Dr. Lucky Sekhon

And sometimes less is more when it comes to things like that.

Obviously, at baseline, everyone should be on a prenatal vitamin if they're trying to conceive, and they really should contain folic acid.

And that's not so much about improving your fertility.

It's about setting you up for the healthiest pregnancy possible and lowering your risk of something called spina bifida, a neural tube defect, a type of birth defect.

Now, aside from that, aside from telling someone an antioxidant-rich diet is going to potentially have some improvement in the overall environment where the eggs are being matured, right, you can think of things like CoQ10 as like a low-lift intervention, and it's not really associated with side effects or major adverse outcomes or effects in the studies that have been done.

And there's actually quite a lot of literature on the animal model and in human studies

that show a trend towards improving outcomes, whether you're talking pregnancy rates without treatment or even the yield of eggs or the quality of the embryos from IVF cycles.

So the data is not all there as I would like it to be, but it's enough that that's one that I'm like, you know, you can add that to CART, and I think that that's fine.

But I think there's a lot of other supplements that have

overreaching claims.

Like, for example, DHEA is a big one.

And it's confusing to a lot of patients because DHEA is like an androgen.

It's like a testosterone-like compound.

And there was a lot of data that came out at one time in really small, not so well-designed studies, but it really took off.

And it was this narrative of, as we age, our DHEA levels drop.

And so by supplementing, we're giving our body something we're lacking.

And that might be the secret behind

improving egg quality as we get older.

And I've seen it cause a lot of issues.

I've seen people with elevated liver enzymes.