Dave Asprey explains why men's testosterone has dropped roughly 1% yearly since 1982, pointing to estrogenic chemicals, excess body fat, poor sleep, overtraining, and low animal fat intake. He offers seven concrete fixes: detox estrogenic chemicals, reduce body fat, optimize sleep and light exposure, do heavy lifting once or twice weekly, limit porn, and eat more animal fats and zinc.
Since 1982, testosterone in men has been dropping by 1% per year. That means that a 45 year old today has a lot less testosterone than a 45 year old back in 1982. In fact, about 40% less. But why are we losing our testosterone? What's happening? The first thing is environmental estrogens. These are coming in from microplastics, they're coming in from BPA, they're coming in from fragrances, and about 10,000 chemicals that, well, aren't approved. Or wait, they are approved, they just aren't tested. How does that even work? It's also coming in from plant based foods like soy, which are shown to interfere with your testosterone metabolism. Glyphosate and atrazine are the two I'm most concerned about in terms of environmental chemicals. You need to learn how to detox these things so you can maintain your testosterone production. You can learn how to do that on my blog. Another thing that's killing your testosterone, it's just the fact that you're probably a little bit fat. Now, I'm allowed to say that I weighed 300 pounds and it was fat, not muscle. So I'll just tell you when I had that much fat and I had exposure to environmental estrogens. Lab tests showed I had less testosterone than my mom when I was 26. That actually happened. So you can come back from that. And today I don't have much body fat. I'm about 6% body fat. Even though I was obese. I just naturally grow abs. What the heck? Well, when you have white fat, it makes extra estrogen and you get less testosterone as a result. So you got to learn how to get lean. Written books that millions of people have read about. How to do that. Just check out any of my content. I'll tell you how to not be hungry, how to get that next. Inflammation is killing your testosterone. Why? Because your body's job is to take 30 pounds of air and some amount of food, combine them, it makes energy, makes heat. It also makes sex hormones. It's not just your balls that are doing that. It's all the cells in your body can make sex hormones. They just won't do it if they're taking energy and making inflammation instead of making something that you need like sex hormones. Sleep disruption. If you're not getting the right quality of sleep, you will have less testosterone. If you stay up all night under bright lights, you'll. You'll have less testosterone going to bed closer to when the sun goes down. Having dinner earlier will support your Testosterone levels. Another reason that men are losing their testosterone at such an amazing rate is you of us are picking up heavy things. The more you pick up heavy things, the more testosterone your body will make up to a certain point, because overtraining will also destroy your testosterone. That's why I recommend once or twice a week picking up really heavy things to support testosterone production. The other unpopular reason, and that you're probably low on testosterone, is that you're ejaculating too much, probably because of porn. This is important because when a man ejaculates, there is a 24 to 48 hour precipitous drop in testosterone levels. So if you're like the millions of people who have just unlimited access to porn, well, if you're ejaculating every day, your testosterone never gets to recover all the way. So you need to learn how to enjoy intimacy without always ejaculating and step away from the porn. And part of this is that you're losing testosterone because testosterone and dopamine ride together. Dopamine is your happiness, joy, pleasure, motivation chemical. When you have low testosterone, you have low joy. But if you have low dopamine, it makes you have lower testosterone. So if you want to protect your joy, your happiness, your sense of desire in the world, you need both dopamine and testosterone. Which means you support your testosterone and you support your dopamine. That means no porn, don't overdo tv, don't overdo social media even and make sure that you take a little bit of time to just chill and allow your dopamine to reset. And the final thing, if you're not eating animal based saturated fats, those are the substrate for your sex hormones. That means that a diet of plant based, 100% it doesn't work. It is a known way. In fact, it was created to lower testosterone and lower desire and make it more programmable. You don't have to eat all meat, you don't have to be carnivore. Have some butter, have some egg yolks, eat some steak, make sure you get some zinc. If you have all those things, you're much more likely to have testosterone like your grandfather would had when he was your age. And what's that going to do? It's going to make you feel good all the time. It's going to give you desire to help other people. And yeah, you'll probably enjoy your bedroom time too as well. Oh, and you'll be leaner and you'll put on muscle with less work and you'll be happier and life is just better because when men and women have the amount of testosterone we're supposed to have, we actually help each other. A.
