
Eating fast food linked to infertility - spking
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-fertility-fast-food/eating-fast-food-linked-to-infertility-idUSKBN1IA33B
======
tomhoward
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
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
Soft tacos or hard shell tacos? Why not both!

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

------
jnwatson
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.

~~~
collyw
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.

~~~
VLM
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.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I disagree with you on almost every point. But I wish I could double upvote
your effort and insanity.

I think your perspective has value, and things may appear this way from your
point of view. But from another point of view that Rich White Girl with the
Alvacodo Toast is getting slammed. She isn't immune from criticism, its just
that different groups have a problem with her.

McDonalds didn't become disgusting because they marketed to minorities. Their
food has mass appeal, and a great flavor per dollar ratio. McDonald's just
didn't keep up with high end burger chains like IN N OUT, which charge more
but offer a objectively different product. This is the consumer cycle in every
product, it doesn't have to be racist.

Do you have an iPhone? Is it ok to say that old school flip phones aren't as
good? Or are we being racist, because generally people in poverty can't afford
the latest phone?

But I will say that your dog whistle argument has made me think. Food is
almost impossible to separate from culture, so we should be careful how we
criticize what we think are unhealthy eating habits. I'm a big advocate of the
KETO diet, and I know when I traveled in Muslim countries the perception that
pork is unhealthy is extremely pronounced. Also my family in India thinks that
beef is the major cause of obesity, even though my diet is mostly beef and
they can see I am 50 pounds lighter after giving up rice, and my favorite
Indian foods.

------
sleepychu
> _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.

------
overcast
This sounds like a good example of natural selection.

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

~~~
mysterypie
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle)

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

------
chiefalchemist
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.

