Put down the remote: TV can lower sperm count
By Bill Briggs
We’ll let you decide which of these TV titles is the most fitting, but a new Harvard study shows the sperm counts of America’s tube junkies are perhaps being pruned by the likes of “2 Broke Girls,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and, yes, “Bones.”
That trio of three of top-rated programs are considered some of the leading semen-sapping culprits, reports the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that men who view more than 20 hours of TV shows weekly have a 44 percent lower sperm count when compared to fellas who watch almost no television. Surely, that daylong visual banquet and chip-and-dipapalooza – a.k.a. the Super Bowl – didn’t help matters.
Twenty-plus hours per week? Who has so much free time they can devote such a fat chunk of their lives to clicker-clutching couch vegging? Apparently, many of us, said Jorge Chavarro, senior author of the study and assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard.
“It’s not difficult to imagine. That’s about three hours a day,” Chavarro said. “Let’s say somebody comes home from work at 7 and turns on the TV; they only need to watch TV until the evening news and they’ve watched three hours.”Starting in the 1990s, studies have suggested a reduction in sperm counts among men in various cities, including in Europe and the United States. It’s become more clear in the past six years
Most people have speculated these are due to higher use of environmental chemicals,” Chavarro said.
“One of the things that has been overlooked during same six-year period: there also have been vast changes in how people live their lives, including how people eat, watch television, move around – whether they are active or not. Relatively little attention has been paid to these factors (when it comes to sperm counts). We wanted to look at that.”
The researchers examined the semen quality of 189 college men between the ages of 18 to 22 who participated in the Rochester Young Men’s Study during 2009 and 2010 at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. The men were quizzed about their exercise and TV propensities plus their diets, their stress levels and whether they smoked – all of which can impact sperm quality.
Twenty five percent of the 189 men reported logging more than 20 hours per week of TV time, Chavarro said. Their sperm counts were 44 percent lower than those of the men who watched little television, the researchers report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The men who reported exercising 14 hours a week or more – enough to get out of breath – had the highest sperm counts.
A normal sperm count, according to the World Health Organization, is 53 sperm per milliliter of semen, and when a man has below 15 million sperm per milliliter of semen, that’s considered abnormal.
