That viral 'laptop on lap causes infertility' thread made me dig out my old bio textbook

Was sitting in a coffee shop in Austin last Thursday reading this 2k retweet post claiming heat from laptops lowers sperm count by 40%, checked the cited study and it was about scrotal temps from car seats in taxis, so I spent 45 minutes cross-referencing and the whole thread was built on a 2011 paper that even the authors said was preliminary, has anyone else caught a health claim that goes viral with zero connection to the actual research?

2 comments

2 Comments

lunar891mo ago

That "activates your enzymes" bit is such a classic case of someone reading a headline and running with it. Did your cousin ever look into what those "bacterial counts" actually meant, like whether they were talking about good or bad bacteria? Because that footnote could have been a warning, not a selling point, and I bet the influencer never mentioned that part.

emmaking1mo ago

Wait, did anyone else's cousin get into raw milk because some influencer said it "activates your enzymes" even though the actual study was about pasteurization temps in cheese making? My friend literally drove 40 minutes to a farm for that stuff, and I had to show him the original paper had zero mention of enzymes, just a footnote about bacterial counts.