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A new study has found low testosterone in men is associated with a shorter lifespan.

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Testosterone levels in men have been dropping for the last several decades now.

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And it's all part of a broader endocrine decline in developed countries.

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What's causing this shift?

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What are the consequences of testosterone deficiency?

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For some reason, testosterone supplementation, also known as hormone replacement therapy, has a bad reputation.

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What does the research actually say?

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Today, we do a deep dive into all of this.

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Welcome to Fallout.

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So, Robert, something I've been thinking about a lot lately is testosterone.

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On the one hand, testosterone levels are going down.

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Sperm counts are going down.

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These two things are connected.

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On the other hand, testosterone replacement theory is almost sometimes viewed as a kind of like taking steroids, maybe, or something of this nature.

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There's potential health ramifications.

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So, let's dig into this.

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Yeah.

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So, this kind of was brought out into the public awareness when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the candidate for president, the third-party candidate,

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admitted or acknowledged quite a while ago that he was taking hormone replacement therapy.

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He was taking testosterone supplements.

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And the press latched onto that and weaponized it in all kinds of ways, talking about that, basically implying that Bobby was taking anabolic steroids.

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Obviously, he's physically fit.

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He takes his exercise and physical fitness very seriously.

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The idea that he was taking anabolic steroids, basically implying that he wasn't really who he was and that that was false because it was being augmented chemically.

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And then there was even stories talking about this parasitic worm infection that he once had in his brain and how that might be somehow related to his taking these steroids.

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And then on top of that, there's the messaging that has been around now for decades that hormone replacement therapy, particularly testosterone, but also estrogen, is associated with decreased life expectancy,

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cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and a number of other things, and it's turned out in the case of estrogen therapy and hormone replacement therapy for women that a lot of that had to do with the early estrogens, synthetic estrogens,

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that were produced that were produced from plant sources, that were used in birth control, in which very high doses of these estrogens were being used to basically suppress ovulation in women.

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And these were not truly bioidentical.

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And subtle differences in sex hormone or steroid structure can have profound implications in terms of biology,

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including supporting cancer cell development, because the lock and key relationship between hormones and their receptors is crucial.

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And if it's slightly off, it can trigger cascades of biologic activities that are counterproductive, can lead to cellular growth and development, unregulated and things like that.

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So the truth is that historically, some of the early practices in hormone replacement therapy and birth control did have hazardous consequences.

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So in the face of this kind of historic bias and messaging that is permeated throughout the medical establishment and what most people are aware of,

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there was a recent meta-analysis published by the Annals of Internal Medicine in which they looked at 11 different prospective studies.

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These are more epidemiologic, but they aren't a retrospective.

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They don't have that bias.

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They did a meta-analysis of 11 different studies, and I think it's over 30,000...

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24,000, I think.

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24,000, and 24,109 in 11 studies for this meta-analysis.

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And surprisingly, they discovered that low testosterone levels were associated with increased all-cause mortality.

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We're now, many of us, familiar with all-cause mortality as an indicator because of the tracking of that metric during the COVID crisis.

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So this is all causes of death all bundled together.

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And then extremely low levels of testosterone were associated with increased cardiovascular disease.

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So exactly a flip-flop, the opposite of what many of us have been told and what physicians generally had taken in as bedrock truth.

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Well, and two other things here, right?

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We have an aging population, right?

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It's a much older population than past historically.

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So that, of course, is related here, right?

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Because testosterone production in men goes down with age just kind of naturally, right?

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That's one side.

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There's this other element, though, as well.

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And, you know, some people would suggest that's probably these overall levels going down among younger people, which have been tracked as well,

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that that might actually be a good thing because of something called toxic masculinity.

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That just occurred to me, right?

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So is it possible that we just haven't been looking at this and there's these multiple variables that we need to consider?

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You know, environmental variables on the one hand, aging population on the other.

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Absolutely.

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But transcending the aging population issue, which relates to something that's known as andropause.

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So we're all familiar with menopause because women have this very clear physical signal of menstruation.

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In the case of males, there's nothing that is that overt as the shedding of the endometrium that happens in women when they ovulate and stops happening when they stop ovulating.

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And they have these symptoms of hot flashes and mood changes and other things that are associated with menopause.

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There's also something called andropause, where in men at about the same time, about 55, sometimes as early as 50, sometimes as late as later 50s,

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they go through this sudden decline in their androgen levels, particularly their testosterone levels.

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But over on top of that, there's this observation that 20 to 30 percent of young men, we're talking about in their 20s and 30s,

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have detectable abnormally low levels of testosterone.

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And this is new, this new phenomenon of an overall decline.

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So we may have multiple things happening simultaneously.

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And we've covered previously issues about glyphosate and other desiccants that are used in production of grain that are contaminating our oats that we have for breakfast,

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most of our breakfast cereals, bread, et cetera, grains.

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A large fraction of Canadian infants have been shown to have detectable on relatively high levels of glyphosate,

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otherwise known as Roundup was the trade name.

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And this is all associated with suppression.

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These environmental toxicants that are in our food stream are all associated with suppression of testosterone.

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So we seem to have this overall endocrine decline.

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And then we have the phenomena of aging in the context of an aging population.

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Before we go into the hormone replacement therapy, it's interesting what this testosterone deficiency is associated with, right?

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We've got like vitamin D deficiency.

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Vitamin D deficiency can lead to deficiency in testosterone.

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It's causally linked.

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Because we just had an episode on vitamin D.

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That's interesting.

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Again, vitamin D plays in, right?

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Yeah.

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And then, so is it just glyphosate or are there other environmental?

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So it's glyphosate.

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Sorry, glyphosate.

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Yeah.

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It's more than just glyphosate.

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There appears to be a number of things.

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And now people are talking about microplastics that are being found in virtually all testes at autopsy.

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Testes being the primary source of testosterone in males.

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Glyphosate, other desiccants that are commonly used, desiccants being things that are sprayed on grain crops in order to cause the grain crop to all die simultaneously and dry out very rapidly.

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So it can be harvested in a kind of a mechanized industrial way rather than allowing it to, the grain to dry naturally.

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So virtually all of these agents are associated with a variety of effects, promotion of cancer in some cases, and absolutely suppression of this endocrine axis and testosterone levels.

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So it seems to be a widespread phenomena of Western diets as we're seeing a male population in the West that is increasingly testosterone deficient with all of the kind of behavioral and psychological effects associated with that.

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And let's talk about those a little bit, because some of them actually, again, as preparing for this, some of them actually surprised me, right?

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It's not necessarily obvious that, you know, I mean, aside from this connection with Alzheimer's, I think that's where.

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Yeah.

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Testosterone, reduced testosterone levels associated with Alzheimer's or dementia.

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And general cognitive declines.

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So this is memory and thought.

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As you age, typically, if you have depressed testosterone levels, your ability to maintain good central nervous system health in general declines.

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This is the forgetful elder.

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Alzheimer's disease, bone density, muscle mass, moodiness, fatigue and depression.

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The male who goes through andropause is associated, among other things, psychologically with moodiness, depression, and potentially even tearfulness.

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Things that are often attributed as female behavioral characteristics are seen in men when they lose their normal levels of testosterone, when that declines.

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And of course, this feeds into all kinds of stereotypes of the cranky elderly male.

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But it also relates to and informs some of these big social trends that we're seeing in terms of, as you mentioned, the pushback against toxic masculinity.

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The sense that men, you know, as we're seeing the rise of a gerontocracy.

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I just want to touch on the toxic masculinity thing.

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The idea that there is such a thing, even as toxic masculinity.

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I think that's probably reached its peak a few years ago.

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I hope.

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Right?

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I hope.

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But there's this whole idea, kind of, that's been pushed in the culture, right?

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That somehow, you know, the traits associated with testosterone, right?

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Right.

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Right?

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Are negative.

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Yeah.

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Right.

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Bad.

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Socially bad.

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Mm-hmm.

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I, so, I hope that you're right.

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These are core traits as, you know, for those of us that are rooted in biology.

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Uh, and the fact that there is sexual dimorphism in humans, uh, it has a chromosomal basis, but it also has a hormonal basis, and that hormonal basis drives behavior.

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You know, it's a gradient, but those two general clusters of behavioral characteristics, uh, in males and females have evolved over time.

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They are adaptive, uh, they are adaptive, or they wouldn't exist, or if you're someone who's fundamentally rooted in, uh, um, monotheistic religion, uh, they were, they were created, uh, because they serve a purpose.

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Uh, and the, uh, gender differences that exist that are largely hormonally driven have, uh, adaptive functions for traditional roles.

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I guess that, uh, I guess that, that part of the logic is those traditional roles no longer apply because we're, um, there's so much, uh, momentum behind discouraging reproduction.

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Mm-hmm.

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Uh, and, and, and so why do we need to have those gender differences if we're no longer having babies and raising children?

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I, perhaps, is part of the logic.

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I don't know.

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Mm-hmm.

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I don't subscribe to it.

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Right.

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So when I look across the, the trends that I'm seeing, I see a kind of resurgence of interest in traditional, uh, social roles among men and women.

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Right.

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Let's, let's cover that a little bit later.

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I want to jump back to this, uh, the, the testosterone replacement idea.

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Like, you know, there's these pros and cons, right, that, that are being shown to us.

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Yeah.

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And so that's the importance, I think, of this Annals of Internal Medicine paper is that it really informs that because there has been this continuing, uh, um, notion that spread throughout medicine and throughout, uh, people, uh, involved in alternative medicine.

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In alternative health and supplements that, uh, when you go through menopause or andropause in males, uh, it's kind of inevitable.

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And, uh, we have to just tolerate it.

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We just have to tolerate the cognitive decline, uh, the decline in sexual activity.

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The, uh, the, uh, motivational decline, the sleepiness, uh, tends towards depression and, and the problems with, uh, muscle wasting, uh, bone health, decline in bone health density, uh, are all linked back to your endocrine system.

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And when that shuts down because of menopause or andropause, we've, we've thought that it's necessary to just allow our elders to decline.

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And, uh, also tying into the COVID story is that one of the things that's driven by the decline in your overall, your overall hormonal function, including testosterone, espigens, et cetera, really for both genders.

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It's just a question of the balance of these hormones that distinguishes is that this decline is associated with what's called metabolic syndrome.

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This pro-inflammatory, typically pre-diabetic state, which we know was one of the major risk factors with COVID.

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Right.

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That's perhaps what was driving a lot of the, uh, increased mortality associated with, uh, being elderly.

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And it turns out that metabolic syndrome is intimately linked with declining testosterone levels in males.

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And metabolic syndrome is associated with coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, other serious problems, including increased in cancer, increased risk of cancer.

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So is it, you know, here's the intriguing thing.

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Could it be that this whole cluster of diseases of aging are driven by, uh, this endocrine failure, this collapse of andropause and menopause?

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And if so, could it be reversed?

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Could the effects that we believe are absolutely linked to aging, could they be reversed if we were to augment and, and, uh, supplement, uh, our, our hormonal balance?

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If we used accurate, uh, hormone replacement theory, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, that's the key question.

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The data are in with this study, with this meta-analysis, that in fact, um, very low, low levels of testosterone are associated with increased all-cause mortality.

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Very low levels of testosterone are associated with, um, uh, uh, uh, cardiovascular disease.

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And, um, um, there's, with one of the metabolites of testosterone, um, DHA, there's kind of a U-shaped response, very low levels of DHA indicating that a depletion of testosterone levels are associated with, uh, increased cardiovascular risk.

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But so are very high levels of DHA, so that's indicating that the testosterone is being metabolized rapidly, or you have excessively high levels of testosterone.

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So it implies that this isn't a case where you can just take a whole lot of testosterone and be in the clear, but the right level is essential.

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And the evidence now is that not just the right level, but you have to have bioidentical testosterone.

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Okay.

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Just like with estrogen.

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Break that down for me.

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What is bioidentical versus synthetic?

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So it has to do with the chemical structures of what's essentially a, a steroid.

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And the steroid molecule is, uh, wonderful from a chemical, from an organic chemical standpoint, because there's all kinds of places where you can modify it.

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And those modifications have profound effects on its biology, its biologic activity, as it interacts with the appropriate receptors that vitamin D, remember, is functioning, uh, essentially in this same kind of way.

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And it's interacting with the vitamin D receptor, as we discussed the, um, during a prior session.

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When one derives a human hormone analog, whether it's estrogens or testosterone from plant sources, you could make these chemical modifications and derive a compound that had many of the activities of natural estrogens or testosterones.

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And it was only after the passage of time that it was discovered that if these weren't exactly the same as the native molecule, then they could have these other effects like tumor promotion in glandular tissue.

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Uh, in, in the case of, of, uh, testosterone augmentation therapy or hormone replacement therapy for men.

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There are different forms, uh, form factors for administration.

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There's injectables, there's gels, um, uh, there's an oral form and there is a long-term depot form that's referred to as pellets, uh, that are surgically implanted and then slow over time release the product.

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And, uh, in these various cases, for instance, in the case of the orally available form, there's a chemical modification that's placed on the side of the hormone to make it more bioavailable and also to increase its, uh, release.

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So it's more of a slow release product because the problem is if you just take or just inject testosterone, you get a surge.

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So you get that very high level, which is associated with toxic effects, and then a sudden crash over a very short period of time.

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And so it's necessary to make chemical modifications if you want to extend that and dampen it.

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And I think this is something, whether, if someone wished to, uh, consider hormone replacement therapy after having had their, uh, testosterone levels or estrogen levels, uh, tested, whether, you know, male or female,

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this is really important to engage with a experienced physician who is familiar with these bioavailability issues, uh, can adjust just like we were talking with vitamin D.

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It's important to get the blood levels tested and then titrate them and typically test over time to adjust the dose so that you're within the sweet spot of not too low and not too high and avoid the risk associated with that, including prostate cancer and breast cancer potentially.

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And now, according to this paper, uh, documented the risk that can be associated with cardiovascular disease and all cause mortality.

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Does that answer your question?

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It, it, it does.

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And you, but you raised one that I would just want you to quickly touch on.

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And that is that, uh, you described it both as a hormone and a steroid, which I think it's, it is, which I think it is.

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Well, so, so exactly that the accusation, right, is that taking testosterone is the same as taking anabolic steroids and that's how you get your buff physique, right?

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If in the case, is that so?

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In a way it's partially true because, uh, testosterone is important for maintaining muscle mass.

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Uh, but it's very different than the anabolic steroids that are typically taken by weightlifters or others that are trying to build the physical sign.

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Um, uh, so it's, it's, it's, testosterone is not one of the classical synthetic anabolic steroids that are used for building muscle and for performance enhancement, but absolutely the, uh, depletion of, of natural testosterone or lack of supplementation of bioidentical testosterone or estrogen in women is associated with,

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with reduced bone density, who cares about reduced bone density?

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Well, that transfer, that translates to fractures, hip fractures, okay, which are a major precursor for, uh, death in the elderly, okay, and also, uh, muscle wasting.

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And so that leads to, uh, decreased mobility, uh, decreased stamina, um, general sedentary lifestyle people kind of just sitting around because they don't have the energy and they don't have the muscle build that they used to have.

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Are there ways without, you know, getting some sort of supplementation as well as to augment your testosterone levels?

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Perhaps the most important one is to lose weight.

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Uh, we have become a society of people that are overweight.

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In fact, we have a whole, uh, kind of new emergent phenomena of, uh, avoiding fat shaming because obesity is so rampant in our culture.

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In the culture, there is shame associated with obesity, but, or historically there has been, uh, but the truth is that obesity is associated with poor health and it's also associated with, uh, decreased circulating levels of these sex hormones, both estrogens and testosterone.

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Because the fat serves as a deposit, these things sequester themselves into the fatty tissue.

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And so one of the things that everybody can do to help with this is to lose weight.

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And by the way, that of course then leads to improvement in your risk for metabolic syndrome.

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All of these things are interrelated.

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And I just want to jump in and say, you know, going for long walks, cutting out the fast, highly processed foods.

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Uh, uh, uh, you know, carbs to simple carbs, sugar, all of that does a lot to lead you in the right direction.

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Just to give a personal anecdote in the early days in COVID, I really started gaining a lot of weight and that probably had something to do with my having such a bad initial bout of COVID disease in 2020 because I had become quite heavy.

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I was being sedentary.

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I was, I was so focused on the computer and writing and talking to people and being on teleconferences that I wasn't taking care of my body.

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And I, and I was stress eating like many of us do.

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Yeah.

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Sounds familiar.

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And yeah, it's, I think we all suffer from this and me too.

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So I wasn't taking care of myself.

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I gained weight and I got pretty bad COVID disease.

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Uh, and it wasn't until I changed my diet.

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I was a vegetarian and eating a lot of highly processed soy based products that I was able to get a handle on that and start dropping weight.

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I've now dropped almost 40 pounds and it's made a huge difference in my life, but it'll make a huge difference in terms of your overall levels of testosterone and males, estrogens and females and the testosterone and estrogen balance.

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Now, some of these plant products that exist that, um, in some plant-based supplements may contain a sex steroid precursors, estrogenic compounds in particular, remembering that estrogens and, and testosterone can be converted biologically in, in some of your cells and tissues.

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Uh, but the problem is that these plant-sourced, uh, um, estrogenic compounds, uh, are not true, uh, analogs of the normal human testosterone or the normal human estrogens.

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And so they can lead to side effects or off-target effects.

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The one that's most obvious that is talked about culturally is, quote, man boobs.

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Mm-hmm.

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The growth of, of, of this secondary sex characteristic that kind of looks like breasts in men, particularly ones that are eating a lot of, uh, soy-based products.

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Uh, and this relates to that general problem of the early days in developing estrogens and testosterone supplements from plant sources.

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Your body is converting some of these, uh, and they do have some activity.

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Uh, but it's not precisely the same as the, uh, um, uh, bioidentical hormone.

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Mm-hmm.

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And so they can have these off-target effects.

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Well, let, let's talk about the, sort of, the broader implications of this, you know, decline in testosterone in men.

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Um, I, I, I've seen all sorts of arguments out there, right?

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Some of them going so far as saying that, you know, that this decline in testosterone is profoundly affecting how society functions.

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Right?

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I think that it's certainly intriguing that, uh, we see this megatrend, particularly in the West, of declining testosterone levels.

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And, and also fertility on, on the, on the male side.

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Absolutely.

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And sperm count.

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Yeah.

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And, uh, all kinds of things like this.

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We, we have a rise in young couples that have become, it's become very difficult in many cases for them to conceive, even if they want to.

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So this is, hence we have these fertility clinics and these various medicines that are used to stimulate ovulation and to increase fertility and the need to do artificial, uh, um, uh, artificial conception.

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Uh, this is the test tube babies.

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That's all been developed because it's become so difficult for many couples to conceive.

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And that probably has a lot to do with, uh, these levels of hormones that are declining and the associated lack of drive of fertility and, and, uh, development of sperm and maturation of sperm, et cetera.

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And, and that's not even talking about, you know, sort of the impact of these, of the genetic vaccines on fertility, because it's something actually covered in a recent American thought leaders episode.

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There there's, there's some evidence there's a connection there too.

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So this is, you know, this is a trend, not even, but sort of beyond that question.

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Yeah, that that's fundamental is whether or not these products are impacting on the pituitary adrenal hypothalamic axis, which is to say your endocrine system.

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And it was intriguing that early on in one of the project Veritas exposés, the leading theory at Pfizer for some of these effects was that the MRNA vaccine products were directly damaging the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

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These hormonal effects, they're very subtle.

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We, it's not like a switch is turned, like you can measure a cardiac enzyme and say, oh, this is clinical myocarditis and you're now at increased risk for sudden death.

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These hormonal effects are much more subtle and long-term.

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Well, and the point is there's just this, it's also sort of becomes part of this general trend and it becomes very hard to tease all these different things out.

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Cause they're all interrelated.

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Right.

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Yeah, so now we talk about the effects of the vaccine products, these, you know, in aggregate with spike and everything else on cardiovascular damage and myocarditis and pericarditis.

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That's well documented.

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But then we have this feedback loop that these, this hormonal status also impacts on cardiovascular health.

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And this really emphasizes this problem of, of analysis of all cause mortality.

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It's multifactorial.

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We can't just dump to the conclusion that it's all the vaccine.

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But what, what bothers me, and I think bothers you also a little bit about this is,

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what if many of the, let's say, megatrends we observe in Western society may be at least partially the consequence of these declines in levels of these crucial hormones that we think of as sex hormones, but they're so much more.

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I mean, so you're talking the psychological megatrends are a result of the chemical imbalances.

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I, I, the prospect that, that some of the sociopolitical psychological megatrends that we seem to be observing in Western society,

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the underpinnings of many of these, including gender dysphoria may reflect alterations in a baseline levels of these, what are called sex hormones, but are so much more that have deep effects on our mental state,

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our, our, our sense of wellbeing, our physical energy, how we perceive the world, um, our level of optimism, uh, all of these things.

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You know, when we think about the trends that are happening in Western society right now that are often spoken about, those that are more philosophical,

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what we now know is a lot of what we think of as culture and society in, in psychology are driven by our hormonal status.

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And within that hormonal status, among the most significant are these sex steroids.

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And we also have the megatrend of the aging of the population.

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How much of that, the, the classical dynamic nature that is associated with, uh, the United States historically,

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a lot of that probably had to do with the fact that we were a younger population historically,

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and now we're an aged population, likewise in Europe, the kind of social lethargy that seems to be, uh, endemic in the West,

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as opposed to these very dynamic young cultures coming out of, uh, you know, younger populations in the Middle East,

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Africa, Bangladesh, India.

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Another great example is Japan.

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Mm-hmm.

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Japan is kind of an extreme in terms of an increasingly geriatric population.

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Mm-hmm.

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And it's suffering from a lot of these megatrends also of, of kind of declining enthusiasm and engagement

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and sense of possibility, the, the dynamism of Japanese culture that was so present in the 80s.

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Um, seems to have disappeared.

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And we're attributing it to economic and, and, uh, sociologic factors, but maybe a lot of it has to do with just the fact of declining, uh,

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levels of these key hormones because they're an aging population.

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You're reminding me of the interview I did some months ago with Dr. Michael Nels, who talks about the hippocampus, right?

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He's been looking at this for, for a very long time, which is also some, there's been a sort of this mega, if you call it a mega trend, right?

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But of, of, of hippocampal shrinkage and that associated with a decrease in, uh,

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memory, index memory, uh, increase in all.

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He, he, he thinks it's connected with Alzheimer's as well.

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Yep.

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Um, and so it may well be that it's connected with, uh,

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And, and you mentioned Alzheimer's again, we've touched this earlier, but, uh, decreased levels of testosterone is an absolute risk factor for the cognitive decline in processes that we call Alzheimer's.

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Right.

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So I, I think that the key here is that it's important to be aware that, uh, sex hormones are crucial for who we are and how we feel about the world and how we feel about each other.

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Far beyond just the issue of sex, of intercourse, they control so much more in terms of our body, our physiology, our mental state, our optimism.

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Uh, and we clearly have a broad trend of decline that reaches all the way back to young people in their twenties and thirties, uh, that happens to, uh, have a biological connection to things like metabolic syndrome,

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obesity, uh, lack of exercise, uh, lack of exercise or unwillingness to engage in exercise, this kind of sedentary lifestyle that is becoming increasingly common, uh, and, uh, many of the things that we consider to be broad sociologic trends and political trends may in fact be driven to some extent by underlying hormonal

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So this has been an incredibly informative, uh, uh, segment of fallout for me personally, um, and probably good place to finish. So with that, we'll see y'all next week on fallout.

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Thank you.