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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, alcohol is well known to have a dramatic impact on both sperm and testosterone production once you exceed a fairly modest threshold (5 drinks/week):

https://pathfertility.com/how-does-alcohol-affect-male-ferti...

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Those phytoestrogens play some interesting games. As does a liver with damage caused by alcohol. Add to this the irony of all the advertising around beer being a predominantly "man's drink" and it gets even more interesting.

> fairly modest

> 5 drinks/week

This makes me wonder strongly what you would consider a significant amount of alcohol consumption, because 5 drinks/week seems like a huge amount to me already.

Where on earth do you live? Looking at some stats, that number was the average for the UAE in 2016. At this time it was illegal to drink without a license, and Muslims could not obtain these at all.

I live in the Netherlands and here alcohol consumption is highly skewed. Smoking too btw. Also one of the few - if not only - places where alcohol consumption correlates inversely with poverty.

If you drink here, you're probably an alcoholic. Even if most don't think they are.

Can't believe that, though I haven't been in .nl for a long time, so I have no 'feeling' for how it could be now. But why then there is Amstel, Grolsch, Heineken and some more?

I think they were saying everyone who drinks there is an alcoholic (by normative global standards?). The reason there would be so many beer brands is because there are a lot of consumers :)

One thing to remember that is that for alcohol consumption, average >>> median. The top drinkers drink an astronomical amount, but a typical person drinks much less than the average.

significant is more like 5 drinks/day, not /week

Biking too

Hot tubs are the closest thing we have to male birth control.

I guess I should stop having a cold beer in the hot tub after riding my bike back from work…

People who have ED need to read this.

What does ED stand for?

Erectile Disfunction

Why? An erection is just a natural delivery mechanism, no measure of healthy, or rather fertile sperm. Besides that Weed tends to give me a real hard boner.

So I don't get your point?

5 drinks/week is a lot.

It's not a huge figure though: a glass of wine with dinner most nights, or a couple of brewskis with boys on Fri & Sat night. For men, the bar for "heavy" drinking is 15+ drinks/week.

Research has “The bar” being lowered for many years. It is pretty clear at this point that all but the most sparing consumption of alcohol has measurable negative effects.

Not even remotely. That’s less than a drink a day.

Drinking ~everyday is a lot for a lot of people.

I'm not sure my kids would agree with that.

Anecdotes are irrelevant when discussing large-scale statistical trends.

Which is why more studies are needed

Haha my thought exactly

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