible because they are made up largely of poly unsaturated fats, which are particularly amenable to these
aldehydes affecting them. So that advice was given to men in the seventies and has been since, which is, if you are planning to conceive, then a good three months beforehand, just give up the booze and the smokes, because that takes the aldehydes out of circulation and it means that you are not going to affect either your fertility or introduce these potential problems of DNA. Now that advice didn't the DNA stuff didn't come with the advice in the
nineteen seventies, but certainly the fertility did. What they didn't say because they didn't know it at the time, was you should also stop consuming vegetable oils. You should or what we've referred to a seed oil. So these are the oils that come from canola seeds, sunflower seeds, surflower seeds, soybeans, you know, all that stuff that's generally marketed as vegetable oil, even though vegetables weren't you know, no vegetables were harmed to create it. You can't get oil from a vegetable.
They are actually seed oils or legume oils if you want to be more accurate, because you can also get them from soybeans and peanuts and so on. So those things are just as bad as the smoking and the drinking, probably worse because the aldehyde produced by them is even more bioactive than the ones produced by the smoking and the drinking. Once again, we didn't fall off the back of the potato truck yesterday. We do have the ability to deal with these aldehydes. We can deal with them.
We can diffuse the damage done by alcohol, we can diffuse the damage done by smoking, and we can diffuse the damage done by seed oils. The trouble is we have limited capacity to do it, and if we overwhelm that capacity by either doing all of those things a lot, or just having a lot of what we eat contain
one of them seed oils, then we're in trouble. So we've evolved in an environment where there we're almost no seed oils in our environment because all of our fat came from animals, or if we live near the equator, came from fruit, so things like olive, coconuts, etc. Which are also vegetable oils, but which I have fat profiles very very similar to animal So we evolved in that environment where there just wasn't much seed oil, therefore not a lot of threat from aldehys from seed oil, so
our bodies are not attuned so having to deal with vast quantities ofage. But today we live in an environment where everything is cooked in it. Every time you buy anything from a restaurant, from a fast food place, from a supermarket, every single thing has been cooked in those seed oils. So we've gone from an environment where almost none of our food had it to where almost all of it has it.
And that's a bad thing when you're.
Trying to minimize the effect on a system designed to eliminate those alder hides. So the advice today to a prospective father would be don't smoke, don't drink, and don't eat seed oils if you want to improve a your.
Fertility and b your ability to reproduce at all.
It's so important that people know that, and I feel like most people don't. I just typed into chatters Whire seed oils called vegetable oils. The term vegetable oil is a broad generic label for oils extracted from plants.
I e.
Vegetation doesn't mean the oil comes from actual vegetables like broccoli or carrots. Usually comes from seeds, nuts, or fruits of plants. So when you see vegetable oil on a label, it's often a blend of soybean oil, canola oil, rape seed, sunflower oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil, all of which are seeds. Yes, then it says why not just call them seed oils? Good marketing and industrial convenience. Oh that's why for good marketing and industrial convenience, vegetable oil
sounds healthy, broad broad, plant based, and neutral. Seed oil sounds more specific. And in recent years it's been given a bad rap by wellness andres people.
That's all right, Well, the original source of the name vegetable oil actually was to distinguish it from mineral oil. So if they just called it oil, people would think, oh, what you mean the black stuff we.
Dig out of the ground.
So there's mineral oil and vegetable oil, meaning you know, stuff we dig out of the ground and stuff that come that got out of plants. So and then it stuck for the reasons that you just read out, which is it's better from a marketing perspective, is it.
Is it possible to undo like for people who have had consumed a lot of seed oils historically, if they stop tomorrow, obviously that's better than continuing. But does that undo any of the damage.
Well, in this particular case, it's actually one of the few examples where stopping has an immediate effect.
Because firm don't last that long.
So that's why the advice was to stop smoking and drinking three months before you plan to conceive by then you should have a new batch and it won't be affected at all by what you've been doing before in your life. So in this particular instance, the advice is good because if you stop, and I'd give it six months just to be safe.
If you stop and.
Not consume those things for six months, then you're making brand new sperm all the time, and those brand new sperm are not going to be affected by aldehydes you consumed six months ago. So in this circumstance, yes, for most things. No, because for most things, what we do is store them as part of the cell membrane in our own bodies. Which is why stopping these things whilst over the longer term will reduce your risk of cancer from consuming them, because you know, slowly the amount in
your body decreases. It isn't an instantaneous thing. It's just better to be not consuming them than consuming them. Piece I haven't written yet, and I'll just preface this. We'll talk about it one day, I'm sure, because I really
do want to write. This one is the one about how in women, how the fat that we're talking about, the poly unsaturated fact, gets stored in their bottoms and because that's the coolest part of the human body because it's furthest from the central core and so so you know, and why it's stored there is to make baby brains. So the human brain is mostly fat, and so a woman spends most of her life storing up the ingredients for creating a human brain. And where she stores it is in her bottom.
That's so funny.
It's also it's also why I first born babies are the smartest because they get the benefit of you twenty years worth of storage, whereas the next kid only gets whatever's left over.
Oh, so you can say, I want to thank my my My great brain is thanks to my mum and bottom.
That's all right, wow, wow, wew.
Hi Mary, thanks for only having one kid and making men. What oil do you have in your diet, like I have.
A lot of I'm usually olive oil.
Yeah, that's a good choice.
Yeah yeah, So it's a fruit oil has a profile very very similar to animal fat. So as long as it is actually olive oil. But you never know these days, you know, just because it says it's olive oil on the bottle doesn't mean that's what.
They put in the bottle. Really well, there's It depends on it. I mean most strainia manufacturers. Yes it is.
If it is olive oil on the bottle, then it is olive oil in it, because it's pretty big penalties for lying about it.
But I don't know.
Stuff coming from Spain and Lily and so on, I'm not so certain about that.
Well, I always buy Australian olive oil.
There you go.
Is the what's the difference between that and extra virgin? Is it is a label?
Oh? Really?
Yeah? You know, they have meanings that theoretically matter. From a biochemical perspective, they don't matter at all. There's only really two important types of olive oil. There's refined olive oil and not refined olive oil. So refined olive oil is what is sold in the supermarkets as light olive oil. And I'm not sure why it's light because it's still olive oil. It still has exactly the same number of calories,
so I don't know. But it's what makes it light is they've taken all the impurities out of it, so they've filtered out all the dirt and crap that's in normal olive oil, and what that does is give it a higher smoke point. So because there are the things that burn when you burn an oil.
So if you.
Can cook refined olive oil or light olive oil, you can use it to deep for our chips if you want to.
You know, you can go up.
Around two hundred and two hundred and ten degrees. But you wouldn't want to do that with an extra virgin olive oil or an unrefined olive oil because it's full of all sorts of impurities which will start to smoke.
Oh, give the up, butter cup, and people can find that on substack, David, and also on LinkedIn. Is that correct?
Yep?
Perfect well, Tiff. If you're looking for a man, and more importantly with your bottom fat that's been getting ready for a baby.
Brain.
That's that that first baby of yours is just going to be a journeys, isn't it.
That's it's a bit unpleasant, un called for. You brought it up, not me, dear h.
We'll say goodbye fair but as always, that was fun and we appreciate to doctor Gillespie.
See you next time, no worries to see you later.