Alex Jones was right to worry? Doctor warns Joe Rogan about infamous pesticide that emasculates frogs
Dr. Casey Means, the Stanford University-educated chief medical officer of the metabolic health company Levels, further vindicated Alex Jones’ longstanding concerns about atrazine, an endocrine disruptor and one of America’s most widely used pesticides, in
Tuesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
When asked about the increasing commonality of early onset puberty, Means said, “We are living in this wildly estrogenic environment that is created by humans.”
Means suggested that the ingestion of
plastics — which behave like xenoestrogens when broken down — has proven hugely impactful, affecting humans as early as in the womb. She indicated further that pesticides have also played a starring role, particularly those that increase aromatase — “the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen.”
The physician called out one pesticide by name: atrazine.
“So atrazine … is banned in Europe, but we spray 70 million pounds of it per year in the U.S.,” said Means. “We buy it from other countries. So China and Germany and other countries are selling us a chemical of which 70 million pounds are spread on our food — invisible and tasteless, which up-regulates aromatase and converts testosterone to estrogen.”
“How are we allowing this to happen? Of course it’s affecting boys too,” continued Means. “It’s not like there’s a bunch of exogenous testosterones, right. It’s not like the plastics are also stimulating testosterone.”
Means is hardly the only person in the burgeoning
Make America Healthy Again movement willing to discuss atrazine and other apparently ruinous pesticides.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently
told Dr. Jordan Peterson, “The second-most used chemical in this country, pesticide in this country, is atrazine. It’s banned in Europe, banned all over the world, but we use it here. It’s in 63% of our drinking water.”
“We don’t know what impact it’s having on our children,” Kennedy later added.
Kennedy
noted in June 2022 on his own podcast, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex, and they can actually bear young. They can lay eggs, fertile eggs.”
‘They have zero chance of reproducing.’
“And so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society,” added Kennedy, who
warned elsewhere that the entire Midwest’s water supply is “coated” with atrazine.
Atrazine was the chemical Alex Jones was alluding to in his now-famous 2015 rant, in which he
yelled, “I don’t like ’em putting chemicals in the water that turn the frigging frogs gay!”
Jones, like Kennedy, was referencing the finding by University of California, Berkeley endocrinologist and amphibian biologist
Tyrone Hayes that atrazine “wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females.”
“These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” Hyes
told UC Berkeley News in 2010. “In an environment where they are competing with unexposed animals, they have zero chance of reproducing.”
Some male frogs morphed into hermaphrodites and mated with other males.
‘Do you want to take a chance, what with all the other things that we know atrazine does, not just to humans but to rodents and frogs and fish?’
Hayes said, “We have animals that are females, in the sense that they behave like females: They have estrogen, lay eggs, they mate with other males. Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.”
The university paper noted:
Some 80 million pounds of the herbicide atrazine are applied annually in the United States on corn and sorghum to control weeds and increase crop yield, but such widespread use also makes atrazine the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water, according to various studies. More and more research, however, is showing that atrazine interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone – in fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles, laboratory rodents and even human cell lines at levels of parts per billion. Recent studies also found a possible link between human birth defects and low birth weight and atrazine exposure in the womb.
Syngenta, an agricultural company that makes the pesticide,
tried downplaying the findings.
According to the New Yorker, a freelance science columnist whose nonprofit organization received tens of thousands of dollars from Syngenta, wrote a Fox News hit piece attacking Hayes, trying to characterize his paper in the journal Nature as junk science.
Hayes doubled down, saying, “Not every frog or every human will be affected by atrazine, but do you want to take a chance, what with all the other things that we know atrazine does, not just to humans but to rodents and frogs and fish?”
When Alex Jones picked up on Hayes’ findings, much of the ire previously assigned the scientist was redirected.
CNBC, for instance,
characterized Jones’ suggestion that “chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay” as one of his “5 most disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theories.”
In a piece disputing Jones’ claims that the government could
manipulate the weather and that fluoride in the drinking water can dumb people down, Forbes also suggested that Jones had misinterpreted the results of Hayes’ study.
‘One of the most significant health issues that affects couples is infertility.’
The unfortunate truth about atrazine has clearly survived such distortion efforts by Big Ag and the corporate media.
Just months ago, the esteemed peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports published a
study confirming that “atrazine exposure is toxic to the testis and affects the normal structure of the seminiferous tubules and sperms.”
“Pesticides like atrazine which are frequently present in everyday surroundings, have adverse impacts on human health and may contribute to male infertility,” said the study.
The study makes no secret of the adverse impacts the pesticide can have on reproductive systems:
In adult females, atrazine consumption has been linked to early onset of pituitary and mammary cancers, extension of the estrous cycle, decreased weight gain caused by estradiol in the uterus, reduced uterine cytosolic progesterone receptor binding, and reduced estradiol-caused uterine weight growth. Male adults who are exposed to atrazine may experience reduced weights in the anterior pituitary, the prostate, and the hypothalamus, decreased levels of dihydrotestosterone attaching to the androgen receptor, as well as decreased spermatozoa quantity and motility. One of the most significant health issues that affects couples is infertility. Around 30% of these cases are caused by male factors. There are other factors including chemotherapy, environmental toxins, and drug use that can harm spermatogenesis and affect normal sperm production.
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