Your Testosterone Is Dropping 1.2% Every Year - And It Likely Started Before You Were Born
A buddy of mine - successful guy, mid-thirties, runs his own business, lifts four days a week, eats clean - went and got his bloodwork done last year because he’d been dragging ass for months. Low energy. Brain fog. His motivation was in the toilet. He figured it was stress, maybe burnout, maybe he just needed a vacation.
His total testosterone came back at 380 ng/dL. He’s 36 years old.
His doctor told him it was “within normal range.” Sent him home. Didn’t even blink.
Now here’s what that doctor didn’t tell him. That number is well below where a healthy man his age would have been sitting just two decades ago. And the reason it’s now “normal” is because they keep moving the goalposts to match a population that is getting weaker, fatter, and more hormonally compromised with every passing decade.
This isn’t just aging. This is something else entirely. And the data on it is terrifying.
The Study That Should Have Changed Everything
In 2007, a team of researchers led by Thomas Travison published a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that should have set off alarm bells across the entire medical establishment. They tracked 1,532 men from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study across three waves - 1987, 1995, and 2004 - all between the ages of 45 and 79.
What they found was that testosterone levels in American men were declining at roughly 1.2% per year on a population level, independent of age.
Let me make sure you understand what that means. This wasn’t the normal decline that happens as a man gets older. Everyone knows testosterone drops as you age - somewhere between 1-2% per year after 30 in a healthy male, and that’s in a best case scenario. What Travison found was an additionaldecline on top of that. A man born in 1970 had measurably lower testosterone than a man born in 1940 at the same age, with the same BMI, the same health markers, the same everything.
Something in the environment, in the food supply, in the way modern life is structured, is actively suppressing testosterone production in men - and it has been doing so for decades.
And it got worse.
The Follow-Up That Confirmed It
In 2020, a study by Lokeshwar and colleagues analyzed data from 4,045 men in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (or, NHANES) between 1999 and 2016. Average total testosterone dropped from 605.39 ng/dL down to 451.22 ng/dL over that period. That’s a 25% decline in less than two decades.
And before someone says “well those guys were probably just fatter” - the researchers controlled for that. Even among men with a normal BMI, testosterone dropped from 664.79 to 529.24 ng/dL. Normal weight men, eating reasonably, still saw their testosterone crater across the study period.
This goes beyond individual lifestyle choices. This is a civilizational problem.
And if you want to understand why men are more anxious, more depressed, more medicated, and less motivated than at any point in modern history, you might want to start here. Only about 17% of men with mental health issues even seek treatment, compared to 28.5% of women. Most men don’t even know what’s wrong. They just know they don’t feel like themselves anymore, and they can’t figure out why.
I’ll tell you why. Their biology is being undermined, and nobody is talking about it in a way that gives men a plan to fight back.
What Is Actually Causing This
The decline is not coming from one thing. It’s coming from everywhere, all at once, and it’s compounding.
Endocrine disruptors are in everything. BPA in plastics, phthalates in personal care products, pesticides in food, synthetic estrogens in the water supply. These compounds mimic estrogen in the male body and interfere directly with testosterone production. You are being exposed to them every single day - in the food you eat, the water you drink, the containers your food comes in, and the products you put on your skin.
Men are fatter than they have ever been. Excess body fat doesn’t just correlate with lower testosterone - it actively converts testosterone into estrogen through a process called aromatization. The more body fat you carry, the more testosterone your body converts into estrogen. It’s a vicious cycle. Low testosterone makes it harder to lose fat, and more fat produces more estrogen, which further suppresses testosterone. This is why you see so many men carrying visible breast tissue now. That’s not just fat. That’s estrogen dominance.
Chronic stress is destroying cortisol balance. Cortisol and testosterone have an inverse relationship. When cortisol goes up, testosterone goes down. And the modern man is drowning in cortisol - financial stress, relationship stress, work stress, the constant low-grade anxiety of being plugged into screens 16 hours a day. Your body cannot optimize its endocrine system when it thinks it’s under threat every waking moment.
Sedentary lifestyles and processed food are finishing the job. Most men sit at a desk all day, eat garbage that comes out of a package, stare at blue light screens until midnight, and then wonder why they feel like a shell of themselves. If the 2.4 million years of human history were broken down into 24 hours on a clock, we’ve been eating meat for almost 24 hours, wheat for six minutes, and processed foods for four seconds. Your body was not designed for this.
None of this is going to fix itself.
What You Actually Do About It
This is the part most people skip. They’ll give you the doom and gloom - testosterone is dropping, men are suffering, the world is falling apart - and then they move on to the next depressing headline. I’m not going to do that. If you’ve done any amount of reading on this channel or in my books, you know that I don’t bring you problems without solutions. That’s not how this works.
I wrote an entire chapter on this in The Unplugged Alpha because it’s that important. Chapter 3, “Testosterone and Health.” It covers the full protocol - natural optimization, TRT, bloodwork, supplementation, all of it. If you haven’t read it, this is the chapter alone that’s worth the price of the book.
Here’s the short version.
Get your bloodwork done. I don’t care if you’re 25 or 55. Get a full blood panel. Not the basic one your family doctor orders - a comprehensive panel that includes total testosterone, free testosterone, estradiol, SHBG, LH, FSH, thyroid, and a full metabolic panel. You need a baseline. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and you cannot optimize what you cannot see.
Fix the basics first. Cut processed food. Get your body fat to 12-15%. Lift heavy compound movements. Get 6-8 hours of quality sleep in a dark room with no screens. Reduce blue light exposure at night. Minimize EMF exposure. Supplement with Vitamin D3 paired with K2-MK7 - most men living north of the tropics are severely deficient, and D3 is directly correlated with testosterone production. Add zinc, boron, and ashwagandha. Consider Tongkat Ali, which has clinical evidence supporting its role in testosterone optimization. You can find the specific supplements I use and recommend at theunpluggedalpha.com.
If the basics aren’t enough, explore TRT with a competent doctor. Not your family doctor who will tell you 380 is “normal.” A doctor who specializes in male hormone optimization and treats symptoms, not numbers. My own protocol is 90mg of testosterone cypionate per week plus 1000 IU of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (or, HCG) weekly, under the supervision of a licensed TRT doctor. Most TRT doctors will prescribe between 80 to 200 mg per week and then adjust based on your bloodwork. Everyone responds differently - there is no one size fits all.
I made a video on this that breaks down my full experience with TRT - the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s one of the most viewed videos on my channel because men are desperate for someone to tell them the truth about this instead of the sanitized, hedge-everything version they get from mainstream health media.
Andrew Huberman said it best when he described the importance of healthy testosterone levels in men: “It makes effort feel good.” That’s the simplest, most accurate summary I’ve ever heard. When your testosterone is optimized, you want to do hard things. You want to train. You want to build. You want to compete. When it’s in the tank, you want to sit on the couch and scroll your phone until you fall asleep. And that’s not a character flaw - that’s a hormonal deficit that can be identified, measured, and fixed.
Why This Matters Beyond Your Health
I want you to think about this in the context of everything else I talk about on this channel and in my books.
Testosterone is the foundation. It underpins your energy, your drive, your confidence, your ability to hold frame, your capacity to lead, your physique, your sexual function, and your overall presence as a man. When it’s compromised, everything built on top of it starts to crack. Your relationships suffer because you don’t have the drive to lead. Your business suffers because you can’t focus or push through hard days. Your body deteriorates because you can’t recover or build muscle the way you used to. Your mental health takes a hit because the chemical that literally makes effort feel good is running on fumes.
And here’s the part that should really make you pay attention. This is generational. The Travison data shows that your sons will likely have lower baseline testosterone than you did at their age, and their sons lower still - unless something changes. Unless men start taking ownership of their biology the same way they take ownership of their finances, their businesses, and their relationships.
Nobody is coming to save you on this. Your doctor won’t flag it. The government won’t warn you. The food industry sure as hell won’t stop putting endocrine disruptors in your cereal. This is on you. It has always been on you. That’s the deal.
The Cold Hard Truth
Never forget: Men’s testosterone levels have been declining since before you were born. The Travison study proved that men today have significantly less testosterone than men of the same age twenty, thirty, forty years ago - and the decline is accelerating. This is not normal aging. This is environmental, dietary, and lifestyle poisoning that compounds across generations.
Getting your bloodwork done is the single most important health decision you will make this year. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure. Start tracking your levels now, establish a baseline, and revisit it every year.
The medical establishment’s definition of “normal” is a trap. Normal is the average of a sick population. You are not aiming for normal. You are aiming for optimal - the levels of a healthy 30 year old man operating at peak capacity.
Natural optimization works and it should be your first move. Cut the processed garbage, reduce stress, lift heavy, sleep properly, supplement D3+K2, zinc, boron, and ashwagandha. You would be surprised at how much your body can recover when you stop poisoning it and start feeding it what it actually needs.
If natural isn’t enough, TRT under the supervision of a competent doctor is a legitimate, life-changing option. Do not let anyone shame you for optimizing your biology. Hate never comes from above - only from people beneath you.
This is a competitive advantage. In a world that is systematically weakening men through environmental estrogens, processed food, chronic stress, and sedentary living - the man who takes ownership of his testosterone is operating at a level most men will never reach. Not because they can’t, but because they won’t do the work.
Do. The. Work.
Peace.
Sources:
Travison, T.G., Araujo, A.B., O’Donnell, A.B., Kupelian, V., & McKinlay, J.B. (2007). A population-level decline in serum testosterone levels in American men. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 92(1), 196-202.
Lokeshwar, S.D., Patel, P., Fantus, R.J., Halpern, J., Chang, C., Karber, A., & Ramasamy, R. (2020). Decline in serum testosterone levels among adolescent and young adult men in the USA. European Urology Focus, 7(4), 886-889.
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