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Are you a man worried about your testosterone levels? Are you hoping to give them a boost? Fox News host Tucker Carlson has a solution.
The trailer for the new episode in a video series by Mr. Carlson describes the “complete collapse of testosterone levels in American men,” providing an explanation for what he and many conservatives see as a creeping loss of masculinity in today’s society.
Full of greased, shirtless men performing vaguely masculine dutiesLike knocking down giant tires and throwing a javelin, the video has already been widely commented on social media for its bizarre erotic images.
But one shot in particular stands out: a naked man on top of a boulder pile, limbs sticking out, exposes his genitals to red light from a waist-high air cleaner. Something very similar to the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” plays in the background.
This is the treatment suggested in Mr. Carlson’s “documentary”: Revitalize your underperforming testicles with a red light, specifically a device made by a little-known company called Joow.
A leading endocrinologist – no surprise – says the whole thing is ridiculous and not just because of the man who got light therapy on a pile of stone slabs in the dead of night.
First, there is little evidence that, as Mr. Carlson says, testosterone “levels drop about 10 percent every decade, completely changing the way people are at their most basic level.”
A specialist in male reproductive health, Dr. John Amory noted that studies examining changes in testosterone over time are challenging for several reasons, including difficulties in recruiting a large population of normal subjects, daily circadian changes in testosterone, and differences in testing methods over time. University of Washington.
Mr Carlson and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.
Related to the concern over testosterone is another hotly debated claim: that sperm counts among men in the Western world have been declining for decades. Numerous studies have been conducted, and there is no scientific consensus on the extent of the problem or whether it exists.
So what is all this about bathing your testicles with a red light?
“The published data on light therapy and testosterone production are pretty light, but the limited evidence is pretty convincing,” Scott Nelson, co-founder of Joow, said in an email.
provided link to a study The Joow website reports that, apparently unpublished, in four men who were also on the ketogenic diet, red light worked best for increasing testosterone.
Dr. Amory was unaffected. “Clearly, performing two interventions – red light and diet – simultaneously with uncertain methods in a nonrandom, non-blind, underpowered study is not very useful for understanding cause and effect,” he said. “The biological plausibility here is also very weak.”
In conclusion, for readers concerned about declining American masculinity: “In the absence of any evidence of benefit from clinical studies, I would not currently recommend this as a treatment for testosterone or low testosterone symptoms,” said Dr. amory .
“It is notable that there is a long history of pseudoscientific treatment for low testosterone that has not proven beneficial over time,” he added.
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