Dr. Mark Hyman:
Coming up on this episode of the doctor’s Farmacy, the mother imprints her eggs and the father imprints his sperm with everything he’s doing in his life or she’s doing in her life. So you actually have to take care of your sperm and egg before conception. Welcome to the Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and that’s Farmacy with an half a place for conversations that matter. And today, welcome to another episode of our special feature in Doctor’s Farmacy called Health Bites. And today we’re talking about something that doesn’t always get the spotlight. It deserves the preconception period. Now, having a baby is one of the most important moments in many of our lives. We know it’s important to take care of your health during pregnancy and breastfeeding and the importance of taking care of the baby once it’s born. But many of us give little thought to the importance of preparing to conceive and how to create a healthy environment for conception.
And this applies to both the mother and the father, believe it or not. Now, are you thinking about starting a family now or maybe in the near future or maybe your kids are getting ready to have kids? I don’t know. Typically, the focus on reproductive health falls on the woman and it begins after conception has already occurred with minimal emphasis on diet and nutrition beyond prenatal vitamins. However, the preconception window is just as important for a healthy pregnancy and most importantly, a healthy baby. Now, the preconception window is a foundational time for both partners. Yes, both the man and the woman to take charge of their hormonal, metabolic, and overall health to ensure the healthiest sperm egg and the chance at creating a healthy new life. In today’s episode, we’re discussing the essential steps that both men and women can take to foster a nurturing environment for conception.
We’ll delve deep into lab tests and tools that can support your hormone and reproductive wellness, the challenges and the insults of our modern day lifestyles, and how we can use functional medicine to take a proactive approach by embracing diet, supplements, lifestyle, exercise and more to prime couples for a successful pregnancy while safeguarding against developmental conditions like autism and A DHD that are doubling or even tripling from one generation to the next. I mean, it’s kind of scary out there. One in six kids have a neurodevelopmental disorder and much of that is preventable. So whether you’re just starting to think about having kids or already on your pregnancy path, this conversation is for you. Alright, let’s get into it. Why does this matter? Why is the preconception window so important? Well, it’s a time to optimize your health, to give your baby the best chance of being healthy.
Why is that important? Well, many of the issues we see in kids today can be prevented by addressing your health before conception. In fact, one in 36 children today have autism. And I don’t mean to tell you all this to depress you. I just want you to understand how important it’s to make sure you create a healthy environment to plant the seed of a new life. And today, one in 36 children have autism, one in six kids or about 17% of kids age three to 17 have a neurodevelopmental. 9.8% or about 6 million kids between ages three and 17 have a DHD and one in five adolescents are living with pre-diabetes and the obesity prevalence is 13% among two to five year olds. Wait a minute, did I just say that? Think about this. Two to five year olds are not just overweight, they’re obese. 13% more than one in 10 kids between two and five are obese.
And why is that happening? Is it because they’re all eating Doritos as babies? No. There’s something also happening in the womb that programs these kids to be overweight, and we’re going to talk about what that is and how to prevent it. Now, overweight parents before conception who are overweight before conception have a four to six times higher risk of having a child with increased birth weight and obesity. This is from the International Journal of Obesity. Now, everything I’m talking about today, I’m not making up. It’s all from peer reviewed literature. All the references are in the show notes if you want to dig into the studies yourself. But I want you to understand this is really an important field and unfortunately in medicine we tend to ignore data. We don’t know what to do with, but the truth is we can use it to uplevel our health, to optimize our health, and to prevent a lot of the things that we see.
So we’re going to include all the science that’s relevant to use, not just what doctors are doing because they’re often 20 to 50 years behind the science. So how do we prevent all these neurodevelopment issues, a, d, d, autism, obesity, diabetes in kids? What do we need to do? Well, we need to address the risk factors that drive impaired imprinting. We call it epigenetic imprinting. I’m going to explain what that is. Basically, what is epigenetics? Epigenetics is the way our bodies determine which genes are expressed and which are not, and ultimately program the baby in the womb for its future health. Now, genes play a part, but epigenetics plays a much bigger part in determining the health of the baby, not just when it’s born, but throughout its whole life. I mean, think of genes as the keys on a piano. They don’t change, right?
They’re fixed. You got 88 keys, but think of your epigenome as the piano player able to play an infinite number of songs, which songs in the book of life are expressed is controlled by the epigenome. It sits above your genes. It’s like the regulator for your genes. And that’s a good thing because most of the epigenome is controlled by our lifestyle and our environment. Now, what are the things that influence our epigenome? Well, it’s the things you’d expect. Our older processed diet, the lack of protective foods, healthy food, our lifestyle including stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, nutrient deficiencies, certain medications, your weight, body composition, chronic diseases like obesity, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, pcos. In pregnancy, women have a lot of these. I mean I talk about this a lot, but I was once visiting Spelman College and it’s a women’s college, black women’s college in Atlanta, and 50% of the entering class of women, 18-year-old women have a chronic disease, one of these problems, but also autoimmunity issues, environmental toxins also can program bad things into the baby.
And we’ll talk about how to reduce exposure and help elimination of those toxins. And also anything that drives inflammation can shape the development of a growing fetus. Now, inflammation can be caused by many of the things I just talked about, but many other things too. So we’re going to talk about inflammation because that’s a really important trigger for dysregulated biology. Now, the host or mother, father in this case imprints the genetic material of the germ cells, meaning the mother imprints her eggs and the father imprints his sperm with everything he’s doing in his life or she’s doing in her life. This is really important to understand. So you actually have to take care of your sperm and egg before conception. Now these traits that are programmed in through the epigenome can be passed to the offspring. Now this can affect the likelihood of having obesity and various comorbidities like heart disease, diabetes, and more.
And what’s even more striking, and this is kind of scary, is that these epigenetic changes can be passed down transgenerationally, for example, from grandmother to mother to child. So for example, children born to obese or overweight mothers have an increased risk of obesity, lower respiratory tract infections and lower childhood iq. This is from frontiers in endocrinology. I’m not making this stuff up. Children of obese parents are at greater risk for developmental delays, including things like fine motor skills. Problem solving. This from journal pediatrics, A 2020 study conducted by the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Academy or PACE investigated the link between DNA methylation changes, essentially how our genes are controlled or regulated, how our epigenome is controlled and maternal gestational diabetes in newborn’s cord blood and discovered reduced levels of methylation in two specific areas of the cord blood, DNA. So what this means is that looking at women who had diabetes or in pregnancy, that diabetes affected the epigenetic programming in the newborn babies cord blood cells.
So they looked at two specific areas. A gene promoter associated with autism called O2 L 13 doesn’t really matter. And a gene called CYP two E one, both known to be involved in type one and type two diabetes. So essentially there’s genes that are screwed up in English that are screwed up if a woman has gestational diabetes, I would say maybe in pre-diabetes that it increases the risk of autism and increases the risk of type one and type two diabetes in the fetus, in the baby, in the offspring when it’s born. Now these suggest that epigenetic mechanisms play a role in how maternal gestational diabetes affects the risk of autism disorders and diabetes conditions in kids. Now in mice, a female offspring from obese fathers showed an altered expression of pancreatic eyelet cells. That’s the cells in the pancreas that make insulin and that leads to impaired insulin secretion and glucose tolerance.
So think about this. If a father’s overweight and has a daughter, that daughter is going to have poor insulin secretion, lower glucose tolerance, and more risk of diabetes. This was published in nature, one of the preeminent journals of the world. Prenatal exposure to stress or major depressive disorder also causes changes in DNA methylation and that leads to low birth weight and long-term epigenetic alterations including lower stress resilience, and in the male offspring, a higher risk of A DHD. So just think about that for a minute. If the father or the mother has stress or depression, that changes epigenetic programming that leads to low birth weight, inability to deal with stress and an increased risk of A DHD in the male offspring. This is concerning. Now, let’s not get too much more into the depressive stuff. I just want you to know that we have an understanding of how our environment, our diet, our lifestyle toxins, all influence the epigenetic programming and the risk of having a baby with bad health outcomes.
Now, this is mostly preventable, and this is where conventional medicine misses the mark. It just doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t look at a preventive approach, a holistic approach to couples who are wanting to conceive and have a baby. The advice kind of stops with prenatal vitamins, but there are a lot of things that are important that never get addressed, like diet, nutrient status, inflammation, hormones, environmental toxins, they don’t talk about it and men’s reproductive health forget about it. It isn’t addressed or optimized at all. Think about it. I mean the men that are out of the equation, but they’re half the equation when it comes to putting the seed of a new baby in the womb, right? The sperm. Now, our conventional approach to pregnancy doesn’t offer patients a deep dive into the health and the biomarkers that they need to know what’s going on.
Now, this is really important. Traditional medicine typically does not routinely test the things that are often the most important to know when you’re trying to prepare to conceive and to optimize your health, including sex hormones, nutritional deficiencies, toxins, metabolic health. I mean a whole list of stuff. And if they do test stuff, it’s very superficial and it doesn’t give you the deep insights you need. So we need a lot of things. We need all your hormones, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, lh, FSH, prolactin, DHEA six, hormone binding globulin, A MH. A lot of things really important. So all by the way, all this is in the show notes. You don’t have to memorize this stuff, go check it out. All the tests are in there, what you should be getting, what you should be asking for, and what’s important to know about your health before you conceive.
Also, it doesn’t fully test a thyroid panel. I’ll do a TSH, but not the full thyroid panel and you’ll miss a lot. We’re seeing, for example, in this company I co-founded function health. I’ll talk about in a minute that about 13% have autoimmune thyroid disease and don’t even know it, and they can have normal TSH. You should check not only the TSH, but something called free T three and free T four thyroid antibodies. These should just be standard. Why is that important? Well, undiagnosed thyroid issues can cause menstrual issues, fertility issues when you’re pregnant and have a low thyroid or suboptimal thyroid, it can have really bad effects on fetal outcomes. For example, low thyroid hypothyroidism increases the risk of miscarriage, hypertension in pregnancy, anemia, low birth weight, preterm labor, and even developmental issues. In fact, we used to have a term for it. It’s kind of not that nice term, but we used call it cretinism.
If you’re a cretin, it’s a very pejorative word actually, but it reflects a name that we gave to people who were born to mothers who are hyperthyroid. They would come out very mentally handicapped and health and their health was severely compromised. A lot of other things critical to know vitamin D, and we’ll get into Y of all these, but just stay with me because we’re going to get into Y of all these, but we don’t check vitamin D. We often don’t check folate. B12, magnesium, zinc, omega threes. These are widespread deficiencies in our society. 80% have vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency. Methylation issues, probably half the population with folate. B12, magnesium, probably 45%. Zinc probably 40%. Omega threes probably 90 plus percent have omega deficiencies. And these are critical for the developing fetus and also critical to have healthy sperm ache. These are really important to optimize, not after you find out you’re pregnant, but before and obviously during the pregnancy.
And this is really why I co-founded this company Function Health. It’s basically a health platform that provides you access to all the biomarkers we just talked about and lots more including metabolic health and many other things. And it’ll help you learn about your numbers and how to optimize them with deep insights and science. And it’s just 4 99 a year for twice a year testing. Now, if you’re interested in learning more, just go to function health.com/mark and you’ll learn more about it and can sign up. It’s great, and you’ll jump the wait list because there’s about 150,000 people on the wait list. So what do we do in functional medicine? How do we think about this differently? Well, we want to get the right lab test to start with. We want to know where you’re at test don’t guess, right? Get your levels tested preconception and then optimize those things that are out of balance.
Optimize your hormones, optimize your nutrients, optimize your toxin levels, meaning get rid of them. So what are the things we need to know and why? We talked a little bit about these, but nutrient testing is so important and we do that extensively with function health, and you need to do it and your doctor is probably not going to do this Vitamin D. Now, why is this important? So vitamin D is crucial for hormonal health, for immune function, for many, many other things. And if you have adequate levels, it increases the chance of conceiving and also having a healthy pregnancy. This is from reproductive biology and endocrinology. What about folate? Folate you might’ve heard about in pregnancy? Why is it important? This is really critical. You need this on board before you conceive really important because if you don’t, it leads to neural tube defects, neurologic defects, spina bifida, all kinds of problems in the days following conception, the genes that govern your brain wiring are turned on and off in a process that requires folate.
So it’s critical for building a healthy brain in a developing fetus. If you start the prenatal vitamin after you learn your pregnant, it’s too late. So you want to start prenatals for both men and women, and we’ll talk about yes men, why men needed prenatals do before conception. A Norwegian study that followed 85,000 women from 18 weeks into their pregnancies until six years after delivery, maybe six years after reveal the woman who took folic acid four weeks before conceiving, and at least eight weeks after were 40% less likely. Now, get this, were 40% less likely to have children diagnosed with autism versus those who did not take supplements before conception. This is in jama, the medical journal, jama. Now we want a prenatal with the right type of folate, ideally methylfolate and not folic acid. What about B12 and B six? These are important. B12 is super important, but what we check is something called homocysteine, and this is on our functional health panel, not typically what you get checked, but high levels of homocysteine indicate inadequate function of folate, B12 or B six.
And if you have high levels, it has a lot of bad associations with a high blood pressure, pregnancy, diabetes of pregnancy, and it’s a much more sensitive indicator of these nutritional deficiencies. We also need to know about iron. So why is iron important? Well, often women need more blood during iron because they have to give it to the baby. They’ll draw on their iron stores, and women often are menstruating obviously before they get pregnant, so they’re often at risk for iron deficiency. But if you have low iron, you can potentially not ovulate every month. You’ll have anemia, you’ll have trouble with red cell production. It affects fetal development and get this, 35% of women under 50 are iron deficient, 35%, it’s like one in three women. So this is a big issue. Now globally, over half a billion women of reproductive age are anemic. Now we’re talking about pennies a day of a nutrient that can have profound impact on the outcomes of infants and babies and the future health of our children.
So next nutrient is really important. Again, this is not checked with irregular panel checked on function health is omega fats. Now why is it important? Well, it reduces the total body and reproductive system inflammation and also supports balance of your hormones. Now, omega threes are critical for neurologic development, for brain development, the fetus, and of course adults too. That affects your risk of depression, A, D, D, and lots of things. Now get this, men who had higher levels of omega threes in their sperm have better sperm quality, higher total semen volume, and higher levels of testosterone. So thinking about that, you can improve the quality of your sperm just by taking the right vitamins as a man for women. Omega support egg quality and the health of the lining of the uterus, which is critical for implantation and maintenance of early pregnancy and preventing miscarriages, improves pregnancy rates and prevents miscarriage.
So it’s really an important thing to have. There was results from a study, the cohort study that showed that women taking omega supplements were one and a half times more likely to conceive than women not taking omega supplements. This is from human reproduction. So think about it, just taking omega threes could increase your risk by 50% of getting pregnant. In the field of medicine, we’re seeing exploding rates of infertility. What else do you need to know? Magnesium. Magnesium is critical mineral. It’s involved in over 600 enzymatic reactions in the body and is critical in fetal development. The bad news, over 50% of Americans are lower deficient in magnesium. It’s also a risk factor for preterm labor and preeclampsia or high blood pressure and pregnancy. In fact, that’s what we give women when they come in with preterm labor to the emergency room or when they have high blood pressure and pregnancy, we give them intravenous magnesium.
Why not take it before you’re pregnant and during pregnancy to make sure your levels are adequate so you don’t have these problems, right? Big surprise if medicine did that, but that’s another topic. Okay, so what about zinc? Now, this is another mineral that’s critical in fetal development. It also prevents preterm birth. So preterm labor, 17% of the world’s population is deficient in zinc and many more have suboptimal levels. So really important to make sure these nutrients are optimized. It’s not that hard. You take a multivitamin, vitamin D fish oil, and you’re basically covered. So it’s not that hard. It’s not that expensive. You just need to take the right nutrients. And we’re going to link to products and things that we recommend that I have looked at, that I’ve used in my patients that have the right kind of nutrients. The right forms of nutrients don’t have any junk in it.
Why take blue dye when you’re pregnant on a prenatal vitamin? You want even healthy things to take that are not full of fillers, additive chemicals and weird junk that you don’t need. But basically we’ve done the homework for you and provide guidance on what to take. Alright? So getting the right nutrients is super important and optimizing your levels is really important before conception, both for the mother and the father. So what should we be testing? Let’s just do a little review. Women should test their sex hormones between day 19 and 22 of a 28 day cycle to help see where your progesterone is because that’s important in conception. Should check testosterone, prolactin, estrogen or estradiol your adrenals through DHE sulfate, FSH, LH and A MH all tell you how things are going with your hormones and gives the doctor a sense of what’s going on.
And through function health, you can get guidance on what to do about these and what they mean. Thyroid really important to test properly. I just mentioned that it’s imperative to have optimized thyroid levels before conception to have a healthy baby and a healthy pregnancy. Now these are tests, additional tests that I recommend that go above and beyond what you might get to understand the whole picture. Cortisol, which measures your stress response, CRPA measure of inflammation, and we talked about inflammation. Critical in creating a healthy environment is to reduce inflammation in the body. Environmental toxins, something we all are exposed to and have to deal with and we can remove by changing our lifestyle or filter and water, air filters or chelation or other treatments as needed. And I do this for a lot of women. I test them before pregnancy I to get the mercury out of their bodies so they can have a healthy baby.
All these things. Mercury led arsenic, all of which affect fetal development. Also, it’s important to look at your metabolic health. We’re seeing exploding rates of obesity and pregnant mothers overweight, and this is a sign of poor metabolic health. And this can create epigenetic programming that leads to an obese or diabetic baby and child and adult. It’s bad news. So you want to get your metabolic health straight and what do you need to know? Obviously you’re fasting glucose, but also fasting insulin, something never checked by typical doctors. Your A1C measure your average blood sugar. So managing blood sugar and insulin during pregnancy is so important for a healthy baby and to protect their long-term health and prevent them from getting obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and lots more. We also want to do a deep look at your cardiometabolic health, which is linked to your blood sugar control, but it’s looking at your cholesterol in a new and important way called lipoprotein fractionation.
I’ve talked about this on many podcasts. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But essentially, this is a much better way of looking at your cholesterol. It’s only 1% of cholesterol tests, so I doubt you probably got it from your doctor, but it looks at the quality of your cholesterol, not just the amount. And it gives you a good idea of whether you have good or poor metabolic health. Now sadly, when you go in for pre-pregnancy counseling or for testing during pregnancy, you don’t get most of these tests and have very little visibility on what’s truly happening in your body. And again, that’s why co-founded Function Health, a health copilot that allows you to test for all this and more, for less than 500 bucks. You can go to function health.com/mark to sign up and jump the wait list. Alright, so let’s talk about what you can do after all this bad news.
What can you do to optimize your health before pregnancy, both men and women and using diet, lifestyle, things that are mostly under our control? First thing is get rid of all the junk in your diet, right? Get of all the processed food two to three months before conception, all the chemically extruded food-like substances. They don’t even meet the definition of food, but all this junk we want to get rid of, we want to get also of heavy metals from your diet, from mercury containing fish makes a huge, huge importance in health of the fetus. In fact, there’s been a link between ultra processed foods consumption and heavy metals in the food supply and autism, which is exploding. We used to have one in 10,000 kids had autism when I was in early training. Now it’s like one in 36. So it’s not just better detection.
Something is going on affecting our kids. Clinical trials suggest that heavy metal exposure and also poor diet from ultra processed foods are primary epigenetic factors responsible for autism. And A DHD, this is from the World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics. This is not my opinion, right? So get this alter processed food and heavy metals have both been linked to autism. Why should we be eating these foods? They should be illegal or at least highly labeled. So eat this and your kid may have autism, it might change people’s behavior. Now, food quality also is really important because it impacts epigenetic programming related to autism and neurodevelopmental diseases, meaning not just the bad stuff but not having enough of the good stuff. And what’s really bad is the American food supply is not so good, right? It has levels of lead, arsenic and mercury that exceed what is known to be scientifically safe, right?
Food coloring contains trace amounts of AV metals. They’re allowed by the FDA high fructose corn syrup, refined seed oils, fertilizers, pesticides. All these things contain trace amounts of heavy metals. Mercury, lead, cadmium can be found in the cord blood of a baby and they’re associated with bad things. These changes in the DNA methylation patterns, which program, the epigenome and those lead to impaired cognitive function. So we want to get rid of all the junk, all the processed food, all the coloring, all the atoms. It should be in it anyway, but anyway, just more important when you’re getting ready to conceive conventional dairy, not so great. Lots of antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, all negatively affected growing fetus. Lots of sugar ain’t so good either. Especially high fructose corn syrup, which is in everything, particularly sugar sweetened beverages. We know that sugar sweetened beverages promote insulin resistance in the mother, and that affects the baby’s risk of being obese and diabetic.
So what the mother eats affects the baby’s risk of being obese and diabetic. That’s really important. And also, it’s not just sugar, it’s refined grains like flour. All these things like sugar and flour, lead to insulin resistance, and even something called PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome, it’s not an ovarian problem, it’s a dietary problem and it’s usually caused by this high concentration of sugar and flour in a diet and that can be totally prevented. Some things are harder to change, right? For example, environmental toxins are everywhere. Glyphosate is an important herbicide that’s used on 70% of all crops, and it’s concerning because it has transgenerational epigenetic effects that affect the offspring. Now this is crazy, right? And this is on 70% of crops. This is an herbicide, so we can talk about how to reduce that, but essentially it’s by buying organic or regenerative food and so forth.
Now, large fish are also something you should be aware of, and this is like tuna, swordfish, halibut, sea, Jillian sea bass and so forth. And there’s great guides. We going to link to it. The Environmental Working Group has a guide. The National Research Defense Council has a guide on mercury fish, so you know which are the lowest, which are the highest, and you can avoid all the highest ones. But we know that, for example, mercury is a potent neurotoxin. Also, inflammation, as I mentioned by any means, will drive impaired conception and poor pregnancy outcomes. And those are things like leaky gut, which is really common in our society because of our diet and the lack of fiber and processed food and damage to our microbiome. And this causes something called metabolic endotoxemia. So think about it, when you eat junk food, processed food, sugar, starch, all that changes your microbiome and it feeds the bad bugs, and those bugs produce toxins that get absorbed and those toxins trigger inflammation.
Those inflammation changes lead to prediabetes and some resistance in more trouble all the way down the road and epigenetic changes, and that leads to a bad environment to conceive and digestate. Now, what should we be getting rid of? Addition to the things I mentioned that can cause this, well, fats, which shouldn’t be eaten anyway. This is shortening margarine and so forth. Low quality fats are not going to eat like oils, seed oils, things that ultra processed food. Gluten can be an issue for some. Not everybody, GMO corn, processed soy, but not whole soy, not whole non GMO soy. But processed soys can be very significantly damaging and can interfere with hormone function in men and women. Caffeine not a good thing to be doing while you’re pre or pregnant or during pregnancy. So coffee, green tea, black tea, not that they’re bad, but during pregnancy they’re bad.
Too much of these things also can wear out your adrenals. They can also, as I mentioned, have adverse effects on the fetus. Alcohol, well, I mean it’s now known to be harmful at any dose. Enough said. Don’t drink it Before you get pregnant and during pregnancy, what should you be eating? Well, these are goals, but I think it’s really important if you want to have a healthy baby to prepare the oven properly. And that means eating real whole foods, nutrient dense foods with micronutrients and lots of phytochemicals before and during pregnancy. And when they did this in studies, they found that women who did that had a lower risk of pre-diabetes, of gestational diabetes, of gestational high blood pressure, hypertension, and a preterm labor. Think about it. If you eat healthy food, you’re less likely to have diabetes during pregnancy, high blood pressure in pregnancy and have a preterm delivery.
This is from the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Also, good quality protein is very important. You need adequate more protein before and after. Sorry. You need high quality protein and more than you think before, during, and after pregnancy because you’re beating a new baby and growing something, so about half to one gram per pound a day. Also for fertility, you need a lot of nutrients that are in protein, iron, carnitine, choline, creatine, zinc, selenium, B12, vitamin A, all in healthy animal protein. And what I mean by that, well, grass fed or we generally raised beef, lamb, venison, and these contain zinc, selenium, iron carnitine beef flavor. I know we may not like that, but it’s good check. Your livers are good too. Lots of vitamin A, really important bioavailable vitamin A. You can use fish, but I would only eat the smash fish. Salmon, very small, wild salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines and herring.
Maybe don’t like those. I do, but you don’t have to eat them. You can take the omega threes if you don’t like them, but you need to make sure you have all those. And what do they have? They have selenium, they have vitamin D, they have choline, they have particularly omega threes and also clams and oysters are great because they’re a source of B12 and zinc canine in pregnancy. Pasture raised eggs also important, including the egg yolks which are high in all the nutrients to create a new life. Think about what an egg is, right? All the nutrients to create a healthy new life. A B12 folate, B six chicken, make sure it’s pasture raised. Pork can be okay that has thym and zinc, but make sure it’s raised in a way that’s sustainable, regenerative and so forth. Bone broth can be great too. It’s full of collagen, glutamine, glycine, amino acids you need for a healthy baby.
Sometimes dairy can be okay if it’s good or sheep. Yogurt, recommend also, you want to eat a lot of low-glycemic fruits and veggies, whole grains, beans, all fine during pregnancy. Lots of antioxidant rich foods full of polyphenols. All the colors and bright colors and vegetables and fruit. These contain a lot of nutrients that need like beta carotene. Then other carotinoids, vitamin E, vitamin C, selenium, zinc, coq 10, all important. And so you want to have these onboard before conception and not only again for women, but for men. For example, coq 10 improves sperm concentration, motility and morphology, meaning it improves how much sperm you have, how good they swim and how they look right. You don’t want sperm with two heads, antioxidant properties. Also, foods help neutralize the effects of what we call reactive oxygen species on the sperm. In other words, oxidative stress or rusting, which can damage sperm.
So these antioxidants can protect the sperm and again, lead to a higher likelihood of a healthy baby or even conception. One study showed that antioxidants in your diet can increase male fertility by fourfold. That’s 400%. And in medicine, when we see a 20% change, we think that’s a lot like will Govi reduces heart disease by 20%. I think it’s kind of irrelevant, honestly, this is 400% and it can also increase the chance of a successful pregnancy, having antioxidants by up to five times. And there’s a lot of ways to help combat oxidative stress using diet and antioxidants. This also has positive effects on sperm count. As I mentioned, fruit’s great, but you want to stay away from the pesticide containing ones. You can use the environmental working group Dirty dozen list. We’ll put the link in that in the show notes. But you want organic apples, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, cranberries, dragon fruit, kiwi, all these other foods.
You want fat fruits, right? Fat fruits. What is fruit? Fats? Fruit fats or fat fruits. Avocado, coconut, great veggies, non-starchy veggies, although you can have sweet potatoes and things are fine. Leafy greens, spinach, kale, have a lot of folate. Vitamin K, red bell peppers, asparagus, mushrooms, dark chocolate’s, great for iron and polyphenols. Yep, dark chocolate’s. Okay, just make sure you eat not too much of it. Also, the other thing you want to do is support your microbiome. The mother’s microbiome plays a huge role in the health of the baby. So you do that through prebiotic fibers, fiber rich foods, fermented foods. We talk a lot about probiotic and probiotic fibers. I’ve done many podcasts about this and also have many links and articles. We’ll put in the show notes, but you can have sauerkraut. Yogurt from goat and sheep, keefer, kimchi, nato, Tempe, all great fermented foods, antioxidants, all the carotinoids, which are important for babies as well.
These are in all the yellow, orange, vegetables and fruits. Vitamin C is important. All support reproductive health. In animal studies, the carotinoids actually from these yellow orangey vegetables, they enhance ovarian function, they improve ovulation, they help make progesterone, which is called the progestational hormone. That’s why it’s called progesterone. Helps progesterone synthesis. It helps the embryo develop in females. Really important. So these are all things you can do. And what are those foods? Cantaloupe, orange, bell pepper, sweet potatoes, yams, carrots, pumpkin, all yummy to eat. Also, nuts and seeds are important and they’re really great for fertility because they have high amounts of Omega-3 to omega six. They’re low in saturated fat. They have a low glycemic index or low. They have high monounsaturated fats and a high amounts of fiber, vitamins, minerals, bioactive compounds, protein. In fact, a 2020 study found that men who ate 60 grams about two servings, maybe two handfuls of mixed nuts a day without changing any other aspect of their diet, their bad processed, sad diet for 14 weeks had beneficial.
DNA methylation changes, better sperm count, sperm size, sperm motility and viability of their sperm. This was from the journal andrology. Now think about that. Just eating two handfuls of nuts, even in the context of a crappy diet, creates beneficial changes in your epigenic programming and all of your sperm characteristics. That’s pretty amazing. Also, there are a good source of vitamin E, which is important, that protects sperm membranes against free radicals and oxidative stress. Whole grains and legumes, if you can tolerate them, are great sources of fiber. Prebiotic fiber, they help the gut microbiome and they feed the good bugs. Gluten-free grains can be fine. I like black rice, red rice, wild rice, taf, amrith, buckwheat. My favorite is Himalayan tart buckwheat sprouted powder. It’s so yummy and it’s full of lots of anti-inflammatory antioxidants. Also quinoa, millet’s, a little high-glycemic, but you can have that.
Legumes are good. Lupini beans, white beans, lentils, peas, black eyed peas, mung beans, non GMO soy, you can have edamame, tofu, Tempe. Also, herbs and spices are great. They help balance your blood sugar. They help with all the antioxidants in them. They can help regulate inflammation. So you want to prioritize good quality protein, healthy fats, lots of fiber, lots of antioxidants at every meal. You want to avoid ultra processed foods, start sugar. You want to make sure you eat in the right way too. It’s not only what you eat, it’s when you eat, how you eat and so forth. So we call it food stacking. Start the day with protein and fat for breakfast. It can be eggs, it can be protein, shake, lots of options. I sometimes have fish for breakfast like tippers. You can have that and you get their omega threes and all the goodies.
You want to avoid sugar and carbs for breakfast. It’s pretty much what the American diet is, right? Cereal, pancakes, muffins, bagels, sugar sweetened coffee, teas, I mean it’s just basically what we all eat. It’s dangerous. If you’re going to eat any carbs, you can put for example blueberries or strawberries in your smoothie. That’s fine, but you want to make sure there’s protein and fat that prevents the glucose spike. You also want to eat veggies, fat and protein before carb. So having bread at the beginning of a meal when you go to a restaurant, worst idea, start with fat and protein and veggies and then if you want a little dessert, you can have that. Why? Because it slows the absorption of sugar in the gut. It prevents the spike in insulin and prevents the whole cascade that happens as a result. Also, exercise underrated. Just walk after eating.
When you walk after eating, it creates a sink for all the glucose and it drains out of your blood and goes into your muscles and stored it used properly. Resistance training also really important because building muscle helps glucose absorption over time and helps improves insulin sensitivity. You can track your sugar if you want, and you can use glucose monitor and see how it impacts your sugar levels. You can try levels on an investor and advisor levels Link slash hyman I think it is. We’ll put a link in the show notes, but you can learn more about it. Also, I want to talk about environmental toxins. Why? Because they’re everywhere and there’s things we can do to reduce our exposure, but essentially they’re ubiquitous. Let’s talk about some of the bad ones. BPA is used in the production of plastics. That’s bisphenol a epoxy resins, and it’s a hugely endocrine disrupting chemical.
A study showed high levels of microplastics in every single sample of placental tissue. So our kids are going to be exposed to this. We just want to reduce the amount and we want to help our bodies detoxify. Studies show that prenatal exposure to BPA is linked to poor methylation, which is part of the epigenome programming that leads to obesity and increases the risk of obesity in children. It also in adults, it also harms fertility not only in women but in men. So if you get exposure to BPA from plastics, credit card receipts, ATM receipts, parking tickets, I mean it’s is hard to avoid it, but you can if you have exposure for men, it inhibits sperm motility by decreasing the level of energy in the sperm cells where are call A TP, it binds to estrogen receptors. It affects gene expression and has epigenetic impact.
And these impacts may be transgenerational. We know that these can kind of cross generations as I mentioned. It also binds to other hormone regulators like sex hormone binding globulin. It may increase testosterone that can affect fertility. It damages female reproductive organs. It causes follicle loss. This is kind of a bummer, right? But it is out there. We have to deal with it. But BPA definitely affects follicle loss. It has embryo implantation, impairs the reproductive cycle. So you got to watch out for it. Now what’s happening, as we’ve sort of started reducing BPA and things, they’ve added a new chemical. So basically tweak it a little bit, change it, and then throw it back in the system and then wait until we find out it’s bad. And then people cry out about it and try to deal with it. But it’s bad. I mean it, it’s just bad news.
There’s another chemical that we want to watch out for related. It’s called bisphenol S or BPS. And it also is an issue. It’s found everywhere. People who had exposure to BPS because it was BPA, it was even worse and there was a 250 times higher risk of exposure because of the absorption for an equal dose. So the same dose with BPA and BPS, the BPS levels get two 50 times higher for an equal dose of BPA in animal studies. That’s scary. So that means that replacing BPA with BPS will likely lead to an increased level of exposure. So you really want to deal with this. What can you do? Don’t store things in plastic. Don’t buy things in plastic. These leach into the food use containers that are glass or metal or whatever. Drink from glass cups, not plastic cups. Don’t drink from plastic bottles.
Don’t heat food or drinks in plastic containers. Avoid BPA lined coffee cups. Take your mug to the coffee shop instead of using their BPA line mugs. Avoid plastic tea bags, which are everywhere. Skip the receipt receipts from when you go shopping from credit card receipts, the tickets you get at a parking garage. All these things have when you get your gas at the gas tank. All these things have BPA on them, don’t touch ’em. Phthalates also are everywhere. They’re in children’s toys, in vinyl personal care products and they’re banned in Europe. But when you have high levels of phthalates, and we can test this in people, there’s impaired sperm, DNA damage and lowered testosterone. Not good. A new study from the University of Washington School of Medicine found that pregnant women who consumed ultra processed food, which is 60 plus percent of our diet, run a higher risk of phthalate exposure from food packaging.
So don’t eat packaged food. I’ve been saying that forever. And in the thousand pregnant women in this study, about 10 to 60% of their diets came from ultra processed food. And for every 10% of their diet, there was ultra processed food. There was a 13% higher concentration of phthalates, which transfers into the bloodstream through the placenta into the fetal bloodstream and creates a cascade of inflammation, oxidative stress. So it’s just bad news. There’s also a link between T exposure during pregnancy and increased risk of low birth weight, preterm labor, and even mental health issues like autism. A DHD. And this is just from S. Where else do you get these things? Fragrances, candles, plugin, scent, things people put in their cars in the bathroom. Don’t do that. Perfume can sometimes have it. Deodorizers, deodorant, lotions. You want to opt out of all these typical skincare and other products and use products that have low levels of toxins.
And I’m on the board of the environmental working group. We’ll put a link. It’s ewg.org. They have a great database called skindeep. You can put your care products in there, see what’s in there. Find ones that are healthier. Other toxins to avoid are important. Parabens, they’re in sunblock and creams, aluminum deodorant, trick, lacent and skincare products. These are all based. So just go to ewg.org, go to skindeep database and you can put in your products and see what’s good, what’s bad, and find them. Okay, what else? Well, PFAS. These are forever chemicals. PFAS exposure maybe associated with lower fertility in women. A case control population study found that there was a five 10% reduction in fertility for every quartile, for every little increase in exposure for pregnancy. So the higher the levels, the lower chance you have of getting pregnant. Now, where do you find these pfas is?
Well in tap water. So filter your water. Large fish, so don’t eat them. Food, packaging, air pollution, particulate matter. That’s 2.5 like mold, dust, bores, allergens, pet dander, all of it’s sort of in there. Indoor air pollution, burning candles with scents and stuff. Incense, air fresheners. Get rid of all, avoid also toxic household products that you can use as a great, again database on EWG, on how to find the healthiest household cleaning products so you don’t have to actually use crap. There’s ones you can use that are healthy. All these things are linked to autism, A, d, D. So make sure you have an air filter. Get rid of the toxic crap in your house. Eat organic. It’s pretty straightforward. Avoid heavy metals. Lead, arsenic, mercury, all these impaired female reproductive health. They create epigenetic changes. They lead to autism. A, DD, where do you get these?
Well tap water, large fish. So get a water filter and avoid large mercury fish. And again, we’ll put the links of how you can know which fish are high or lone. Mercury in the show notes. So I know it’s a little depressing, but it’s important to know because knowledge is power. And when you know these things, you can avoid these toxins. You can improve your diet, you can optimize a chance of having a healthy conception and a healthy baby. And that’s really important. What else? Glyphosate, we mentioned a little bit earlier. Pesticides in animal studies. This is kind of scary study. I saw these kind of freaked me out a little bit, but it’s true. Which is glyphosate, which is everywhere, was shown to promote the epigenetic changes across generations. So it led to all sorts of diseases in not only the subsequent generation, right?
But even the great grand offspring. Three generations down in animal studies. This was in a paper in epigenetics journal. So eat organic whenever possible, at least the dirty dozen, which is the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Now EMFs, what about EMFs? A lot of controversy about that. But there is data about this and we’ll link to this in this show notes. This is not something I’m making up or conspiracy theory, but radio frequency from EMFs, electromagnetic frequencies from microwaves, laptops, wifi cell phones may have negative effects on testicles or testes and may affect sperm count shape of the sperm, the motility, how fast it swims, and DNA damage. And this is from a journal called reproductive biology and endocrinology, and it’s kind of scary there. There’s an association between high frequency of smartphone use, for example, more than 20 times a day and lower sperm concentrations and total sperm counts.
So keep your phone away from your body, don’t put it in your pocket. Put on airplane mode when it’s in your body and use speakerphone and just be careful just from the journal Fertility and sterility. What about tobacco marijuana? Well, research shows that a man’s exposure to nicotine and THC can change in a bad way. DNA methylation in sperm or even certain genes. Seven genes that play a role in neurodevelopment which are associated with autism. So this is kind of weird, if you smoke pot or if you smoke cigarettes, you may have an increased risk of having a child with autism. And we’re seeing again, all these things happening. If you stop all this stuff, you’re okay, right? Sperm production increases and over two months you get back to normal. What about exercise? Obviously it’s good for everything, including fertility. So it helps you balance your hormones, it helps blood sugar control insulin, blood flow, lowers oxidative stress, all important for preparing yourself to have a healthy pregnancy.
Sweating really important. So saunas not when you’re pregnant, but before saunas. Sweating from exercise helps reduce metals in your body. Like cadmium lead, mercury helps excrete BPA from two saunas. Men, you want to avoid excess heat from saunas in a hot bath when trying to conceive because hot temperatures can lower sperm count. So you got to be careful. Also being sedentary and inactive means you have a low fat-free lean mass, meaning low muscle, and you have higher fat mass meaning more fat. And when that’s true, you have trouble with fertility and trouble conceiving. So do a combo package, aerobic exercise strength, high intensity interval training. Start with you can manage work your way up. Really important stress. What about stress? Well stress can also disrupt reproductive hormones that are tied to fertility and to pregnancy. It activates something called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that leads to higher cortisol or the stress hormone.
And when you activate the stress response, it affects not only the HPA axis, but something called the HPG axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis, which regulates sex hormones and reproductive hormones, both for men and women. When you have high levels of stress, it can inhibit the release of something called gonadotropin releasing hormone or GnRH. And that signals the pituitary from your hypothalamus to produce FSH and lh, which are hormones that actually stimulate the ovaries and the testicles to do their thing, to get eggs ready to make more sperm and so forth. And when you have this inhibition of this signal from your brain because of stress, it can delay or prevent ovulation and it can lead to irregular cycles and even loss of your menstrual cycle. So researchers actually did study on this. They calculated mean stress levels during each phase of the menstrual cycle.
And the woman reported feeling more stressed than other women during the atory window, meaning when they’re ovulating they were 45% less likely to conceive. Think about that. If you’re stressed during the time you’re likely to get pregnant, you’re 45% less likely to conceive. This is from the Annals of Epidemiology. So here’s what you can do also to offset the stress. We’ve talked about this a lot in many podcasts. We have a lot of podcasts on this. We’ll link to this. Things like meditation, movement, yoga, walking nature, exposure, all increase endorphins and relaxation, gratitude practices and journaling. Breath work, avoiding long travel, which interrupts your dislocating rhythms and increases stress hormones. Get rid of sugary foods all in spike. Cortisol. Prioritize self-care, which helps reduce stress on your nervous system. Massage, journaling, taking a bath, my favorite, taking a walk, playing with friends, hanging out, just being in a less stressed state and it’s something you have to work at.
It’s kind of weird to think about active relaxation, but you kind of actively have to relax. Maybe you need therapy. Whatever it is, get it. Sleep. Also important. If you don’t sleep, it screws up your hormones, your whole circadian rhythms and stresses your body. So make sure you have a set bedtime. Try to get bed before 11. And when you have more of these stress responses from lack of sleep, you have higher cortisol, insulin resistance, and a lot of the things you can do to optimize your sleep. We have a sleep master class will link to it, but you can keep your room dark, light blocking curtains or just keep a sleep mask. I travel with that all the time. Don’t use your screens before bed an hour or two. They overstimulate your pineal gland and change your circadian rhythms and sleep. Also, don’t eat two hours before bed.
Two or three. Give your body time to digest. Avoid snacks high in sugar, carbs or caffeine because that’ll increase cortisol. Prevent your sleeping. Try to get about 78 9 hours a night when you have long-term sleep disruption. It actually affects things directly in terms of reproductive cycles. Something called luteinizing hormone. This is a hormone that triggers ovulation, so it’s going to screw up ovulation if you don’t sleep. Basically get sunlight first thing in the morning, helps reset your circadian rhythms. Okay, so you’ve done all these things, you’ve eaten better. You’re exercise, you’re reducing stress, you’re sleeping, you’re improving your diet, you’re avoiding toxins, you’ve done all these stuff. What else do you need to do? Well, supplements. You need supplements because we’re all deficient and it’s really important not to start ’em when you find out you’re pregnant, but to start ’em before you’re pregnant, at least three to six months before conception.
Now I’m going to reference a prenatal vitamin I love called wena. It’s for men and women. There’s two different versions. One for men and women and women. It’s a great company. I’m going to advise that company and it’s a really clean product with all the right nutrients, but you want the right form of folate, methylfolate, not folic acid. And by the way, about 35 to 40% of the population has a mutation in this particular gene called MTH FFR that regulates the abilities processing of folate and folic acid. So it’s really important. You need to have the right form. You also need other B vitamins that are methylated like B12, high quality omega threes. Probiotics really important, can prevent a lot of allergic and inflammatory issues of the kid, vitamin D three, iron and acetol. So all these things are in the right prenatal vitamins. We needle has all these essential vitamins for women and men.
As I mentioned, I’m an advisor of the company. You want to know about conflicts of interest, but I only endorse companies that I think are really doing good stuff out there and providing good products. Although support may be helpful, but I would check with your practitioner. Various herbs can be helpful. You can also track your cycle, right? Real important. There’s various tracking apps. Natural cycles is a good one. That’s FDA cleared. You can track your cycle by taking your temperature every morning. It syncs with your R ring if you have one. And there are other apps like flow and Clue, you can check them out. What about men? Do men need something? Yes, they do. They need full spectrum multivitamin and mineral and vitamin D and fish oil and folate. B12, antioxidant zinc, coq 10 particularly for men and acetylcysteine, which helps detoxify things. It increases glutathione.
And when you do all this, what happens for men? It increases sperm quality, reduces oxidative stress, which damages sperm. It helps sperm volume, so more sperm motility, better swimmers, and also viscosity in fer men, which basically helps the sperm swim. Also, things that can help our carnitine and maca, which improve sperm function and health. Now we needle has all these and lots more. We’re going to put a link in the show notes for more information about wena for women and men. And so we just covered a lot. I know there’s a lot of information, but this is a topic that doesn’t get covered very often. It’s a topic that affects the future health of our children and our society. It’s massively consequential. Something that doesn’t get talked about much. And this is really why we do these podcasts to help you understand the science behind some of the practices that can really uplevel your health and optimize your wellbeing, and even protect your children.
And this is all through the lens of functional medicine. How do we think about not only preventing disease, not only treating disease, but optimizing the environment that your body has? And this is obviously not just going to help the baby. This is going to help you improve your health. So as we conclude today’s episode, this health bite, it’s really important to point out that infertility and child health problems are exploding. Now, many of these issues and problems can be prevented by good preconception practices. So reproductive health is a vital aspect of our overall health, and it’s got to be a shared journey. It’s not just all on the woman. So embracing a functional medicine approach allows us to explore the root causes and work towards holistic solutions that are not just good for conception, but also having a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. So I encourage everyone to approach this preconception window proactively.
And also I encourage you to consult with healthcare who understand these issues and also check out function health because you can get these lab tests and find out what’s going on with your body. Again, everything for this podcast is in the show notes, a lot of information I downloaded. You can read the transcript, you can look at the show notes, you can see the links, you can get the references. All the things I’ve talked about are there. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. We’d love to hear your comments and your questions. And please leave us a rating and review and of course, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel at Dr.
Mark Hyman. I’m always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Marks Picks [email protected] slash marks picks. I promise I’ll only email you once a week on Fridays, and I’ll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey, and I hope they’ll help you too. Again, that’s dr hyman.com/marks picks. Thank you again and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.
This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorse the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. Now, if you’re looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lennox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultra wellness center.com. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifm.org and search. Find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who is a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public and keeping with that theme, I’d like to express gratitude to the sponsors that made today’s podcast possible.
