We all know that junk food is a plague in the west and often blamed for the rising tide of obesity. With this come the related health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure and now male infertility.
The effect of the high calorie western diet, combined with lack of exercise, shows in the statistics for teenage obesity. In the UK, a staggering one in four teenagers is clinically obese by the age of 15.
We are not talking about merely overweight, a category occupied by one third of UK teenagers but those with a BMI exceeding 30.
Standard BMI categories
- less than 18.5 falls within the underweight range.
- 18.5 to <25 falls within the normal.
- 25.0 to <30 falls within the overweight range.
- 30.0 or higher falls within the obese range.
To put some perspective on this, an average height man in Europe is 5’9”. He would have to weigh in excess of 203 pounds in order to BEGIN to be classified as obese. However, since so many people in the west exceed this BMI parameter, physicians now stratify people with a BMI in excess of 30 into classes. So a 5’9” tall man who weighs in excess of 270 pounds with a BMI of around 40 is now categorised as Obese Class Three and so on.
The problem is that obesity as a teenager can affect organ development, as well as increase the risk heart and circulatory diseases such as a stroke in later life.
Tam Fry, UK’s National Obesity Forum, says, “This is a generation born around 2000. They were brought up by parents who never learned to cook and raised them on junk food and convenience meals.”
He described the figures as devastating and a reflection of today’s lifestyles. He said, “There is a substantial proportion of teens out there who have barely had a healthy meal in their life. They are living couch potato lifestyles, spending hours playing computer games.”
What else can possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, quite a lot.
Take male fertility, for instance. A Harvard University-led study has recently revealed the negative impact of an intense junk diet on sperm count. The researchers studied nearly 3,000 men with an average age of 19 who were placed in four diet categories:
- Junk diet
- Prudent diet of mostly chicken, fish, vegetables, and fruit
- Scandinavian diet of processed meats, whole grains, cold fish and dairy
- Traditional vegetarian diet
Researchers noted sperm concentration, volume and motility of men on a junk diet were the worst compared to other diets. The young men in the ‘junk’ diet category had 25.6 million sperm per ejaculation. A low sperm count is considered less than 39 million sperm per ejaculation.
Worse than that, those in the junk category had more damaged Sertoli (sperm producing) cells revealed by hormonal tests. If the junk diet is abandoned and replaced with a healthier then sperm count improved within three months. However, the report noted that damage to Sertoli cells was irreparable.
The study strongly suggests there are after-effects of an unhealthy lifestyle during our younger years. This directly correlates unhealthy eating with male fertility. While fertility is not something that our teenagers think about just yet, the findings should nonetheless raise an alarm.
