Dr. Lucky Sekhon

think about it it's easy to rack that up if you have a bunch of events especially around the holidays so totally that's a guide and i would say a mediterranean style diet it's rich in antioxidants you know it's like lean protein healthy sources of fat like avocado nuts seeds eating the rainbow like this is all common sense but it's important to hear from a fertility doctor that we see that make a meaningful difference really you see diet make a meaningful difference yes and men and women fertility

yeah it's not to say that if you're suffering with infertility it's because you're not eating healthy no but i have seen patients longitudinally say okay i i have made an effort to do xyz and we have seen better outcomes and that sounds really anecdotal so i will say there's lots of data and studies looking at this looking at dietary patterns and outcomes whether you're trying on your own and you're just getting started out versus going through treatment wow

I'm so glad you brought that up because that often sounds like a myth, but sperm are really sensitive to extreme temperature, especially heat.

So, you know, being in a hot tub once on vacation, it's no big deal.

Men are always making you sperm and it's not going to kill off all your sperm.

Right.

But if you're one of those people that's like, I'm doing a cold plunge and then a hot tub and I'm doing that every morning, I'm going to spend like 30 minutes in this extreme heat and

And think about how the male body is built, right?

The scrotum, going back to that like Seinfeld episode shrinkage, right?

It is actually, there's a muscle that helps bring it closer to your body if you need heat and further from your body if you need to cool down because there's an optimal temperature for sperm production.

And if you're surrounded by boiling hot water, you're doing extreme hot yoga or saunas for hours at a time, you don't have enough of an ability to regulate your temperature, at least where the sperm is being produced.

So it can actually, in a chronic way, negatively impact fertility.

But the good news is it's not a permanent effect because you're always making new sperm.

So like you said, there's ways to kind of counteract that.

And I usually ask both partners about their lifestyle at length.

But then I always say, like, let's do the semen analysis and, you know, let's see if there's any indicator or red flag.

And if there is, then we can kind of work backwards to think, OK, how can we be optimizing what you're doing?

Another example, which is often thought of as a myth, and maybe it's not as extreme as people make it out to be, but wearing really, really tight underwear.

And it's the same thing.

It's counteracting your natural mechanism to cool the area where sperm is being produced.