Testosterone Deficiency: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Treatments

Dr. Stengler: There's been a lot of studies on mercury inhibiting the production of testosterone. You get mercury from foods such as tuna, large fish like halibut, and swordfish, and you get it from shellfish as well.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Stengler. In this video, I'm going to cover surprising causes of testosterone deficiency — causes you're probably not aware of, and that your doctor is not testing you for. Let's face it, testosterone deficiency is a major problem in men. If you have low testosterone, it can cause fatigue, low libido, sexual dysfunction, loss of muscle mass, loss of bone mass, and can even affect your cardiovascular health and your cognitive and brain health. Across the world, testosterone deficiency is becoming much more common.

One of the main, surprising causes are endocrine-disrupting chemicals, known as EDCs. These are chemicals in the environment found in common substances such as water bottles, plastics, cosmetics, canned foods, fertilizers, and even toothpaste. You get them in soaps, textiles, carpets, utensils, deodorants, and other man-made products. These chemicals interfere with the production of testosterone in the testicles. You have specialized cells called Leydig cells, and research has found that these EDCs disrupt the ability of these cells to produce testosterone.

Let me go into more detail. Phthalates are used in plastics and have been found in 75% of Americans on urine testing; they disrupt testosterone production and interfere with the metabolism of cholesterol in the cells of the testicles — and cholesterol is the building block for testosterone. Another common chemical is BPA, bisphenol A, a plasticizer found in the urine of most Americans. There are also dioxins and PCBs, which disrupt the messaging system from your brain to your testicles that's important for making testosterone; you find these in chlorine, the bleaching of paper pulp, and the manufacturing of pesticides and herbicides, and they get into us through the food chain via meat, dairy, fish, and shellfish, accumulating in animals and then in the human body.

How about insecticides? Studies show they're found in the urine of men too, and certain pesticides are associated with reduced testosterone levels. For example, a study in the International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology revealed that pesticides and insecticides significantly decrease testosterone and sperm levels. Then there are the toxic metals, or heavy metals. There have been a lot of studies on mercury inhibiting the production of testosterone — mercury interferes with the synthesis of testosterone in the testicles. You get mercury from foods such as tuna, large fish like halibut, and swordfish, and from shellfish. You can also get a different type of mercury from amalgam fillings, which unfortunately have mercury as part of the amalgam mixture.

It's important that we avoid these toxins as much as possible. There are tests your doctor can do — and we run them with patients — to measure the levels of these chemicals. If they're elevated, we want to do specific things to detoxify them out of the body so we can free up testosterone production. And it goes beyond testosterone: these chemicals can interfere with all sorts of hormone production in the body, which I'll review in future videos. I hope you learned a lot in this video, and now you know one of the major surprising causes of testosterone deficiency.

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