Dr. Mark Hyman

It's just impossible to avoid this.

We live in a toxic stew.

Now, the other thing about toxins you should know is that they're highly hormonally active.

pesticides, petrochemical toxins.

I read a book about this when I was starting to learn about functional medicine 30 years ago called Our Stolen Future by Theo Colmer.

And in this book, she talks about basically our stolen future, how our offspring are being affected by these environmental toxins.

And she talked about animal models and all these hermaphrodites that were being born and now alligators and frogs and problems with fertility across the whole animal population.

It's a real issue, and they are highly effective in binding to hormonal receptors, particularly estrogens.

They call them xenoestrogens or foreign estrogens.

They're endocrine disruptors.

They disrupt your hormonal system.

Also, microbiome plays a big role in hormone function, and we've taken so many antibiotics.

We've had such a crappy diet.

Our microbiome is actually a piece of shit.

If you, excuse my French, it's bad.

It just needs, we need to really get our microbiomes healthy because that can play a big role in our health.

And of course, stress.

And there's actually another book I read many years ago about stress and infertility.

And there was a whole program at Harvard where they taught people to meditate who were having infertility and they were getting pregnant at as high or higher rates than IVF treatment.

So stress plays a big role.