Why is testosterone so heavily regulated?

Now, Testosterone doesn't just float around in your body interacting with everything like Chad at the club. After it's synthesis in the Leydig cells of the balls, testosterone hops a ride on the protein components of the blood. A bit less than 1/3 becomes bound to serum albumin, while the other 2/3 hooks up with creatively named sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), with about 2% of testosterone remaining unbound and free in the blood - known as free testosterone, which has the ability to enter into cells and act [2].

Now that we know how testosterone exists in the blood we'll be able to better understand how it's measured. Keep this in mind because different papers use different metrics like:

Bioavaliable Test - same as free test, 2% of total

Total Test - free test + test bound to serum albumin and SHBG

The Landmark Study

Travison, et al. conducted a longitudinal study on 1532 men living in Boston (so we already know their test will be lower than typical ayyy). A longitudinal study is when the same group of men (referred to as a cohort), provides multiple data points over some time course t. In this case, each patient had their serum (total) testosterone and free testosterone measured at 3 periods over the course of about 25 years from 1987-2003.

Now naturally, as you know, testosterone declines as age increases. However, by cleverly utilizing a longitudinal approach to this study the researchers were able to compare different subjects' T levels at the same chronological age. In addition, Travison, et al. trimmed the sample data to reduce individuals with absurdly low or high test (under 100ng/dl or more than 1200ng/dl, respectively), and utilized self-reported metrics of health to further weed out men who developed prostate cancers or other abnormalities that may contribute to changes in T levels.

Metrics used are as follows:

Age

Chronic illnesses including Cancer, Heart disease, Diabetes, etc.

Depression

Prescription meds (by number - an unfortunant weakness of this study)

Education, Marital Status, and Socioeconomic Status

Weight, BMI, and hip-to-waist ratio

Cigarette smoking

Dietary intake (in cals & as grams fat/day)

Sedentary Activity (metric not specified here)

Results

After deconvoluting that wealth of data and working some statistical black magic, the researchers end up reporting the following metrics.

Each year past 55 due to aging T levels were reduced by 1.6%. When adjusted for all of the above self-report metrics the rate was a decrease of 1.1% / year.

Each year for the past 20 years, the T levels of men decreased 1.2% in an age-independent manner, adjusted for above metrics resulted in a reduction of 1.0% / year.

What this means is that testosterone in the men of this cohort was decreasing as fast (roughly speaking) from an unknown source as from regular aging. This is scary stuff my dudes. Now remember how we listed off those metrics? Well we did that because the age-independent T decrease is likely coming from a source other than those listed.

As an interesting aside, in my estimation it seems pretty clear that peoples conformation to those self-reported metrics accounted for a decrease of about 0.5% annually. Might be worth thinking about.

So now that we have taken a look at the data, it's time to speculate what could actually be causing this population-level T decrease. In my last thread many people voiced their concerns and theories about this, ranging from big brother "turning the frickin' frogs gay" for population control to the role that a sedentary lifestyle might play (sitting on your balls all day ain't too great for them. Look up cyclists sperm counts if you're interested).

All of the following speculation and data was found by querying Gulag Scholar with the terms: "Testosterone Decrease, Population Testosterone Trends, Sex Hormone Trends", among other similar variations, with a filter excluding any results published prior to 1990.
Metabolic Syndrome - Eat Like Shit, Feel Like Shit

One oversight of the Travison, et al. study was that they used Diabetes as a variable in their data but left out metabolic syndrome, also known as pre-diabetes. Pitteloud, et al. conducted a study in 2005 looking at insulin sensitivity (a metric of metabolic syndrome) in men aged 25-65 years old, as well as the functioning of their HPG axis, and subsequently, serum T. The researchers also looked at the effect the blood concentration of our sex-hormone binding protein fraction (SHPG) had on total T.

Pitteloud, et al. ultimately reported a SHBG and BMI-independent correlation between serum T levels and insulin sensitivity, where if you're less pre-diabetic then your T is higher. [3]

Furthermore, by administering a hormone that stimulated Leydig cell production of T, the study excluded some elements of the HPG axis including the roles of leutinizing hormone and GnRH. Corroberating this study is another, Kaplan, et al, that found an extremely strong correlation between BMI, metabolic syndrome, and decreased T levels - again independent of LH and GnRH [4]. If there is interest we can address insulin sensitivity and how to increase it in another post, as it warrants its own discussion and presentation.

Fuck that. Eat meat. Fatty animal meat and organs. Leave plants to the soyboys

Miscellaneous Other Things That Affect T
Alcohol Abuse

Yup. Ethanol is a testicular toxin my dudes, and it's actually a double whammy. By the way, abuse is defined in this paper as a history 3+ years with elevated markers of alcoholism. According to Maneesh, M., et al (2006), "Alcohol abusers had significantly lower plasma T with low LH and FSH" (the data shows a reduction of about 25%!) and "[ethanol] causes fertility abnormalities with low sperm count and impaired sperm [movement] in men" [5]. The authors attribute these negative effects to the destruction of Leydig cell function by super-oxide radicals (these are basically products of normal cellular function that have extra electrons and like to fuck your shit up on the molecular level).

Moral of the story here is that if you want to drink heavily for 3+ years you might as well just chop off half of one of your balls.
Fatherhood

Well this one was unexpected. However, in a study comparing 14 men who did not go on to become fathers with 28 men who went on to have a child, a marked reduction in T was seen [6]. Also notable here is that the dad's had lower cortisol levels, which I found quite odd, as well as higher levels of estradiol (female sex hormone). I'm not sure what to make of this but I'm hopeful that some colorful explanations and theories will surface in the comments.
TL;DR and Conclusions

So whats the truth? What's affecting T levels across the West?

In my estimation, the most likely candidate would have to be metabolic syndrome and pre-metabolic syndrome.

I know that everyone wants to jump to the conclusion that the drops found by Travison, et al. are the result of malice or intentional hormonal sabotage, and it certainly is fun to speculate about that and I even welcome that. Regardless, the conclusion that seems evident to me is that many smaller factors are chipping away at our T levels over time, and that currently the research just isn't there to identify all the factors.

Animals are injected with growth hormones.

I'm thinking you should go into the doctor and proclaim that you want to transition into being a man and demand testosterone… they'll give it to you or you'll sue them. Just say with zero T you currently are technically a woman but identify as a man and need some test.

The absolutely degenerate state of the Modern World: Doctors won't give it to you for medical reasons, only ideological reasons.

...

If cost is a problem you can go to privatemdlabs a website that allows you to get the blood drawn at a local doctors office and you get the results without your primary doctor knowing. IT ONLY COSTS $85!

Once you receive the score I urge you to try raising your score naturally. There are plenty of natural ways to raise test. Squats, eating red meat, eggs, more fats, zinc, etc. Don’t jump into TRT without doing research and talking to a doctor. Also, don’t treat yourself make sure you're under doctors care.

Before getting the test done I was 22 (142 lbs) under 10% bf. Very active going to the gym 5 days a week.

I recently went through the process of getting my testosterone looked at and I had a total t level of 320. Some say that you can naturally bump it up which I did try. However, after a few months, I decided to talk to a doctor and was put on TRT. My current dosage is 150mg every week and I feel great.

Some of the biggest changes for me were:

-sleeping through the night (used to wake up at 3 am every night)

-extreme sex dive

-more focus and energy

-higher drive and competitiveness

Physically I haven’t noticed a ton I’m obviously a lot more cut but not like steroids. You don’t automatically get ripped you just are able to put on muscle where in the past it was harder. You notice that you don’t get as sore that next day after a hard workout tho.

True but you can buy grass-fed meat from your local butcher

Here's some guidelines. Low T user should want to be at the top of the range, not the bottom of the range. High 20's or low 30's on his scale. His number is bad even for a 60 year old man.

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