Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The Strange Connection Between Plummeting Sperm Counts, the Trans Phenomena, and pre-Diabetes

During my years as a hospital pharmacist, I've ordered many blood labs for patients. The variety of labs available has multiplied, providing a better picture of what's going on in the human body. The cynics among us will not be surprised to learn that such innovations are increasingly at odds with the one-step-forward-two-steps-back of modern medical practice, in which the more inquiring minds learn about the disastrous state of modern American health, the more the stone-walling for reimbursement from our overlords ... um, insurance companies and hospital administration.

Fortunately my latest set of labs was drawn outside the hospital with cash payment, so I had free reign to pick the ones I wanted. The patient was an overweight teenage girl whose genetics put her at moderate risk for diabetes.

I ordered the usual labs for diabetes: blood glucose, hemoglobin A1C, triglycerides, cholesterol. It's considered a better test to have the patient drink 75 grams of pure glucose and draw blood every 30 minutes for 2 hours, but I wasn't about to do that to a teen, so I added a fasting insulin level to the other labs. That's one of the new labs we didn't have in the old days, and it clarifies the picture with much less unpleasantness.

Lastly, I ordered a few sex hormone labs. Pre-diabetes is a very high risk factor for a hormonal disorder in women called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Briefly, it can cause severe acne, mild to moderate male pattern baldness, and infertility in women due to an ongoing high level of testosterone and other androgens. (1)

The results came back a few days later, strongly positive for insulin resistance, also known as pre-diabetes. While her blood sugar was still in the normal range, her triglycerides were three times the normal maximum and her fasting insulin was eight times normal max, or 40 uIu/ml, both astoundingly high numbers for someone so young. The hemoglobin A1C straddled the pre-diabetes borderline. (2)

And the hormones? Estradiol, her main estrogen hormone, was normal, but her free testosterone -- that's the active portion -- was twice the normal upper limit for young women. Verification of PCOS requires an ultrasound of the ovaries, but from this data, it certainly merits a closer look.

But even though this testosterone excess was not unexpected, I was still amazed to see it. You see, fat cells are little estrogen factories, so the more overweight you are, the more estrogen pours into your circulation. (This is why overweight males grow breasts.) (3) But her estradiol was normal. Why did all the excess estrogen disappear? And where did all the testosterone come from?

Insulin.

Just not directly. This powerful hormone has more tricks than Houdini.

Most everyone knows that insulin is not just a prescription drug, but a hormone naturally produced in the human body that helps blood sugar get into cells.

But this hormone influences everything -- not just the movement of blood sugar, but also growth, brain function, the health of your heart and arteries, and whether or not you can burn fat (hint: it's one reason why the "calories in calories out" theory is wrong). (4)

Men and women need some of both male and female hormones to be healthy. It seems natural to think these groups of hormones are wildly different in physical structure, but in fact they're so similar it doesn't take much chemical reaction to transform one into the other.

The body's storage bin for sex hormones, called SHGB (Sex Hormone Binding Globulin), exists so that appropriate amounts of these hormones can be released slowly when the body needs it. SHGB has a greater affinity for binding testosterone than estrogens. High insulin levels destroy SHBG, and this was borne out by the lab results I saw. My young patient's SHBG level was the closest to zero that I've ever seen. (5)

Insulin is kind of a bully.

So it was no wonder that her testosterone was so high. Is it surprising that this teen girl insists she's actually a man? Not really. Of course, she didn't believe me when I told her that these hormones caused her to feel this way.

The current trans ideology insists that their true selves are first male or female, and then put into the wrong body. It's a lot like Scientology in this way.

Apart from our schools teaching nonsense, how did we get into this mess?

Unfortunately for humanity, the last 50 years has been pretty devastating for our hormonal balancing act. Diabetes has quadrupled in only 30 years (6) while men's sperm counts have decreased 62%. (7) Those remaining sperm are increasingly dysfunctional. At this rate, it will only take another 10 years before the average man is borderline infertile. (8)

Just to be clear, the World Health Organization's minimum reference value for sperm concentration refers to an estimated time frame of less than a year for a man and his partner to achieve a pregnancy. This minimum concentration was 40 million/ml until 1980, when WHO lowered it to 20 million/ml. They lowered it again in 2010 to 15 million/ml. This isn't just WHO making it more difficult to claim infertility as a reason for insurance to pay for a doctor visit. In 1973 the average Western male's sperm count was 99 million/ml. By 2011, it had declined to 47.1 million/ml. (9)

Unfortunately, this problem cannot be fixed with prescription testosterone if you want to have kids. The body quickly realizes it doesn't need to make its own testosterone, and in short order, it stops making sperm entirely. (10)

Other researchers have come to similar dire conclusions about the worldwide decline in sperm counts, which has been linked to widespread obesity, sedentary lifestyles, smoking, exposure to certain chemicals and pesticides, and other factors. (11)

What do the four named factors have in common?

You guessed it: they either cause pre-diabetes, or worsen the condition so that it becomes diabetes. As for the "other" category, I know of three major classes of prescription drugs that cause insulin resistance and diabetes: statins, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. (12) (13) (14)

The key feature of both pre-diabetes and Diabetes Type II is insulin resistance.

What is insulin resistance? A simple way to illustrate what goes on there is to think of a subway train arriving in a crowded New York City station in the 1920s, when "subway pushers" would forcibly shove as many people as possible into the waiting cars. (15)

Insulin is the subway pusher, shoving as much glucose as possible into cells, even when the cell is already stuffed. Any glucose left outside means the body makes even more insulin to exert more force to get it all in. This is called compensatory hyperinsulinemia. Over time, the cell overflows and glucose can't get in even when the door is wide open. The cell is now insulin resistant, and to compensate the body makes an ever-increasing amount of insulin to force glucose inside. The congested cells fight back by making as much fat as possible to relieve the pressure, and the overflow backs up in the liver, causing fatty liver, which in the last 20 years became America's number one liver disease. (16) This is the vicious cycle my teen patient and millions of others are caught in.

The only difference between insulin resistance and Diabetes Type II is that in the latter, the pancreas is now too fat to keep up the Red Queen's Race. It can still make some insulin, but up until now, it managed to keep the fasting blood sugar under 125. Estimates say this breakdown takes 10 years on average, but there's not enough data to be sure. It's a guess. (17)

Once the fasting blood sugar is over 126, we have diabetes. But insulin resistance causes the same damage as diabetes, just more slowly. So you have under-the-radar heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and creeping dementia (Alzheimer's is also called Diabetes Type III), as well as crashing sperm counts, infertility, and a generation of overweight kids as confused about their hormonal signals as frogs bathed in Atrazine. (18)

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I quoted Dr. Jason Fung earlier when I said that the incidence of diabetes has quadrupled in the past 30 years, but how bad is that population-wise?

Pretty bad, no matter who you ask. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that more than 84 million adults in the U.S. have insulin resistance, or about 1/3 of the adult population. (19) In 2019 the American Diabetic Association estimated 96 million American adults with insulin resistance and 37.3 million with diabetes. (20) In 2021, the University of Alabama at Birmingham did a study, testing 6,000 young adults (age 18-44) for blood sugar abnormalities. The researchers found 40% of them to have insulin resistance. Half of these subjects were not obese. Another 12% had diabetes, which brings our total of diabetes and insulin resistance to 52%. But this underestimates the overall incidence in the American population, since it didn't count anyone over the age of 44 and the elderly have a higher incidence (it would've been nice if the study counted teenagers, but nobody does that). (21) Dr. Mark Hyman of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine estimates that 90% of Americans with diabetes or pre-diabetes are undiagnosed. (22)

WTF, you say? Why is the medical system so completely unable to put the pieces together? Well, they don't do routine screenings. When they do find a patient with pre-diabetes, the usual response is to either give the patient metformin (which lowers blood sugar while blocking B12) or tell him to come back when they've got diabetes. When diabetes happens, they're put on multiple drugs and a semi-high carb low-fat diet and told there's no cure. (23) There's no drug cure -- the cure, at least for most Type II diabetics, is a low-carb (20% of calories) diet with plenty of fat and protein. This is the same diet they were put on at the turn of the 20th Century. And it worked very well indeed. (23) Then in 1921, three researchers at the University of Toronto figured out how to isolate and purify insulin from the cow pancreas. Lilly Pharmaceuticals got involved, and what was a life-saving miracle for juvenile diabetics soon became a toxic prescription pipeline for adult Type IIs (in other words, it kills them faster, well documented in the 1996 Quebec Cardiovascular Study, the 1999 ACCORD study, the 2008 ADVANCE study, and many others). (24)

But to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I remember how baffled I felt when I saw the results of those studies. How could it possibly be true that these patients all fared so badly with improved care? Big Pharma solutions made things worse? I apologize for being part of a "healthcare" system that relies on indoctrination when science didn't provide the answers we wanted. The worst part is, I truly believed I was skeptical about pharmaceutical industry claims.

Looking over all the data now, I see no mystery regarding the origin of our so-called Spermageddon. Nor is it a mystery why so many of us have no energy and can't lose weight, why dementia rates are exploding, and why so many young people have imbalanced hormones to the point of demanding quick-fix "affirmation" surgery.

We're eating too much processed chemical-laden "food" and not moving enough. Even simple tactics like a 10-minute walk after a meal of unprocessed real food, and weight loss of only 2 percent of body weight are enough to begin turning insulin resistance around. (25)

If you have to eat a foodbar because you're hungry and short on time, check the ingredients. If the first 3 ingredients include sugar, dextrose, high-fructose corn syrup, or fake sweeteners like Sucralose, put it down and pick a different one. Be wary of grandiose claims such as "heart healthy" and unpronounceable chemical additives. Be extra wary of seed oils such as cottonseed and canola, which are highly inflammatory. (26)

If you really want to dig deep to discover what other foods may be spiking your blood sugar, consider getting a continuous glucose monitor for a month. Levels has a very user-friendly CGM, and you don't need a diagnosis to use it. (27)

Maybe the silver lining in the recent epidemic is that more people than ever before have gotten red-pilled about taking charge of their own health.

That's my message to you. Don't rely on Big Pharma, Big Food, or Big Media for their ideas on health. Your branch of humanity deserves to have a future.

(1) https://www.womenshealth.gov/a-z-topics/polycystic-ovary-syndrome

(2) Why We Get Sick: the Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease-- and How to Fight It, 2020 Benjamin Bikman Ph.D., Chapter 1, What Is Insulin Resistance?

(3) https://hardingmedicalinstitute.com/estrogen-in-men/

(4) Ibid, opcit

(5) https://labs.selfdecode.com/blog/sex-hormone-binding-globulin/

(6) Ibid, Why We Get Sick, Forward by Dr. Jason Fung

(7, 8) https://www.timesofisrael.com/sperm-counts-worldwide-fell-by-62-in-under-50-years-israeli-led-study-finds/

(9) Count Down: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, Feb 2022 by Shanna Swan Ph.D. from Chapter Two, The Diminished Male

(10) Grimes D.A., Lopez L.M., Gallo M.F., Halpern V., Nanda K., Schulz K.F. Steroid hormones for contraception in men. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 2012;14:CD004316. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD004316.pub4. [PubMed]

(11) Ibid, Times of Israel

(12) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369709/

(13) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3781547/

(14) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1435746/

(15, 16, 17) The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally 2018 Dr. Jason Fung, Chapter 6 Insulin Resistance: The Overflow Phenomenon

(18) Ibid, Why We Get Sick, Chapter 1, What is Insulin Resistance?

(19) https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24178-hyperinsulinemia

(20) https://diabetes.org/about-us/statistics/about-diabetes

(21) https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/12289-uab-researchers-find-that-40-percent-of-young-american-adults-have-insulin-resistance-and-cardiovascular-risk-factors

(22) https://drhyman.com/blog/2011/11/11/fifty-percent-of-americans-suffer-from-silent-killer/

(23) The Diabetes Code, pg 11 How to Reverse and Prevent Diabetes, the Quick Start Guide

(24) Ibid, Chapter 10, Insulin: Not the Answer for Type 2 Diabetes

(25) Why We Get Sick, Part III, The Solution

(26) https://www.levelshealth.com/blog/what-are-processed-foods-and-why-are-they-so-bad-for-metabolic-health?utm_source=drip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Welcome+to+Levels&utm_content=The+Ultimate+Guide+to+Processed+Foods

(27) https://www.levelshealth.com/