Go pull up pictures of young American men from the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s and start looking at their necks.

Yeah, their necks.

Here, I found a few for you. Look at those Adam’s apples. Pretty impressive, right?

It’s one of those details nobody thinks about until somebody points it out, and then suddenly you’re staring at old yearbook photos like a lunatic. And honestly, a lot of those guys have Adam’s apples you could hang a hat on. Add in the heavier facial hair, harder jawlines, leaner faces, and the fact that a 24-year-old in 1962 looked like he had three kids and a mortgage, and a lot of modern guys look really different by comparison.

Of course, old photographs aren’t some scientific study. Yes, clothing changed, hairstyles changed, and body composition changed. Our idea of what a young leading man should look like changed.

But still…

Where did all the damn Adam’s apples go?

America Gets Blamed First

The clip that sent me down this rabbit hole has an answer, and of course, it’s America’s fault.

The TikToker compares a British man’s very visible Adam’s apple with an American man who barely seems to a lump. They say it’s atrazine, an herbicide that’s used in the United States, mostly on corn. According to the theory, American men are being exposed through food and water, and their testosterone levels are taking a beating… and that’s why the big manly neck bump isn’t developing the way it once did.

It’s an excellent internet theory because it has everything: a body part you never noticed disappearing, a mysterious chemical, America’s food supply, hormones, and just enough truth floating around the edges to make you wonder if this person has actually stumbled onto something big.

@echoandinkink

This chemical in the USA’s food and drinking water affects men this way according to her. #healthy #food #fitness #fyp #shorts

♬ original sound – Echo & Ink ✍️

The clip gets one thing right: testosterone really is connected to the development of the male larynx during puberty. Where it gets shakier is jumping from that fact to “atrazine is why American men don’t have Adam’s apples anymore.”

It sounds logical, but it’s a leap, because this doesn’t appear to be just an American problem.

Sorry, Brits. Your Necks Aren’t Off the Hook

Once you start looking at men across generations instead of comparing America with Britain, things change.

Another video making the rounds starts with a brutal side-by-side: a 29-year-old Clint Eastwood around 1960 beside a 24-year-old Timothée Chalamet decades later. The creator keeps going through older photographs, pointing to prominent Adam’s apples, stronger-looking jaws, facial hair, and other traits he says are less pronounced in many young guys these days.

Then he blows the question wide open, dragging in testosterone, strength, sperm counts, obesity, sleep, chemicals, diet, and basically the entire modern male operating system.

Eventually the video wanders all the way into a pitch for a gut-health app, which is usually the moment I reach for my wallet and put it somewhere safe.

Still, the first twelve minutes raise a legitimate question worth separating from the snake oil pitch: have some measurable aspects of male biology changed across generations?

First Problem: Nobody Actually “Loses” an Adam’s Apple

Your Adam’s apple isn’t some extra body part that magically appears during puberty. It’s part of the structure around the voice box, and the reason it looks much more dramatic on men comes down to what actually happens during male puberty.

And the truth is, an Adam’s apple isn’t a manly bonus male organ that appears during puberty and can vanish later.

Cleveland Clinic puts the basic fact rather neatly:

Everyone has this cartilage, but it’s not always visible.

So technically, nobody has misplaced his Adam’s apple under the couch cushion.

What we’re really talking about is prominence. Some necks have a bump you could spot from across a parking lot. On others, you’d need to go hunting for it.

And that difference is tied to testosterone.

The Bump Gets Built During Puberty

The Adam’s apple is actually really interesting, especially when you look at what happens to the male voice box as boys develop.

This is where the testosterone connection in both videos has legitimate science behind it.

NCBI:

Male larynges grow larger under the influence of hormonal changes, primarily due to elevated testosterone.

Well, there it is… turns out the internet didn’t invent the hormone connection after all. Testosterone really does play a major role in enlarging the male larynx during puberty, and that enlarged structure is what can give a man the prominent bump we recognize as an Adam’s apple.

So, if testosterone helps build this trait, and modern men have smaller Adam’s apples, does that mean their testosterone has collapsed?

I went looking for the answer. All I needed was a study that actually measured Adam’s apple prominence across generations.

The problem is, I couldn’t find one.

There’s no giant collection of male neck measurements from 1960 compared with 2026. And there’s certainly no decades-long chart showing the bump steadily retreating. And no scientific confirmation that Clint Eastwood’s generation genuinely had larger Adam’s apples on average.

So the disappearing-Adam’s-apple theory remains an observation… for now.

But then I went looking at testosterone.

And that’s where things started coming together.

Okay, So Something Has Changed

If the neck bump hasn’t been tracked across generations, testosterone certainly has.

One US study dug into national health-survey data covering 4,045 adolescent and young adult men from 1999 through 2016. Instead of simply comparing old men with young men, researchers were looking for changes over calendar time.

Their conclusion wasn’t pretty clear.

Pub Med:

We conclude that TT levels have been declining in young adult men in recent decades.

Now we’ve got something, guys.

Now, that study still doesn’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that young men are growing smaller Adam’s apples… and that’s because testosterone measured in adolescence or adulthood and thyroid cartilage developed during puberty are not interchangeable evidence.

But it does blow up the easy dismissal that nothing biological has changed and everybody on the internet is just comparing flattering pictures of Clint Eastwood with skinny, waif actors.

Researchers have actually measured a decline in testosterone among young American men over time… so, the Brits have entered the chat again.

And as a result, that original “What the hell happened to American men?” theory sounds like it’s making a comeback… until another country barges into the chat.

America Doesn’t Get to Hog This One

Researchers in Israel examined testosterone testing from more than 100,000 men between 2006 and 2019.

If this were purely an American-food, American-water, American-lifestyle phenomenon, we’d expect the trail to get considerably colder once we left America, right?

Well, it didn’t.

Pub Med:

There was a highly significant age-independent decline in total testosterone in the first and second decades of the twenty-first century.

So much for blaming this entire story on American Fanta and cornbread. Not today, wankers.

The Israeli study doesn’t tell us why testosterone declined, and it doesn’t tell us anything directly about Adam’s apples. But it gives us another population where researchers detected a similar hormonal trend.

And once we leave testosterone and look at another piece of male reproductive biology, the map blows up again.

Then We Found the Sperm Study

This part has nothing directly to do with the size of anybody’s neck.

It does, however, question changes in modern male biology that are much harder to just wave off.

Researchers assembled decades of sperm-count data and eventually expanded their analysis beyond North America, Europe, and Australia to include men from South and Central America, Asia and Africa.

Here’s the number that jumped off the page.

Oxford Academic:

Among unselected men from all continents, the mean SC declined by 51.6% between 1973 and 2018.

More than half!

Again, nobody should take that number, draw an arrow to somebody’s throat, and announce CASE CLOSED: MISSING ADAM’S APPLE EXPLAINED.

That would be hooey.

But now our weird little neck question has led us down south. Scientists have documented changes in testosterone in multiple populations and a major decline in sperm concentration across a much wider geographic area.

So whatever may be happening to male biology, “American men drank the wrong soda” suddenly looks awfully small as an explanation.

Sorry, Brits.

And now, we’re back to the star villain from our first video.

Atrazine.

About Those Frogs…

The atrazine story is probably the reason this whole theory became irresistible online.

A Berkeley team led by biologist Tyrone Hayes exposed male African clawed frogs to atrazine and studied what happened to their reproductive development.

And folks, this isn’t internet folklore.

The study is real, and the result everybody remembers is every bit as strange as advertised.

Pub Med:

Ten percent of the exposed genetic males developed into functional females that copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs.

Yep.

The frog thing is real.

Which explains why atrazine has become catnip for any conversation about testosterone, feminization, and environmental chemicals.

But this is also where the viral clip takes a running leap over the evidence.

Those were frogs that were deliberately exposed under experimental conditions. The study doesn’t show that atrazine exposure in American men is shrinking their Adam’s apples, and it certainly doesn’t establish that corn syrup is quietly deleting male puberty.

Interesting suspect? Yes.

Convicted throat thief? Not yet.

And atrazine has picked up another serious scientific concern since that first video’s talking points began circulating.

Atrazine’s File Got Thicker

In November 2025, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, published its latest evaluation of atrazine.

The viral clip describes the WHO as calling atrazine “slightly carcinogenic.”

That isn’t the current classification.

IARC:

The Working Group evaluated both atrazine and alachlor as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A).

That certainly doesn’t make atrazine sound like something you’d sprinkle on your Cheerios, but cancer classification and our Adam’s-apple question are two different things. “Probably carcinogenic” doesn’t magically prove “causes American boys to develop smaller larynges.”

There’s another wrinkle too, because while IARC assesses whether something can pose a cancer hazard, the EPA also evaluates actual human exposure and risk under permitted uses.

Its current conclusion on food and drinking-water exposure is way less dramatic.

USA EPA:

EPA’s assessment found no risks of concern when evaluating all dietary exposure sources including drinking water.

And this is why science isn’t a 47-second TikTok clip.

Atrazine can produce striking endocrine effects in experimental frogs. IARC now places it in Group 2A for cancer hazard. EPA says its dietary risk assessment, including drinking water, found no risks of concern.

All three of those things can exist at once.

What we don’t have is the one thing our original viral claim desperately needs: evidence connecting ordinary American atrazine exposure to a generational disappearance of big ol’ Adam’s apples.

So maybe we’ve been looking for one villain when the more interesting story is the entire world modern men are developing inside.

Your Neck Has to Survive Modern Life Too

The second video throws nearly every possible culprit into the blender, then eventually veers into a gut-health app pitch. Fine. We came for the biology, not the infomercial.

But sleep gives us a nice glimpse at just how responsive male hormones can be to ordinary modern behavior.

Researchers at the University of Chicago took healthy young men and compared their testosterone under well-rested conditions with levels after a period of restricted sleep.

JAMA Network:

During waking hours common to both conditions (8 AM-10 PM), testosterone levels were lower after sleep restriction than in the rested condition.

So male hormones don’t live inside some sealed biological vault untouched by how a man lives.

That doesn’t mean staying up watching YouTube shrunk bros’ Adam’s apple. What it does suggest is that looking for one explanation for changes in men may be the wrong way to do this.

Think about it like this: the environment changed. Food changed. Bodies changed. Daily activity changed. Sleep changed. Chemical exposures changed. Even the way young men look in photographs changed.

Untangling which pieces affect hormones, reproductive health, or physical development is a hell of a lot harder than pointing at one herbicide.

And frankly, considerably more interesting.

So… Are Men Really Losing Their Adam’s Apples?

Here’s where my little investigation actually lands.

I couldn’t find research demonstrating that the average modern man’s Adam’s apple is physically smaller than his grandfather’s was at the same age.

So that part remains an intriguing visual observation, not an established scientific trend.

What I did find was something stranger.

The Adam’s apple is closely tied to male pubertal development, and testosterone helps drive the growth of the larynx that makes it prominent. Separate research has found declining testosterone in young American men and in men outside America. Researchers examining sperm counts have reported major declines spanning multiple continents.

Atrazine deserves discussion because the animal research is kinda bizarre.

Maybe the guys in those old pictures really did develop differently on average. Maybe body composition makes today’s Adam’s apples harder to see. Maybe we’re cherry-picking rugged-looking old photographs and comparing them with a very different modern male aesthetic. And maybe some piece of changing hormonal development is hiding inside the picture too.

Science hasn’t settled that question.

The Adam’s apple theory isn’t proven. But the bigger debate about something changing in male biology over the past few generations? There’s real research behind that.

The disappearing neck bump may be the wrong symptom, but the bigger question about men is absolutely worth asking.