BPA (and More) Lowering Sperm Counts Across the Board
If there was a problem with fertility, most men wouldn’t know it until they tried to conceive a child. Everything can seem to be in great working condition, but low sperm counts leading to infertility are more common than we might think. As a matter of fact, contrary to popular belief, about half of all infertility cases involve some problem on the man’s side of the two-person equation, and there is more to blame than you might think.
Sperm Counts Plummeting from Chemicals
According to experts, this usually comes as a surprise to men, who assume everything is working well until their wife doesn’t conceive after a few months of trying. Unlike in women, where symptoms like missed periods of erratic bleeding can signal fertility issues ahead of time, for men the problem is undetectable until the sperm is expected to perform.
Numerous factors can contribute to male infertility, but one—low sperm count—has progressively been getting worse over the past 50 years.
What’s causing the lowered sperm counts in men? Several things can be blamed, says Dr. Paul Turek, a male fertility specialist.
Contributing factors to a low sperm count include:
- Keeping your cell phone in your pocket
- Consistently using a laptop in your lap
- Smoking
- Drinking
- Recreational drugs
- Some hair loss medications
- Illness
- Stress
- BPA
Yes, BPA (Bispehnol-A), still found in plastic food containers, can seriously affect both male and female fertility. Though the FDA recently moved to ban the use of BPA in baby bottles, it is still found in numerous everyday products. And even those labeled “BPA-free” now contain a distant relative to BPA, known as BPS chemical, whose affects may be just as detrimental.
Not only low sperm counts, but reproductive difficulties, including Anogenital distance, have been shown to come up from BPA-exposure in the past. Males with short AGD have been found to have 7 times the chance of being sub-fertile. This is a troubling statistic given that prenatal BPA exposure through parental consumption is associated with shortened AGD.
Eight million couples struggle with fertility problems in the United States each year. But, many of these problems can be easily prevented, with common sense nutrition, self-care, and conscious awareness of those triggers that can lead to a low sperm count.
“You know you can bring a sperm count to zero by taking hot baths every other day for a month,” Turek explained. “It’ll take you three months to recover. It’ll go to zero.”
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