Posts made by Insr

Good post! That is an insane product. I've heard textiles (furniture fabric, rugs, clothes, etc) are the majority source of microplastics in yo body. The polyester gets dustified and then you ingest the dust/little fibers floating around. These towels must be the worst of all though.

@yoan I have yet another shill website detailing what each type of filter media does, etc
https://whatwaterfilter.com/perfect-water-filter-family/ - theres links to lab results and a table of filter media if you scroll down. Sorry it's kind of disorganized.

Ion exchange is a type of filter media, what's inside the filter actually doing the work. While "gravity filter" describes how the whole product is configured. (like its a big barrel that sits on your counter with the water dripping through it, as opposed to like a water filter pitcher.)

The right filter media: You actually need a filter that's got several different media in order to cover all the contaminants.

When I researched that I found that ClearlyFiltered, ZeroWater, ProOne, and some Canadian guy's brand called Opus all contain media that can remove all classes of contaminant, show lab results doing just that, have people giving them good reviews, etc. There isn't really much difference between those brands in terms of performance. If I remember correctly those were the only brands I saw that could do everything well.

The right type of filter (countertop vs pitcher vs undersink, etc) - It depends on your living situation honestly. Those brands make water filter pitchers that work just as well as their big gravity filters according to their lab results, so it really just depends on what's convenient for you. An undersink filter can also remove everything but it's going to be more of a hassle to install and keep the filters updated, on the plus side it's less of a hassle to not have to always be filling your pitcher filter or gravity filter.

Berkey is apparently kind of a meme - untrustworthy, impossible claims, uses a fluoride filter that puts aluminum into the water. Although I think they do remove most contaminants pretty well.

Apparently it's a bit of a problem that reverse osmosis removes minerals from the water, by the way. People add minerals back in afterwards. I don't really see why it matters if you're getting minerals from your food but i dont know.

Theory of balding: DHT in the follicle will produce balding unless balanced out by epitestosterone in the follice. Enough epitestosterone in the follice = no balding. Non-balders produce enough epi in their hair, but balders don't, for reasons unknown.

"the hormonal pathways leading to epitestosterone are probably greatly silenced in the balding hair follicle and heavily favor the metabolism into testosterone and 5a-DHT, which is clearly detrimental to hair. Something is obviously going wrong downstream from pregnenolone
__

The questions we should be asking ourselves is why so much pregnenolone is going down the DHEA pathway into testosterone or rather why the other side of the pathway leading into 5-androstene-3b,17a-diol [the precursor to epitestosterone] is underactive. [in the follice]

The OP study [in the rpf thread] is actually hugely important - it has been known for a long time that in MPB follicles both 5-alpha reductase and the androgen receptor are overexpressed, but what hasn't really been known is 'why'. It's been speculated that this is due to SRD5A2 gene being overexpressed (the 'genetics' explanation) but the study that @PurpleHeart posted shows that the dysfunction is even further upstream. Since epitestosterone, a natural 'anti-androgen' and 5-AR inhibitor, acting as a sort of intrinsic brake on androgenic activity, is severely underproduced in these follicles, it makes perfect sense that the androgen receptor and 5-AR are upregulated being exposed to above normal levels of T & DHT (we know here that DHT upregulates its own production). The sad thing is there will probably be no further research on this angle but it amazes me that so far mainstream hair science has not connected the dots on this." - guy in the rpf thread https://archive.is/Qf3oc#60%

Nature's finasteride!

The problem is that epitestosterone is extremely understudied. Even its actual formation pathway is still not known for certain. And unfortunately I don't know enough science to get near figuring any of this out.

However, if epitestosterone wasn't a controlled substance, and if it was applied to the hair follicles, I would expect that it would work as well as finasteride, with way less side effects. It's a potent 5AR inhibitor that's also neuroprotective somehow!

Did you know that the early balding, overly hairy, low-test phenotype has been proposed as "male PCOS?"

"Increased dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS) levels have been reported in men with early-onset (<35 years) androgenetic alopecia (AGA). It has been suggested that a male polycystic ovarian syndrome- (PCOS-) equivalent, defined as an endocrine syndrome with a metabolic background and a PCOS-like hormonal pattern, predisposing to type II diabetes mellitus (DM II), cardiovascular and prostate diseases later in life, may occur in at least a part of these men."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339216373_Increased_DHEAS_and_Decreased_Total_Testosterone_Serum_Levels_in_a_Subset_of_Men_with_Early-Onset_Androgenetic_Alopecia_Does_a_Male_PCOS-Equivalent_Exist

This phenotype is found in the male relatives of women with PCOS, has similar hormone abnormalities to PCOS, and has similar heath risks. (also both have acne)

The male PCOS phenotype has a characteristic hormone profile in the blood. Relatively low testosterone, SHBG, FSH, epitestosterone.
Relatively high prolactin, LH, DHEAS.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7382675/

Balding men have a higher ratio of Testosterone to Epitestosterone in their hair compared to non-balding men. Epitestosterone is a 5AR inhibitor.
"Epitestosterone can be considered as a weak antiandrogen in the term of displacement of androgen from receptor binding and as an efficient inhibitor of 5 alpha-reductase."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2532272/

Epitestosterone goes along with less estrogen and less IGF-1. This study has a graph of a very strong inverse relation between estrogen and epitestosterone.
https://www.biomed.cas.cz/physiolres/pdf/49 Suppl 1/49_S113.pdf

"A significant negative correlation between epitestosterone and estradiol levels in human male serum has been found, but no inhibition of aromatase was observed." (what does that mean?)
https://www.hormonebalance.org/images/documents/Epitestosterone.pdf

In the blood, a 6 year old boy has around a 1.4 to 1 epitestosterone to testosterone ratio, while an adult's ratio is something like 0.1 to 1. (graph in the link right above this)

Epitestosterone also apparently has a mild neuroprotective effect. (also mentioned in that link)

Epitestosterone is produced directly, it is not a conversion product of testosterone. So injecting test produces an unnaturally high test/epi ratio for that reason. But in addition to that, the shutdown of the leydig cells from test injection not only shuts down endogenous test production but also shuts down at least 50% of epi production, so the test/epi ratio is raised even higher. Maybe this is why TRT users start to look like withered tomatoes?

So I get the impression epitestosterone is a healthy anti-androgen that the male body needs to make. Used for some important balancing purpose. So when the modern low test guy tries to raise his testosterone, his epitestosterone had better come up too, maintaining the natural ratio.

And maybe epitestosterone could be applied topically as a much safer, just as effective alternative to finasteride?

Epitestosterone is found in pine pollen (at least some species)
Per 10g of Scotch pine pollen:
1.1 mcg epitestosterone
0.8 mcg testosterone
4.9 mcg androstenedione
(from "Mammalian sex hormones in plants" by Anna Janeczko and Andrzej Skoczowski)

RPF thread about epitestosterone and balding, with a lot of studies linked.
pg 1: https://archive.is/Qf3oc
pg 2: https://archive.is/k4VnV

I don't really know any more than this. Seems important and should be researched a lot more!

(edited 3/1/24 to fix errors about epitest/test ratio)

@insufferable For that matter, I guess I would get Vitamin D just from putting lanolin on my skin, even without getting any sun myself. Since the lanolin was already exposed to the sun and thus filled with Vitamin D, back when it was still on the sheep!

@Ecstatic_Hamster that's really interesting.

weird question - if i put lanolin on before sunbathing, i think i would absorb more Vitamin D? As far as I can tell that's how sheep get vitamin d, they secrete lanolin which gets into their wool, the sun hits the lanolin and turns it to vitamin d, then as far as I can understand the vitamin d absorbs back into the wool and into the sheep from there? Sheep don't really groom themselves much so they're probably not licking their wool and ingesting that vitamin d lanolin that way.

I think so. It's obvious to me that excess UV is harmful even when you are more resilient. (low PUFA) 15 minutes is all your skin needs to produce max Vitamin D if i remember correctly, more than that and you're just cooking yourself for no reason. Can still get lots of healthy sun in the morning though when there's minimal UV in the sunlight.

Related question:

The ribcage changes shape with age, it hunches in the back, sticks out more at the waist, and I think it narrows at the top. This makes breathing harder, throws off the whole posture, and looks bad.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4111931/

There's no change in the length of the rib, the only change is its shape and angle.

I saw a study speculate that it's caused by the long term effects over time of weak intercostals and stiffening of cartilage.

I'm skeptical about golden era ribcage expansion actually doing anything to the bones. Maybe what they actually do is increase the ability for you to inflate your chest for a pose. I don't care about doing that BUT maybe exercises like that might also help prevent this age related ribcage deformation by keeping the intercostals and cartilage in better shape.

Any theories on preventing the ribcage turning into a big stiff cone?

@haidut had a post on rpf in 2013 about using super high Vit E and BCAA to get 1500+ test. I'd like to see someone recreate that!

It's at the bottom of the page:
https://archive.is/7Qxn8

(I don't want to copy it directly here cause rpf had a nasty (and absurd) copyright claim in their terms of service and i dont want to give them any ammo against this site.)

Here's an interesting group:
14% of Turkana nomadic pastoralists in east africa (living on meat and milk and extremely lean) were over 1500 ng/dl (Their population average was 943 ng/dl)
But Turkana people that had moved to a settled agriculture life on some kind of charity farm village setup were down to 675 ng/dl population average.
From https://testosteronedecline.com/do-hunter-gatherers-have-high-testosterone/ (that's my website)

@brad Yeah that would be awesome. I don't have enough data to do that properly at the moment, but I will probably be able to show the USA's rising TSH at least from the late 80's to today.

my current TSH spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTOE6ppgrSLoLynKe75kYphJ5rwoBgIJhLtN1W4czknpeO1-yZzAc2qCP1Wt21tl_e0ci7K0-Y4mbcC/pubhtml

current TSH map:

(based on single datapoints mostly, so parts of it could be totally different in reality!)

First thing I notice is that a lot of it (but not all?) correlates with the testosterone map

which is unsurprising because thyroid and testosterone are strongly connected it seems
Hypothyroid brazillians went from 279 ng/dl to 715 ng/dl testosterone when given 0.2 mg T3 for a month
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/j.1939-4640.1988.tb01038.x

@Dakota I don't know what causes it. But the form of decline that region stereotypically has suggests bioenergetic problems to me. That kind of "can't summon the energy to repair the shed when a tree falls on it, just let it sit there half broken" kind of thing. That "what's the use" feeling. I'm pretty familiar with a "who cares" despair in myself, it's a vicious cycle of low energy.

(no offense WV bros. To be honest I haven't spent a lot of time there. And I'm picking WV as the most representative, but sadly I think a lot of the rural parts of the country have some of this going on.)

With that in mind I'd say the Peatiest place to live would be a place where there's a feedback loop of good energy, cultural structure: people doing things, caring about things, being positive, enterprising, having good energy. That energy is infectious.

I have a theory that west virginia suffers from endemic hypothyroidism.

I have a site where I've posted a research project I did on testosterone levels worldwide, and how they vary in different situations. I was looking to answer the question "why are testosterone levels dropping." It's a work in progress and at times shill-ish (you know i will be selling ebooks soon)

The site: https://testosteronedecline.com/

A big map of test levels: https://testosteronedecline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Testosterone-Levels-Worldwide-full-size.png

I am doing more research, and putting together more resources so I wanted to have a thread here for discussion, critiques, suggestions, etc.

There's stuff I haven't published yet, for example a similar world map of TSH levels, info on anogenital distance variation (an indication of prenatal testosterone), correlations between diet and testosterone levels in NHANES data - but I want to discuss stuff here before I publish it to the world.