Something in the Water: Why We Need More Research into the Effects of Estrogenic Chemicals on Animals and Us - Aman Shanti News

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When legendary film director James Cameron called testosterone “a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system,” he was simply repeating what we’ve come to accept as a truism about the master male hormone. Testosterone makes men aggressive. In fact, it’s responsible for all the regressive behavior we’re now supposed to associate with traditional forms of masculinity—so-called “toxic masculinity”—and we’d be far better off if there was less of it all round. Men would be much nicer, and maybe we’d finally have world peace and a female president of the United States.

The reality is rather more complicated than that. The science of hormones is not so simple. As we’re coming to understand more and more, the “female” hormone estrogen plays a key role in aggression in animals and humans. In a study I never tire of discussing, male macaques had soy isoflavones added to their diet—plant compounds that mimic estrogen—and their behavior changed in very interesting ways. Macaques are social animals, but these ones withdrew from the rest of the troop and became more submissive on the rarer occasions they interacted with their fellow simians. At the same time, however, the number of aggressive incidents rose dramatically.

Shy, submissive—but also nasty, sneaky, and vicious. What a combination.

I often describe these unfortunate macaques as “incel monkeys,” not least of all because there are clear parallels with human behaviour, as modulated by estrogen.

A new decade-long study, this time of fish, builds on what we know about the role of estrogen in modulating aggression. It also raises worrying questions about the growing pollution of the environment and our bodies by chemicals that mimic the hormone. These chemicals have been linked to more or less every chronic disease in the Developed World and to a precipitous decline in fertility markers, especially sperm counts. One expert, Professor Shanna Swan, believes natural reproduction could become impossible in less than a generation if sperm counts continue to fall like they are—a scenario that’s often dubbed “Spermageddon.”

Scientists in Canada added a synthetic form of estrogen (EE2) that’s commonly used in birth-control pills to a small lake over a period of three years. They expected the male fish in the lake would become passive—feminized—but instead something else happened. The male fish became wildly aggressive. Rather than guarding their nests full of eggs, they abandoned them to chase other fish nearby. In the third year, the population of fish within the lake suffered a catastrophic collapse. The nests stopped being properly cared for and eggs began disappearing. The male fish themselves began to lose physical features associated with sexual selection and attracting a mate, which made them less likely to reproduce.

Three lakes reserved for special scientific research were used: one to which the synthetic estrogen was added in increasing amounts, and two more that were used as controls for comparison. The total amount of estrogen added to the main lake was between 5 and 6 nanograms per litre, which is a concentration regularly found in rivers and lakes worldwide. This is important, because it means the experiment was realistic, simulating conditions that are now common because of widespread pollution by natural and synthetic forms of estrogen like birth control, but also plastic chemicals, strain-resistant coatings, fire retardants, pharmaceuticals, personal-care products, and even compounds found in sunscreen.

Snorkelers filmed interactions among the fish in the three lakes. Hundreds of videos were analysed for the amount of time each male spent guarding his nest, how many times he chased other fish away from the nest, and how many other fish were in close proximity to it. The videos were randomized so viewers had no idea which lake the footage came from. The researchers collected nests and counted eggs using a microscope, and also examined male fish taken from the lakes, with an eye in particular to the nuptial tubercles and fat pad on their backs they use to clean eggs in the nest.

As I mentioned earlier, the researchers were surprised by their findings. Under controlled conditions in a laboratory, male minnows exposed to EE2 became less aggressive; although like their counterparts in the lake, they ended up suffering serious reproductive effects. The male lab fish also spent less time guarding their nests and fertilizing fewer eggs.

So why the difference? Why the aggression? The researchers believe it has something to do with the social dynamics of a real environment—something you can’t really model in a lab—and in particular crowding. The introduction of the estrogen seemed to drive the fish in the lake to crowd the nests, and this in turn made the males more aggressive. Other research has shown that estrogen administered under conditions of stress like low light and temperature, to simulate winter, increases aggression between mice.

There was some good news at least. After the scientists stopped adding the synthetic estrogen to the lake, the fish population recovered and the males began to behave as normal again. But it took some time: eight years.

The message of the new study is clear to me. The way we test chemicals is wholly inadequate. This is a constant refrain in my work on health, whether I’m writing about food additives and the FDA’s absurd “Generally Recognized as Safe” loophole, or industrial, agricultural, and consumer chemicals. We simply don’t test chemicals in ways that accurately capture how animals or humans are exposed to them. The overwhelming majority of studies, for example, look at the effects of individual chemicals, rather than the typical cocktails we’re exposed to, which might include dozens of chemicals at once. And that means, of course, that we don’t know whether they’re truly safe or not. Even when we know chemicals have negative effects, our understanding is at best partial.

We live in a world that is now, whether we like it or not, suffused with estrogens. I think it’s reasonable to say ours is the first estrogenic civilization in history. We have, as I said, polluted our environment to an unprecedented level with agricultural, industrial, and commercial chemicals that have estrogen-like properties, but we’ve also deliberately administered these chemicals, mainly to women, in the hundreds of millions.

Seven decades after the creation of the contraceptive pill, we’re only just starting to reckon with its social, political, and health effects. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have driven this reckoning, allowing young women to document and share their experiences with negative side effects ranging from weight gain and skin problems to mood and personality changes—side effects many of them say they were never warned about by their doctors. There’s also been new scientific research that reveals changes to women’s behavior, like their sexual preferences, and even changes to the physical structure of the brain. One recent study, using MRI imaging data, suggested hormonal contraception can actually shrink a key region of the brain involved in emotional processing and fear regulation.

In my new book, “The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity,” I provocatively suggest that growing polarization between men and women, which is taking on the quality of a gender war, may be driven by changes to our hormonal environment, including millions of women taking hormonal birth control. This is not a flippant suggestion. Hormones govern every tissue in our body, and every imaginable process associated with being a living creature, from the digestion of food and the building of muscle, to social, sexual, and political behaviour. Aggregate changes to hormones will have aggregate effects on society, that much we can be certain of. But we still know too little about the specifics.

That must change, fast.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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