Fertility challenges are increasingly linked to lifestyle and environmental factors that go far beyond reproductive organs. Emerging science reveals that metabolic health, inflammation, diet, and exposure to environmental toxins all play a profound role in hormonal balance, egg and sperm quality, and even early embryo development. Key drivers of dysfunction—such as ultra-processed food, insulin resistance, gut imbalances, and mitochondrial damage—are rarely addressed in conventional fertility care, despite their deep impact. Paying attention to these overlooked root causes offers not only a powerful path to improving fertility but also the foundation for lifelong health in both parents and their future children. In this episode, I discuss, along with Kelly LeVeque, what we can do to improve our fertility, which ultimately impacts the future health of our children. Kelly LeVeque is a holistic nutritionist, celebrity health coach, the best-selling author of Body Love and Body Love Every Day, and most importantly, mom of three little boys. Kelly LeVeque is passionate about the science of human nutrition and is always guided by a practical and optimistic approach to wellness. Kelly helps clients improve their health, achieve goals, and develop sustainable habits to live a healthy and balanced life. Kelly is a regular contributor to numerous health, wellness, and lifestyle publications. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Fertility in Crisis: Exploring the Toxic Threats to Fertility and the Rise in Infertility The Fertility Crisis: Why it’s Happening and How to Fix it Boost Fertility Naturally: Top Foods to Eat
Chapter 1: What role does inflammation play in fertility?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. But if you have omega-3s at adequate levels, it lowers inflammation, it lowers reproductive system inflammation, and it supports hormone function.
Now, if you're a guy and you have omega-3s in your diet or from supplements, it affects sperm quality, sperm count, sperm motility, the amount of semen you make, your testosterone levels, and even the rates of in vitro fertilization. So just taking fish oil and reading a lot of sardines can have all these benefits. Are you feeling stressed, sluggish, or struggling with sleep?
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Try it now with an exclusive discount. Go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10. Your body will thank you. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there is simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you.
If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive.
And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. 93.2% of Americans have some level of metabolic dysfunction, meaning they were on somewhere in the spectrum from insulin resistance to prediabetes to type 2 diabetes.
And this is the thing that screws up both men and women's fertility. Now, sex hormones are regulated by our diet. You may have known that, but sex hormones are directly regulated by what you eat. And pretty much everything is regulated by what you eat if you don't know by now listening to me. Ultra processed foods and sugar and starch are causing massive shifts in our sex hormones.
And that's driving the infertility crisis. Our SAD diet or standard American diet is 60% or more from ultra processed foods. The average American consumes anywhere you look at it from 113 to 150 pounds of sugar and about the same amount of flour every year per person. That's almost a pound a day of sugar and flour per person. And that is not something we're used to eating.
That's a pharmacologic dose of sugar that's causing dramatic hormonal shifts in our biology. Spiking sugar leads to high insulin levels. That leads to insulin resistance. And then we get blood sugar and hormone imbalances as a result. So what happens? What is the biology here for women? Let's talk about it. It's a little bit different for men and women.
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Chapter 2: How can nutrition improve sperm and egg quality?
hair loss on your head, hair growth on your face, acne, lack of ovulation, as we mentioned. And so this is really not a fun problem to have for women, but it's often solvable by addressing the root causes of diet and lifestyle. Endometriosis is another factor we talked about that can be driven, but not necessarily by the high sugar diet.
Although there's some evidence that this is an autoimmune disease, which can be caused by leaky gut and other drivers of inflammation caused by our diet. Now, what happens with men when they have too much starch and sugar? Well, they get insulin resistance and that leads to the opposite. It leads to low testosterone levels in men.
That leads to damage to their blood vessels because of the insulin resistance that causes inflammation and blood vessels are needed to have good erections so they get erectile dysfunction. And it also, because of low testosterone, affects sperm quality.
And what's even worse, when they gain body fat as a result of insulin resistance, they make more estrogen because there's an enzyme in your fat tissue called aromatase that converts testosterone to estrogen. So that's really bad. They get higher body fat, they lose the hair on their bodies, and they have low sex drive, low sex function, low fertility, low sperm count, and the list goes on.
So when you have this higher body fat, you get all these problems, and that leads to more inflammation. And then more inflammation for men and women leads to more infertility, more endometriosis, more PCOS, worse pregnancy outcomes. Even if you're using IVF or advanced fertility treatments, ovulation problems, as I mentioned, you get poor quality of eggs and sperm.
So the very seed of a new life is being damaged by your diet. And we're going to talk about that. This can also lead to miscarriages. Inflammation can lead to that and also birth defects. So all around our toxic diet, lifestyle and environmental toxins are driving so much of these problems. As I mentioned, inflammation is a big driver in fertility. So what's causing inflammation?
Of course, inflammation, as you know, listening to me forever, driving almost every known chronic disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, autoimmune diseases, the list goes on, depression. And it's not just driving those things, it's driving fertility issues, right? So it's our... processed SAD diet. It's excess sugar.
It's the insulin resistance that results, the blood sugar imbalances, the chronic diseases that result, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and damage to our gut microbiome. We're going to talk about how the gut microbiome plays a big role in hormones and fertility, at least the leaky gut. Also, our sea of environmental toxins is not good for our hormones.
The sea of industrial chemicals and pollutants, sometimes latent infections can cause inflammation, but those are the main causes. And then we also see damage to our mitochondria because anything that causes inflammation will affect our energy production. And energy production is essential for every factor of life, including healthy sperm and eggs.
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Chapter 3: What are the effects of ultra-processed foods on fertility?
Chapter 4: How does magnesium affect reproductive health?
So a lot of things will mess up your gut microbiome. Taking the pill, antibiotics, stress, certain acid blocking drugs, which you take all the time. Obviously alcohol and other things are not good for fertility too. Obviously you should probably not smoke. You shouldn't have too much pot. All those things are bad for you. Certain medications can be problematic, obviously.
Birth control pills, antidepressants, antipsychotics, obviously anabolic steroids. If you're taking testosterone as a guy, it's gonna decrease your sperm production. Calcium channel blockers, because we need different pathways in our biochemistry to make things work. So these are blood pressure pills, but they can affect sperm motility. Antibiotics can interfere with menstrual cycles.
All this stuff is just to say that there's a lot of factors that we have control over that affect our fertility that are not being addressed from inflammation to metabolic health, to mitochondrial function, to dysbiosis, to the medications we're taking, and all those things can be addressed. So let's talk a little bit more about where conventional medicine just misses the mark. No pun intended.
Why does it miss the mark? Well, it doesn't get to the root causes of the hormone imbalances and other factors that cause this decline in fertility. It doesn't address diet, inflammation, mitochondrial health, dysbiosis, environmental toxins, stress, autoimmunity. You know, and they give you like, you know, general advice. Okay, lose weight, eat more veggies. It's not quite personalized.
It doesn't really measure what needs to be measured to understand what's going on in your biology. You know, you look at farmers, they're testing the soil. They want to know what nutrients are in there, what the levels of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus. They're so deep in understanding soil health as a way to predict what's going to be happen to the plants that they're growing in there.
How do we not test for what's going on in a woman or a man to find out whether or not the sperm and egg are going to be healthy or whether the baby's going to be healthy, right? They don't check inflammation levels. They don't check nutrient levels. They don't check toxin levels.
So we really need to do proper testing for fertility, looking at all sorts of things from metabolic health to hormonal health and nutrient status to toxin levels, looking at something called AMH, which we'll talk about for women, which measures the quality of their their eggs. So we kind of have to look for what's really going on and not just ignore the symptoms, right?
We need to look at how is a woman doing? Does she have hormonal imbalance clues, right? Does she have painful periods? Does she have PMS? Does she have weight gain, acne? Is she on the pill? You know, what's going on that we need to address that can help to regulate hormones better? So, you know, when women have hormonal issues, they don't really address in conventional medicine the root causes.
They just kind of treat you with hormones, right? They give you the birth control pill. So the first sign of hormonal balance is there's painful periods, PMS, heavy bleeding, clotting, acne, PCOS, boom, you get the pill. That does not get to the root cause. It doesn't address how we regulate our hormones. It doesn't actually... help us support our natural cycle.
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