Digging for the Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa
“As the most important male hormone, testosterone has an impact on almost all organs and body functions. The biological effects of testosterone and the testes have been known since antiquity, long before testosterone was identified as the active agent…”
The History of Discovery, Synthesis and Development of Testosterone for Clinical Use, Eberhard Neischlag, 2019 (PMID 30959485)
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As Napoleon pointed out, his vast Grande Armée “marched on its stomach”, but I bet my bottom dollar that no seasoned poilu was ever fat. Last year, according to the UK Ministry of Defence, a third of British military personnel were overweight or obese. A muchly maligned official Army anti-fat poster was captioned, “DON’T GOBBLE TILL YOU WOBBLE”.
Being fat creates a host of significant health problems, as we should all know. Many of these life-threatening conditions are caused or exacerbated by intra-abdominal visceral fat – the protuberant “beer belly”: type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease spring to mind, but fundamentally more insidious is the negative effect of visceral fat on testosterone levels.
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Although it had long been known that the testicles had a key role in the manifestations of masculinity, it was not until the 1930’s that two famed scientists, the Croatian-Swiss Leopold Ruzicka of CIBA and the German Adolf Butenandt of the Max Planck Institute, independently worked out “the truth” of testosterone – its identification and eventually its synthesis, initially from the wild yam in Switzerland and cholesterol in Germany. They jointly won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in the fateful year of 1939.
The thoroughgoing Nazi Butenandt (NSDAP member 3716562) soon put testosterone to good use, purportedly taking advantage of the inmates of concentration camps for his clinical trials. Heinrich Himmler, the Reich Leader of the SS, certainly encouraged his doctors at the Buchenwald camp to “cure” homosexuality with the use of hefty doses. Reputedly, Nazi stormtroopers were fed large quantities in order to tweak their aggressive traits and to promote their strength and endurance.
To add to this nasty reputation, a poorly conducted clinical trial in 1941 appeared to demonstrate that testosterone administration caused prostate cancer to develop. This arrant myth created a serious barrier to any attempt to use testosterone in a clinical setting, especially as the diagnosis of prostate cancer was entirely dependent upon the sensitivity of the doctor’s forefinger. It took a further 40 years to establish the safety of testosterone supplementation, and it has only recently been shown that a low testosterone level is associated with an increased occurrence of the most pernicious type of prostate cancer.
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In 2006, a large observational study showed an unexplained and substantial decline in the overall testosterone levels of American men (PMID 17062768). In 2022, it was “revealed that lower levels of testosterone were related to higher mortality” (PMID 36820240), also that low testosterone levels were associated with “a higher risk to develop severe COVID-19” in males (PMID 34402750). Similar academic reports are increasingly numerous, especially in relation to overweight and obesity. The association of excess intra-abdominal fat with low testosterone levels in men has been of increasing interest to scientist as overweight and obesity are now becoming epidemic – at first so stealthily that it is only recently that this imminent danger to our over-indulged society is being fully recognised.
Even politicians are being forced to take notice. You should certainly have noted that none of our recent immigrants are fat.
COVID was the wake-up call. It took the near-overwhelmed hospital doctors some months to appreciate that it was not only the old and sickly that were dying in intensive care, it was also as likely to be the male and obese. A low testosterone has a profound negative influence on the function of the immune system. The COVID virus had had a ball.
The WHO reported in May this year, that in 2022, “2.5 billion adults were overweight. Of these, 890 million were living with obesity”. Live births per woman in 2025 are running at 2.2, having fallen from 5.1 in 1965. “A total fertility rate of 2.1 or below will cause the native population to decline”.
At present, the overall UK birth rate is 1.44 children per woman.
No doubt our lean immigrants – the top four from India, Poland, Pakistan, Romania, in that order – will rapidly grow fat gorging on our foul ultra processed food: there will be no stopping them becoming as self-indulgent, infertile and physically inactive as we are.
As the lugubrious Dad’s Army undertaker said, “We are doomed”.
– or was it Homer three thousand years ago?
Richard Petty
