Can cheese harm a man’s fertility?

This is just correlational crap and is based on self-report at that.  Because it has not been peer reviewed and published it is difficult to evaluate but it seems odd that the commonest index of fertility  -- sperm count  -- is not mentioned.  Did it fail to correlate?  I suspect so

The author has other articles on peri-natal defects and problems so one wonders what precautions she has taken here against experimenter bias.  Her study is certainly a long way from double blind

Cheese is very popular so if cheese is bad for your fertilty it is a wonder we exist at all

Scientist from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the US, compared the diets of 189 men aged 19 to 25.  None were overweight - they were all very fit and did at least one and a half hour’s exercise a week.

They had each filled in a questionnaire answering how often they ate dairy products, fruit, meat and other types of food during a typical week.

The researchers also looked at their sperm including how fast it travelled and its shape.

They found that the sperm of men who ate more than three portions of full-fat dairy food a day was 25 per cent poorer quality than those who had less.

The researchers will present their findings this week at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference in San Diego, California.

Myriam Afeiche, who led the study, explained that the female hormone oestrogen in milk that had come from the cow may be affecting men’s fertility.  It may also be impaired by pesticides which find their way in to dairy products, she added.

'While it has been suggested that full-fat dairy products may negatively affect semen quality, very few studies have actually examined this question directly.

‘The association could be attributed to the high levels of naturally occurring reproductive hormones in commercial dairy products.

‘It is also possible that the presence of other compounds in dairy such as pesticides, chlorinated pollutants, and heavy metals could account for this relation.’

But Dr Allan Pacey, fertility expert at the University of Sheffield and Chairman of the British Fertility Society said men should not give up on dairy purely on the basis of this study.  He pointed out that even though the men’s fertility had gone down, they wouldn’t have any problems conceiving.  ‘Although it goes down, it doesn’t go into the red.’

‘A change of that magnitude for a man in a fertility clinic, we wouldn’t worry about that.

‘What I would say about diets is we don’t understand it well enough. I wouldn’t want to scare men out of drinking milk.’

SOURCE




HRT taken during menopause can protect women against Alzheimer's

How the worm has turned!  After years of HRT being demonized, it is now good for all sorts of things

HRT can protect women against Alzheimer's – providing it is taken at the menopause, according to  researchers.

A study showed women who began taking hormone replacement therapy within five years of the menopause cut their risk of the disease by a third.

But the findings suggest that if HRT is started in later life, it could give women a greater risk of developing the condition, leading some experts to believe there is a 'window of opportunity' when the benefits are maximised.

The researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, followed 1,768 women aged 65 and over for 11 years, recording a history of their HRT use and the date their menopause began.

A total of 1,105 women had used some form of hormone therapy, the report in journal Neurology noted.

During the study, 176 women developed Alzheimer's disease, including 87 of the women who had taken hormone therapy compared with 89 of the 663 who had not.

The study found that women who began HRT within five years of the menopause had a 30 per cent lower risk of Alzheimer's dementia than those who had not used HRT.

The risk was unchanged among other hormone users who began treatment more than five years after the  menopause. And the protective effect was even larger in women using HRT for ten years or more.

But the risk of dementia among women who had started HRT when they were at least 65, which, depending on the individual, can be more than a decade after the menopause, was almost doubled.

The protective effect from HRT may come from boosting supplies of the hormone oestrogen, which is thought to play a key role in keeping the brain healthy, or the improvement in heart risk factors linked to HRT.

Earlier this month a study found HRT can reduce the risk of heart attacks and heart failure.

In the United Kingdom, women in their 50s are told to use HRT drugs short-term and for no longer than  five years.

Dr Simon Ridley, head of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said: 'Previous research into HRT has shown mixed results, but this useful study suggests the timing of hormone use may be critical for either raising or reducing the risk of Alzheimer's.

'More work is needed to understand this link and help women make informed decisions about whether to start HRT, but these findings could be important for guiding future research.'

SOURCE