Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has declared a new “existential problem”: declining testosterone levels and sperm counts in teenage boys.
The 71-year-old baselessly suggested that testosterone levels in teens were being dwarfed by 68-year-old men during an appearance on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime Tuesday to discuss the government’s plans to ban eight common artificial food dyes by the end of the year.
“The food our kids are eating today is not really food,” RFK Jr told host Jesse Watters, adding that the science surrounding the petroleum-based synthetic dyes has been “systematically suppressed.”
After touting his war on chronic disease and listing a raft of health issues faced by Americans, the nation’s top health official turned his attention to male fertility.
“We have fertility rates that are just spiraling. A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man,” RFK Jr, who revealed previously that he takes the hormone as part of his anti-aging protocol, said.
“Sperm counts are down 50 percent and girls are hitting puberty six years early,” the health official added as the Fox News host cuts in, attempting to return to his previous claims.
“Wait, an American teenager has less testosterone than a 60-year-old man?,” the Fox News host probed.
“That’s right,” RFK Jr doubled down. “Testosterone levels have dropped 50 percent from historic levels. And, you know, that is a problem. It’s an existential problem. That is only when we have obesity off the charts.”
Over the past five decades, human sperm counts appear to have fallen by more than 50 percent worldwide, according to a 2022 review from the Human Reproduction Update journal.
The review, which focused on data from between 1973 and 2018, sparked debate amongst fertility experts, with some medical professionals supporting the findings while others concluding that methods of counting sperm have drastically changed over the years, making it impossible to accurately compare numbers.
A 2020 study from the Yale School of Medicine published in the Urology Times Journal suggested that testosterone levels have dropped among young adult males in the U.S from 1996 to 2020.
RFK Jr also peddled misinformation about autism, claiming it is worse than Covid-19, which has killed more than 7 million people worldwide. The health official vowed to uncover the root cause behind the “epidemic” earlier this month.
“There was a wave of anger against me because I announced that we’re going to find the cause of autism,” he said. “This is something that President Trump told me on day one: ‘I want to know what’s causing it within a year.’ And I announced how we’re going to do that.”
