The Curse of Women’s Urine

There must be something in the air… or water. Bolivian President Evo Morales has asserted publicly that hormones found in mass-produced foods are “feminizing” men. He was referring to chicken in Bolivia, which he believes is “loaded with feminine hormones.” He further suggested that when men eat chicken “they are diverted from their nature as men.” So, is this how metrosexuals came to be?

Here in America, growth hormone use in poultry has been banned since the 1950s, and the amount of estrogen present in meat is likely far too little  to be a cause for concern. But this hasn’t thwarted some on social media from scaring people into thinking that eating meat from female animals can feminize men..

Coincidentally, the Vatican commented on this issue as well, although they blamed female hormones from birth control pills for the increased estrogens in groundwater. In the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in 2009, Pedro Castellvi wrote, “We have sufficient data to affirm that one of the reasons for the not insignificant rise in male infertility in the West, is the environmental contamination caused by the pill.” Actually, it’s not the birth control pill itself but the urine from women taking the pill.

In fact, to date, the urine of women taking birth control pills has been blamed for worsening sperm counts in men, the growth of female sex organs in male fish, breast growth in young men, and the early onset of puberty in young girls. What next?

I’d like to add a little balance to this discussion:

• First, it is unclear exactly what happened to men in Bolivia that upsets the president. Are they more civilized and less disruptive?
• Second, male infertility is not necessarily increasing in the western world. It may even be true that men have lower sperm counts now than a generation ago not because they are less fertile but because women are more fertile.
• Third, estrogens are found everywhere in the environment, including in many plants (phytoestrogens) such as soy and legumes, and are not produced exclusively from the urine of women.
• Fourth, the intersex conditions that have been reported in many animal species tend to be caused by very specific exposures at very specific time points during fetal development and have been linked to pesticides, bisphenol A, dioxins, and other environmental contaminants (xenoestrogens).
• Fifth, did we somehow forget about the worldwide obesity epidemic in humans and the fact that fat converts male hormones to female hormones?
• Lastly, there is little evidence that substantially increasing a man’s estrogen levels as an adult will dramatically alter anything, except maybe waist size and color preferences.

Ongoing research suggests that birth control pills could, technically, contribute a tiny amount of estrogen to our water supply, but this is nowhere nearly as dramatic as that from pesticides and fertilizer. Where the truth lies in all of this is currently unknown, but it is hard for me as a urologist to see how women’s urine could be blamed for so much in men.