“That is like saying that sneakers cause ankle injuries. When you look at the science the majority of people who wear sneakers probably DO have more ankle injuries so the tendency would be to blame the sneakers from this point of view. However, if you look at the actives these people we probably doing while wearing the sneakers you get a better idea of why so many of them have ankle injuries.”

Makes sense in this context, seems almost stupidly obvious in this context, but science has a way of narrowing the scope about these issues so much so that they exclude anything else relevant. I read recently that the scientific community is moving back to glass because the chemicals used in the production of plastic are altering the tests they are doing… maybe it was here… I do not remember… but even the tools they use are from this minimalist/narrow scope ideal and still causing problems.

I personally have the opinion that meat actually IS a healthy food for human beings — GOOD meat, that is. Grass-fed beef has all kinds of great stuff in it, including the right balance of omega fatty acids, for instance. So it doesn’t make sense to me that eating meat would in any way be harmful to reproduction — how would the human race have survived? But the hormone angle, that absolutely makes sense to me.

It should probably be noted that this study says nothing about the mechanism of causation (nor, in fact, does it prove causation, merely correlation… from the standpoint of pure logic, it COULD be true that men with low sperm counts are driven to eat more meat, maybe there’s an instinctive craving for protein in an attempt to boost sperm — in other words, the low sperm count causes the meat-eating, rather than the other way around). So if the meat is at least partially responsible, this study can’t conclude that it’s the meat itself, or the way it was cooked, or what it was eaten with, or if it was something like hormones.

My money’s on the hormones.