Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1B44VmZFiI
the jurgen experience when did all this come to light when did people start understanding the the negative consequences of plastics and your food um well they came to understand it first in animals um because that's the way science works you know first you do animal studies and then you try to replicate them in yumas right and so um in around 2000 they did some experiments where they fed a rat food contaminated with phthalates and then they looked to see how the offspring developed right and what they saw was that the males were born different than the females and different from unexposed males do you want me to tell you how different yes please so this will really interest you i think what um what happened is so let's go back okay so before the phthalates before you know early in pregnancy the genitals are just a single ridge same in males and females undifferentiated okay and then at a certain time and in mice in rats it's 15 to 18 days of gestation the testicles start making testosterone and then that gives the signal to produce the male typical genitals so if they don't have the testosterone there will be ovaries and if there is testosterone they'll be testicles and so on and so forth right and that migration requires testosterone at exactly the right time and the right amount it's very delicately programmed okay so if that happens if everything goes well then the penis will develop it'll have a certain size and then there's something which is very key to to my research which is something you might know by the name of the taint mm-hmm that taint or we call it anogenital distance yeah it's not a real it's not really a technical term is it
but ain't no genital distances yes but taint at solaris listening to a phd right well i'm saying that because i'm talking to a lot of people who might not know the area known as the okay yes um known on the street as they take the streets and um or the gooch or the grendel or gooch i've never known that's the gooch you know about the ghosts yeah actually i just saw someone the other day didn't know what a taint was and they're like oh you mean the gooch i didn't i've never heard the gooch yeah i thought the gooch was like a baseball player well it could be that also but isn't there a guy named maybe he's named after it sorry and also abc have you heard abc abc no i have not heard that how's that one go ask ball connector oh the ass ball connector okay yeah okay for a woman yes you can imagine yeah it's not called an abc it's not called abc okay sorry so here you got this distance and um it's been measured in animals for like 100 years and what they use it for was first to just sex the animal so the litter is born there's a lot of little pups they want to separate the males and the females because they're going to do different things with them and they just hold them up by the tail and they look and the reason you can do this is because in the mail it's much longer it's 50 to 100 percent longer now this is stop and think about this there's nothing else in the body that's that different between males and females in terms of size organs yes but size no you know our heights don't differ by 50 to 100 percent or weights nothing nothing it's this is it this is the the mark is that in all animals it's almost all mammals really the hyena's a little different we could talk yeah though i know about those you know over there i have a whole bit about them yeah um so you know they're mad the females are masculine so they have a longer
agd right but most for most mammals it's this way okay including humans so here's this little pup that's born and he's if he's unexposed he'll have a good you know standard penal size and agd and he won't have any malformations of his penis and so on you know he'll be normal but if his mother was exposed to phthalates everything can go south and what happens is the penis is smaller and the agd is smaller and the scrotum is smaller and the testes are maybe not descended in other words it didn't finish the process it was arrested if you will so we say that that that pup is incompletely masculinized now the amount of phthalates that get into the pup system in you in vitro in in utero is that the same is that possible to achieve those levels in the modern world with human beings absolutely it is and i'm going to tell you what i did to show that i showed that wow so when i heard the story i was flying on a plane to japan to go to a conference i was with a friend who was a chemist for the centers for disease control and he said shauna you should study phthalates and i'm going why i'd never heard of them what why phthalates and he said well we have been measuring them at the cdc and they're in everybody they're in pregnant women and this group of scientists in the national toxicology program has shown that they altered the development of the male newborn and they called that the phthalate syndrome that's what it's called that collection of changes that come about after the mother has phthalates is called the phthalate syndrome so i thought well does that happen in humans same question you asked right so how do you how would you how would you answer that question
then i'll tell you what i did how would i well you would hope that you're not running experiments like you're running on animals right um are you measuring the blood of the people that are having children that have issues like with with uh development developmental issues in the way the children look when they're born is that what you're doing it's really close so phthalates have the property that they dissolve in water they're water soluble and so they go into the urine so for this class of chemicals if you want to know how much is in your body my body we've got to measure the urine other chemicals um like flame returns we would look in the blood so it depends what what the chemical is but but your right idea look inside the body okay then rather than looking at kids with problems what i did was i just took a whole population of pregnant women and i got their urine measured their phthalates got their kids measured their kids so then i had the problem of what to measure in the kids because nobody had made this translation from an animal genital developmental system to a human and so that was kind of a challenge you know figuring out how to do that but we did that and we developed this system for this exam for measuring all these things that you measure in a rat we measured it in our children and then we showed and this was big news when it came out that the mother salads did alter the genitals of the boys so that was the first evidence that was 2005. and then we published some more in 2008 and then we fortunately i got money to do it all again nih doesn't like to pay for replication it's very expensive these things are five million dollars a study by the way well it seems like it's very important though yeah so they gave it to me they gave me money to do it again so the second time i did it better because i really knew what i was looking for and i got urine actually in three points
in pregnancy and i measure the kids exactly when they're born so everything was much more precise and i found it again so now there's no question i don't think anyone questions that at least this class of chemicals which we know lower testosterone alter the development of these boys and then i asked well what does that have to do with sperm count because actually for a long time we haven't talked yet about sperm count but i've been studying tracing you know what's happening with sperm count i'll tell you the history of that in a minute but so then i thought well is this related to sperm count well these are babies they don't have a sperm count but in rats it looked like the agd was permanent so if you were had a short just like if you have a small hand you know your statures certain set it at birth right so the agd if you're born small and my friend earl grey who was a toxicologist said aged forever we don't know that for sure about humans by the way but um because we haven't had the 20 years yet but um if you believe that then a sensible thing to do was to take a group of adult men who could give you a sperm count and measure their agd right and then you could see whether those with a shorter agd had a lower sperm count and then you would have one pretty solid piece of evidence that chemicals in the environment lower sperm cap are you with me yes ma'am okay so i did that study too so i got students in rochester new york to volunteer for 75 bucks to participate and they gave us a semen sample and they gave us opportunity to measure them also a questionnaire how does one measure kids taints do they just bend over and you bust out a ruler i happen to bring it bring you something to show you yes i noticed you had this measuring device
jamie's volunteered to let you measure his taint by the way so um this is not for a baby this is for this is for our rochester young men study um and it looks kind of fierce um but we had the points taken down yeah i used one of those to measure uh pool cue tips there you go all right so you know all about it yeah turn it on you want 13 millimeters that's what i like but only for so look um i also brought you a little diagram so you see where we measure okay but we can't show this i don't know how it shows so the calipers are in they're in millimeters or in inches or both both you can yeah yeah and and so oh boy you got a diagram is there a chart online i could look up like a how about i just hold this up okay yeah that works too yeah all right can we have a selfie with you and me in that picture yes ma'am okay all right so what i wanted to so when i published this the uh the headlines were size matters but it's not what you think right right yeah and so i got all these people asking me what should it be what's good enough what's big enough so i did this translation from the millimeters for you so here it is the two inches is at is the median okay okay and in this population and um here's the kicker if it was less than two men who had less than two inches were seven times more likely to have a sperm count in the subfertile range i can tell you what that is as men who had an agd longer than two inches wow seven times it certainly is related to sperm count and then another study in california showed that infertile men in an infertility clinic versus men who had come had borne a child had smaller taint legs when did this stuff start getting into our food
supply does that is that been estimated so the growth of these chemicals um tracks with the growth of the petrochemical industry because they're made from petrochemical byproducts okay so if you look at a curve of the growth it starts around the 50 1950 okay so back in 1950 you have people loving science jumping on the science bandwagon there's this better living through chemistry that everyone's talking about and everybody is just wanting everything made of plastic you know it's the new it's the new craze it's the new you know and and it just took off it went faster than a straight line you know exponentially up and so somewhere in there it started having an effect but where we're not sure but i did look at the decline in sperm count over time so we could look at that as an indication that this is not the only thing that's affecting sperm count by the way this these phthalates but that's one where i feel i can say this with confidence because i measured those babies and i you know i did it i did the science and i did it again and i you know and other people have done it and and so it's it's i believe it's solid and um that's just one example of the many chemicals that can affect our hormone system catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode
of the joe rogan experience