Eating fast food linked to infertility

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-fertility-fast-food/eating-fast-food-linked-to-infertility-idUSKBN1IA33B

by spking • 8 years ago

94 30 8 years ago

orand• 8 years ago

So just wait one generation, and problem solved? ;-)

mysterypie• 8 years ago

Jokes aside, you may be right that it's self correcting at the species level (though still bad at the individual level -- i.e., for those women who wanted to get pregnant).

The first time I heard of Fisher's principle it blew my mind: If the male to female ratio gets imbalanced, it'll return to 1:1 after about 2 generations. The reasoning can be understood by logic alone (see the "basic explanation" in Wikipedia[1]), but there's also experimental evidence[2]. I think that the same argument should hold if the genetic component that makes you avoid fast food is an inherited property.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle

[2] http://www.genetics.org/content/148/2/719

tomhoward• 8 years ago

Which do we think is more likely?

a) Choosing to eat too much junk food causes hormone imbalances that increase the chance of infertility;

b) Hormone imbalances that increase the risk of infertility in women also tend to increase one's appetite for junk (AKA high-energy) foods.

Having witnessed these problems up close, I'm going with (b).

FWIW the actual substance of the article is this paragraph:

Roughly 1 in 10 women of childbearing age have difficulty getting pregnant. Most of the time, it’s caused by problems with ovulation, often related to a hormone imbalance known as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Some signs that a woman is not ovulating normally include irregular or absent menstrual periods.

PCOS and other fertility-related hormonal issues are much more complex and deeply rooted than food choices, though they're not unrelated.

The real issue is inflammation and auto-immunity, in which food intake is a factor but only one piece of the puzzle.

AstralStorm• 8 years ago

Why not both though?

Ultimately, it is a runaway homeostasis, a vicious circle.

We have only moderate evidence that dietary advice to stop eating highly energy dense nutrient poor foods is effective...

top_post• 8 years ago

Soft tacos or hard shell tacos? Why not both!

announcerman• 8 years ago

I wonder if fast food is to blame for hormone imbalances in men as well, especially the problem of lower testosterone for westerners. Maybe not directly but due to the obesity excessive fast food calorie consumption causes?

collyw4• 8 years ago

I recommend 4chan for their advice, they are convinced it's soy and that eating raw onions is the solution. (Don't take that or anything else on 4chan too seriously though).

sambe• 8 years ago

The hormone speculation seems to come from the article itself, rather than the authors of the paper. In fact, you could be forgiven for reading the article and not finding anything of interest - no causal link, no mention of controlling for weight (already known to have an effect and very likely correlated with fast food consumption).

However, the paper says:

"All models are adjusted for maternal BMI, maternal age, socioeconomic index, recruitment site, ethnicity, polycystic ovary syndrome, previous miscarriage, smoking status, alcohol intake, multivitamin use prior to conception, frequency of sexual intercourse, paternal BMI, paternal age."

Having controlled for BMI & alcohol at least makes it somewhat interesting, despite the need for patient recall.

hycaria• 8 years ago

Correlation is not cause.

collyw4• 8 years ago

I would go with C, a bit of both, a circular reference if you like.

jnwatson• 8 years ago

I’m curious whether the study accounted for the confounding variable of wealth. Wealthier women eat fast food less and have more access to fresh fruit.

Wealthier women are more likely to exercise and be in general more healthy.

In other words, without taking care of the data, this might just be saying that wealthy people are more fertile.

philliphaydon• 8 years ago

Problem of the West, not wealth, I think. In Asia fast food is often more expensive than fresh fruit or better meals.

amelius• 8 years ago

I once heard a story about Asian people dressing up before going to McDonald's.

collyw4• 8 years ago

I struggle to believe that wealth is what is missing. You can eat healthily for very little money. It does however require time to cook / prepare, which maybe be tricky if you have two jobs.

calvinbhai2• 8 years ago

True. Time, more than money is wealth.

Earning $50k per year working 20 hrs a week may be better than earning $95k working 60 hrs a week.

I cook a lot, and love to cook at home, using fresh vegetables, lentils and legumes, constantly aware of the fact that it is such a luxury to be able to cook and eat at home. Fast food and pizzas are so cheap, for someone starved of time, it can be the only option, to make ends meet, in terms of time.

I have been in that situation of living on fast food for more than a year, and have been grateful to be out of such poverty of time, which has slowly yielded benefits in health, and monetary wealth.

graphitezepp• 8 years ago

People who are not wealthy often do not have the nutritional knowledge or easy access to grocery stores with good produce. The issue is deeper than time.

VLM• 8 years ago

The vast majority of the people repeating the irrational meme are doing it to fit into the groupthink; its an irrational meme, the whole point is its not supposed to make sense, you only know and repeat it if you're one of the cool kids who've observed its part of the local groupthink. Consider almost any discussion of politics or urban lifestyle here on HN, same issue. Magic dirt exists, strange creationism theories, cars are evil, etc. Given that almost everything here thats non-tech is a groupthink meme, it makes you wonder if any of the tech discussions are real, or are also just people meme-ing at each other. I know at least some of the tech discussions are real, maybe nothing else here is...

The meme probably should be banned because its racist in the same sense that anti-weed laws were invented to be anti-mexican before they branched out. A white woman buying a $6 pre-made organic salad is the theoretical ideal whereas a black woman buying $4 of take out soul food or a $8 bucket of fast food fried chicken is gross and disgusting and the people initially promoting the meme were not talking about the food as the topic being gross. For another example, McDonalds for a variety of reasons marketed sharply downscale a generation ago to swap their white customers for minority customers, and now McD are almost entirely full of minority customers, therefore the same food that was yummy in the 80s is for no reason we can admit in polite conversation, now gross and disgusting, of course the change is because the people buying it are now non-white instead of white. Complaining about diet as a thinly disguised dog whistle is literally the polite politically correct left wing equivalent of /pol/ complaining about black crime and black music. To be as clear as possible about what I'm claiming, most "progressive" diet complaints originated as racist dog whistles complaining about non-whites. No one ever complains about the conformist young white girl eating avocado toast, huh. Obviously NOT everyone involved in the groupthink, especially dozens of generations later is a klansman brother; but the origin of the meme surely was racist, thus the meme probably deserves the banhammer.

To some extent the meme is tired because its so one sided. Yes yes we get the idea, ya all don't like soul food or fried chicken or McD because of the black people who eat it and we'll get endless rationalization about how black people eating chitlins are evil while old white guys eat pork rinds which are some kind of manna from heaven. But its so boring to see the same tired one sided memes thousands of times with essentially no response. If meme jokes about casserole eating, mayo smearing, cheese eating, Panera Bread shoppin white people were even a thousandth as popular as the anti-minority-food memes, it would at least be entertaining, despite the tasteless racism.

There's also a side dish of humblebrag along the lines of, I'm not saying I'm rich, which means I want to draw lots of attention that I'm rich, but the only healthy food humans can eat is multiple pounds at a time of $25/pound beef tenderloin which I sous vide in my $499 dedicated appliance and the poor rabble will just have to eat (corn syrup) cake and die young after laboring ceaselessly to make me rich (insert Simpsons laugh). The point being look at me I eat well because I'm rich and most are not rich, look at me, look at me, look at me. Ironically with sane portion control, its cheaper to serve my family home made beef tenderloin than to pay for decent fast-ish food as a total meal cost, and food cost of homemade grilled burgers are practically a rounding error compared to an equivalent or even somewhat substandard fast food meal. A similar humblebrag for "Everyone needs to know that I like to appear very busy, far too busy to open my own pre-made salad container or pour a bag of salad onto a plate, instead I'll spend a half hour traveling and sit around for an hour each meal in restaurants while explaining how busy I am, and did I mention I'm really important because I'm so busy, only (lazy, aka minority aka yet another racist dogwhistle) poor people in foreign (more racism) countries have enough spare time to fry an egg or make a sandwich (gasp!) by hand at home.".

A third tradeoff aside from cooking labor vs money is flavor or monotony. The local progressive hipster organic market has take-and-go premade Chicken Ceasar salads fairly cheap, and from a purely nutritional standpoint I think a human could live on nothing but that single food item in perpetuity, perhaps with a daily multivitamin pill for the most obscure trace elements. Only maybe a billion of the world population spend more than a dollar per meal, and they don't seem to be dying off strictly due to not spending $200 at the steakhouse every lunch hour, although poverty meals are often incredibly monotonous. Stir fry veggies on rice or rice -n- beans are some other meals that will keep you alive a long time for practically no money although its terrifyingly boring.

Making it worse, is given the ageism, this dietary advice is mostly coming from a generation that famously thinks tide pods are gourmet food. Twenty year old kids can and will eat anything and be perfectly healthy ... for awhile, a short while, then they get fat, sick, die, etc. If you want to discuss healthy diet you need to talk to the village elders not recent high school grads who read something once on instagram.

To summarize my rant, the overall "HN" opinion on proper diet not supposed to make sense because its a tired overdone racist meme used as groupthink to show who's paying enough attention to fit into the "in" crowd by follower-like repetition of the groupthink. Once you figure out that if white people buy it from the progressive hipster market and eat it, then its good, and if minorities buy it from minority areas and eat it, then its bad, then you can use that carefully crafted scientific model to almost as a root password to figure out every discussion on HN about diet, and thereby fit in.

sleepychu• 8 years ago

Another limitation is that researchers relied on dietary questionnaires women completed during prenatal visits that asked them to recall how they ate in the month before they conceived - a method that isn’t always accurate.

Isn't always accurate? More like "Is always inaccurate" people are notoriously bad self reporters even when they're logging things day by day.

Someone• 8 years ago

”All models are adjusted for maternal BMI, maternal age, socioeconomic index, recruitment site, ethnicity, polycystic ovary syndrome, previous miscarriage, smoking status, alcohol intake, multivitamin use prior to conception, frequency of sexual intercourse, paternal BMI, paternal age.”

It surprises me that, starting with only 5598 subjects, it is possible to control for 13 different factors and keep a signal, more so because a few of those have fairly strong correlation with fertility.

Because of that, I would want to know whether adjusting the yes/no threshold values for those variables would affect the conclusion.

mrfusion• 8 years ago

I would have liked to see exercise level controlled for. Maybe a few other general health markers.

chiefalchemist• 8 years ago

Correlation with maybe a small dose of cause.

If you don't take care of yourself, the body isn't going to let you attempt to care for two.

overcast• 8 years ago

This sounds like a good example of natural selection.

Eating fast food linked to infertility

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