photo by 9583071@N02
Penises are shrinking.
Over the weekend ChemTrust, an organization that works to publicize how manufactured chemicals and hormones “undermine humans and wildlife by effecting their health, behaviour, intelligence and ability to reproduce,” released a report reviewing over 250 studies looking at the sexual health ramifications of a variety of species after prolonged exposure to chemicals and synthesized hormones in the wild and lab environments. The conclusion: male gonads and offspring are under fire, threatening the survival of a large portion of the animal kingdom over time.
In study after study, from birds to amphibians to wild cats to polar bears, reproduction is threatened by the chemicals humans spray over the terrain. Animals living in highly polluted and very agrarian regions are especially prone to reproductive effects. Males increasingly have a wide range of symptoms, including hermaphroditic tissues, shorter penises, smaller testicles, and deformities that effect the ability to impregnate females.
Fertility is on the decline, with lower sperm counts and slowed development in the womb, leading to sickly offspring that nurse on contaminated milk. As chemicals build up in the body, mating rituals are changing, and in some species, less fit males are more effective at landing a mate that ones less effected by pollution.
Why should you care? You are what you eat.
Famed food writer Michael Pollan has been making rounds discussing the problem of corn. The American diet is full of corn. It’s in foods you don’t give a second thought to.
Take a typical fast food meal. Corn is the sweetener in the soda. It’s in the corn-fed beef Big Mac patty, and in the high-fructose syrup in the bun, and in the secret sauce. Slim Jims are full of corn syrup, dextrose, cornstarch, and a great many additives. The “four different fuels” in a Lunchables meal, are all essentially corn-based. The chicken nugget—including feed for the chicken, fillers, binders, coating, and dipping sauce—is all corn. The french fries are made from potatoes, but odds are they’re fried in corn oil, the source of 50 percent of their calories. Even the salads at McDonald’s are full of high-fructose corn syrup and thickeners made from corn.
Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.
In a parallel argument, we’re eating animals in the food chain that are beginning the suffer from the damage done by pollution. Forget that we’re stuffing animals with corn feed. We’re eating ones whose tissues are riddled the hormones and chemicals that are rendering animals sterile and fertility challenged. Not only are we exposed to the same toxins every day via the air and our toiletries, hair dyes, pesticides and cleaning solvents, we’re also consuming them via our food supply.
While smaller creatures are reacting noticeably first, it won’t be long before the high concentrations humans consume and absorb take effect. Already, mothers pass a chemical cocktail onto their babies via breast milk that may grow to pass those same chemicals off to their offspring. Nor does it help that “trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, including narcotics, birth control, antidepressants and other controlled substances, are in the drinking water and in U.S. rivers, lakes and streams,” in 80% of the water samples recently tested by the EPA.
When you begin to realize how impossible it is to avoid the chemicals and hormones corporations have spray our planet with, combined with the general apathy of much of the developed world, the notion of a not-too- distant future of a sterile human race a la Children of Men seems less far fetched.
Recent Comments