The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [112]
Holy Christ. I was terrified.
But what were the possible causes?
Was it the phthalates in everything from shampoo to deodorant? Bisphenol A in everything from household electronics to plastic bottles? Tightie-whities? There was no consensus. It could have been one of a million suspects, or it could have been all of them.
No matter the causes, the real question was: could I do anything to reverse it?
To start, I attempted to remove environmental pollutants from my body using injections (IV DMPS, etc.) and dietary changes, and the changes in blood work were almost unnoticeable.
What else could I do?
Besides avoiding plastics and going organic, the sad answer seemed to be: not much. I called some of the most experienced and innovative urologists in the United States, including Dr. Dudley Danoff, founder of the Tower Urology Medical Group at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who served as a clinical faculty member at UCLA Medical School for 25 years. His most striking comment was a disheartening one: “Male fertility is a relatively ‘infertile’ field. There is so little one can do.”
Then came August 31, 2009.
In preparation for an unrelated interview with famed strength coach Charles Poliquin, I had asked a friend in the fitness business for his dream list of questions. One of the side notes in his e-mail read:
He won’t use a cell phone due to radiation, states they have a high tested correlation between low T levels in athletes and cell phone carried in pocket.
“T” in this case refers to testosterone.
The interview with Charles was a fascinating romp through all things performance-related, ranging from the endocrine system to intravenous vitamin C treatment and genetics testing. In the middle, as we were shifting topics, I asked Charles if he’d observed a correlation between cell phone use and low testosterone counts.
“It’s not just something I’ve observed. Take a look at the studies.”
So I did.
Lo and behold, jumping from article to article on MedLine, there were more than a handful of studies that showed significant decreases in serum testosterone in rats following even moderate exposure (30 minutes per day, five days a week, for four weeks) to 900 megahertz (MHz) radio frequency (RF) electro-magnetic fields (EMF), which is what most GSM cell phones produce.
Then, the epiphany.
In the “related articles” pane next to one such study, I noticed research focusing on the effects of cell phone radiation on sperm.
One click opened Pandora’s box, but let’s cover basics before we look at what I found. There are principally three things an MD will first look at when evaluating sperm:
1. Count: How many swimmers do we have total?
2. Morphology: How many swimmers have the proper tadpole-like shape?
3. Motility: How many of them can actually swim forward, which is the right direction?
If the sperm is misshapen or can’t move, it doesn’t matter how many you have. If you have great swimmers but not enough to survive the kamikaze one-way trip, you are equally screwed.
Of the dozens of studies that I found, most done in Europe, more than 70% concluded the same thing:17 cell phone radiation impairs sperm function. The explanation for how it does this varied, but the outcome was never good.
Here are just two abstract highlights from 2008 and 2009:
Three hundred sixty-one men undergoing infertility evaluation were divided into four groups according to their active cell phone use: group A: no use; group B: <2 h/day [hours/day]; group C: 2–4 h/day; and group D: >4 h/day… . The laboratory values of the above four sperm parameters [mean sperm count, motility, viability, and normal morphology] decreased in all four cell phone user groups as the duration of daily exposure to cell phones increased.
• • •
Male albino Wistar rats (10–12 weeks old) were exposed to RF-EMR [radio frequency electro-magnetic radiation] from an active GSM (0.9/1.8 GHz) mobile phone for 1 hour continuously per day for 28 days. Controls were exposed to a mobile phone without a battery for the same