The Undiscussed Role Of Men In Fertility
Episode 249
In this episode of Integrative You Radio, we explore the often overlooked role men play in fertility. While fertility discussions usually focus on women, male health factors like hormonal imbalances, infections, and environmental toxins can significantly impact fertility. We also discuss how poor blood flow, age, and lifestyle contribute to male infertility, urging couples to address both partners' health when trying to conceive. This episode challenges the assumption that fertility issues are primarily female-related and highlights the importance of a holistic approach to conception. Tune in to learn how addressing men's health can improve fertility outcomes and lead to healthier pregnancies and babies. What you’ll learn: Male Fertility Matters: Men’s health plays a crucial role in fertility, with factors like hormonal imbalances, infections, and environmental toxins potentially affecting sperm quality and fertility outcomes. Health Issues Go Undiagnosed: Many men have silent health issues, such as undiagnosed prostate infections or hormonal imbalances, that can impact fertility without showing clear symptoms. Holistic Approach to Conception: A successful fertility journey involves both partners addressing their health, including lifestyle factors, blood flow, and toxins, to improve natural conception chances and support a healthy pregnancy. Quotes: "This isn't a one sided journey, this is, you know, there's two to tango here, so this is a conversation that includes your partner."- Dr. Nicole "There are so many men that are walking around with silent infections in their urinary system, ejaculatory duct, prostate because they're all connected." - Dr. Nicole Find Integrative You Radio On: Website Youtube Apple Spotify Curious about Integrative You? Dive into Integrative You Radio with Dr. Nicole Rivera, where she explores the intersections of holistic health, personal growth, and living in alignment with your core values. Each episode provides insights and practical
Topics: fertility, health, male, unknown, integrative, role, factors, infections
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## The Undiscussed Role Of Men In Fertility
- Male health is a critical component of fertility, with various factors directly impacting sperm quality and the ability to conceive.
- Many men may have undiagnosed health issues, such as silent infections or hormonal imbalances, that negatively influence fertility without obvious symptoms.
- A truly holistic approach to conception requires both partners to actively address their health, including lifestyle, environmental factors, and underlying medical conditions.
- Improving male fertility can lead to not only a greater chance of conception but also contribute to healthier pregnancies and offspring.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs, so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up, because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio.
**Unknown:** So this is a fun one today. Um, this was actually by special request. There were, uh, people that were asking me to speak about fertility from the perspective, the role of the male. And I thought that this is actually a very valuable topic because most of the time when I've worked with, um...
**Unknown:** I wanna say when I've worked with couples in their fertility journey, it really hasn't been the couple, it's been the woman. And, you know, the woman with concerns about her fertility, the woman's concerns about her reproductive health and her egg health, et cetera. And I'm the one that says, "This isn't a, a one-sided journey. Th- this is...
**Unknown:** You know, there's two to tango here. So this is a conversation that includes your partner." You know, this is... Infertility doesn't just lie in the woman, it lies in the woman or the male, or both. And this is something that I feel like...
**Unknown:** I feel like it's not talked about, I feel like it's not acknowledged. And, and if anything, women will go through IVF and IUI, they'll go through rounds and rounds of fertility treatment before anyone even says, "Hey, maybe we should check your partner, spouse, husband." And I just think that that's fucking crazy because when you get into the science, there's actually more issues with paternal age and its influence on the health of the embryo, the pregnancy, and the baby. So AKA, the older the male, the more room for complications in the outcome of the baby. And so, you know...
**Unknown:** And I, and I fucking find it hilarious when they call women that are pregnant, I think it's, what is it? Over the age of 33, they call it a geriatric pregnancy. Like, I'm sorry, go fuck yourself. Like, I'm just gonna say that.
**Unknown:** Like, I'm 40 right now, or I'm almost 40, 39, and I'm pregnant. I am healthier now than I was ever in my 20s. Let alone the wisdom and the, the mental wellbeing that I have, in addition to the physical wellbeing. I think it's insane that we are condemning women that are older and almost implanting in their brain that they're gonna need some type of help from conventional medicine.
**Unknown:** Like, that is such utter bullshit, and that's... If anything, that's defying science. That's defying an- any basic understanding of the fucking human body. Don't even get me started.
**Unknown:** You can clearly tell I'm heated right now. But the point is, is that fertility or no fertility, men are walking around with silent issues. And what I find so interesting is that a lot of men, and it's happening younger and younger. You know, uh, let's call it five years ago, 10 years ago, men were getting diagnosed with prostate issues, you know, above the age of 50, above the age of 55.
**Unknown:** And most men that you talk to above that age are on some type of prostate watch or prostate medication. It, it's... They're also on blood pressure medication, and they're on cholesterol medication. That is the trifecta.
**Unknown:** I've done a whole separate podcast about that. So do we really think that men just hit 50 and the problem started? No. They were...
**Unknown:** All of those problems existed, and they just finally got bad enough in the labs, or they never got labs until they were, you know, "Oh, I'm getting old now." 'Cause a lot of men will tend to just ignore things or normalize things that they have going on, or just not even talk about it. And then they hit this point, you know, in their late 40s, 50s, they're like, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's like some little voice that comes and they're like, "Oh, you're getting fucking old, you should probably get some testing done." And then it's inevitable, "Oh, you need blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and you need Flomax for your prostate and urinary flow." It is... Like, I see it all the time.
**Unknown:** And this isn't just clients, because I, I always end up in conversations with people about their health and wellbeing, and it is, it is so, so, so common. So let's backtrack here. Okay. So cholesterol is rooted in a liver issue.
**Unknown:** If you've listened to any other podcasts-Liver, it does a lot of different things, but liver is going to be one of the master controllers of hormones, testosterone included, estrogen included. So a lot of people talk about this with women, that women have estrogen overload, and this could be playing a role in fertility. But guess what? Men can also have estrogen overload when they have taxed out livers.
**Unknown:** If your liver is taxed out, if you know it or you don't, you're gonna have excess estrogen. And so what happens with men is their testosterone goes down, and most of the time they're either going to the doctor and saying, "Test my testosterone," or the doctor is only testing the testosterone and not testing the estrogen. And they're just saying, "Oh, you have low testosterone." Well, why do you have low testosterone? Because there's a variety of reasons, mercury toxicity, aluminum toxicity, or excess estrogen.
**Unknown:** There's other issues, but let's just focus on those. And so if you have excess estrogen, men will have, um, belly fat. They can have, uh, more fat in their pec area. They could almost have like a little bit of a curvy figure, um, in their hips area, um, or they can have a very difficult time with building muscle, and they just end up having more...
**Unknown:** They have a higher BMI. They have higher fat than they do muscle, and that's because of the estrogen overload. And of course, there could be, uh, issues with, uh, erectile dysfunction and things like that. That's usually a combination of things, blood flow included, but di-different topic.
**Unknown:** Okay. So if you have high cholesterol, you have a fucked up liver. It's inevitable. They work together.
**Unknown:** Strong probability you have excess estrogen, which is lowering your testosterone. That alone can be an issue when it comes to fertility, quality of sperm. Then there are so many men that are walking around with silent infections in their urinary system, ejaculatory duct, prostate 'cause they're all connected. If you wanna get on Google and look at the anatomy of a male, the urinary system and the male reproductive system, they're connected, um, the way that it's set up.
**Unknown:** So if you get an infection, uh, in your urinary system, and if it's from the kidneys down or from, you know, the urinary tract, AKA ejaculatory duct from that up, it's gonna affect your prostate. It's going to affect your, your testicles. It's going to eventually affect all those areas. So those systems are completely intertwined, but most men are asymptomatic.
**Unknown:** They don't have symptoms. Like women, when they get infection, bacteria or, or yeast in their vaginal tract or their urinary tract, they have symptoms. They're... They feel burning with urination.
**Unknown:** They feel frequent urination. They have, you know, pain in their bladder. They have weakness in their pelvic bowl. They take an antibiotic.
**Unknown:** They get a yeast infection. They have vaginal issu- itching, irritation. They get an abnormal pap smear. There's a lot more that will give them the signs and signals of like, "Hey, there's something going on here." But most women that are dealing with reoccurring infections are getting it from their partner.
**Unknown:** They're getting it from their partner 'cause their partner doesn't know because what's happening with their partner is that he is having, uh, urinary stream issues. He's having his urine is starting or stopping when he goes. Uh, no big deal. I don't know.
**Unknown:** Could've been some... a fluke. Or he's urinating, and then twenty minutes later he has to urinate again because he didn't feel like he got it all out. Or he's urinating frequently through the day and the night, getting up three times, five times to urinate in the night.
**Unknown:** Those are all signs that there is something going on in the prostate, kidneys, urinary system, and that could easily be an infection. It could be stones. It could be oxalates. It could be calcium.
**Unknown:** It could be a lot of things. But there are so many men that are walking around with infections in their prostate, and it's later down the line that they're being told, "Oh, you have benign, uh, prostatic hypertrophy, AKA an enlargement of your prostate. It's pretty normal, you know, in your forties and your fifties, so yeah, it's probably just an age thing." It's not a fucking age thing. You don't just have that happen for no reason.
**Unknown:** There has to be a reason why it happens. Why is there inflammation in that area? It's because something is in that area that shouldn't be there. And we're talking about infections but, you know, yes, it could be infections.
**Unknown:** It could be, uh, bacteria. It could be a, a silent, uh, sexually transmitted disease from your fucking teens, twenties. Like there are a lot of things that could be in the system that, again, men don't have the typical symptoms. It's not like there's like things oozing out of the tip of their penis.
**Unknown:** Like that's not common, but sometimes they'll, you know, they'll have issues with their urination. They might, um, find that they have pain in, you know, what we would call the bikini line for a female, but that groin area. And if they press in there, they have little, um, they have inflamed lymph nodes. Like those are all things that most men are not in-investigating, you know, and their doctors are not investigating it.
**Unknown:** It's just like, "Oh, well, let me check your prostate because you're old now," which is ridiculous. But if you're getting your prostate checked from a physical exam, most doctors are not running a urine test to say, "Do you have white blood cells? Do you have bacteria? Do you have, you know, something going on that's causing this?" And then in addition to that is I mentioned something about mercury and aluminum earlier.
**Unknown:** Nobody is exempt from heavy metal exposures. We're getting exposed to different types of toxins from tap water, showering in that water, food, pesticide residues, acaricide. Like it is everywhere.That is the other thing that if that gets into your blood, it gets filtered by your kidneys, and your kidneys flush it out via your urinary stream. Another avenue that the prostate is going to get filled up with toxins that are creating issues, and then the longer that goes on, it gets into the lymph nodes around the prostate in the pelvic bowl, and then it can affect your testicles, which is then creating issues with fertility.
**Unknown:** And really the other major factor here is blood flow. So the other drug that I mentioned is men are typically on blood pressure medication. It is so common. And so w- I, I don't know what it is about people thinking, like, blood pressure, heart, and, "Oh, my heart.
**Unknown:** I gotta worry about my heart. I gotta go to a cardiologist." Guess what? Blood, blood flow goes everywhere in your entire body. Like, if your...
**Unknown:** If a tissue doesn't get blood flow, it doesn't get oxygen, and it dies. So you have blood vessels throughout your entire body that are bringing blood, nutrients, and oxygenation to those tissues. So if you have injuries to your low back because you were an athlete, you've broken your tailbone 'cause you were a crazy skier, snowboarder, you have had, uh, you know, you rode horses, like whatever, you did motorbike. You know, most males did crazy shit when they were young.
**Unknown:** If it was a, you know, a, a sport they did often, or it was something they did it as a hobby, or they just did dumb shit and fell and broke bones, et cetera, et cetera. Guess what? If you have any type of musculoskeletal stuff or scar tissue that's affecting your low back pelvic bowl, that's affecting blood flow to your testicles, to your prostate, to your ejaculatory ducts. It's e- and so it's not only just affecting the blood flow to it, but it's also affecting the veins taking toxic blood away from it.
**Unknown:** So if you have blood pressure issues, right off the bat, you're having trouble with blood getting to the distal parts of your body. Because when you look at blood pressure, there's the top number and the bottom number. The top number is an indicator for inflammation in the peripheral arteries, so that means there's issues with inflammation that are constricting the blood vessels, and it's affecting how well blood can travel. The bottom number is an indicator of cardiac output.
**Unknown:** How strong is your heart muscle to pump the blood to push it out? Most people have a high systolic, which is the top number, telling us that there is inflammation in the body. And in reality, especially in the US, just look at men. Once they especially get into, you know, their forties and fifties, like they look inflamed.
**Unknown:** It's... They don't look fat. They look like you could put a pin in them, they're gonna pop. It might be their face.
**Unknown:** It might be their neck, you know. And also, people alway- like women get very frustrated that men can lose weight quick. Men can lose weight quick because, yes, they don't have the hormone orchestration that we do, but you can onl- you don't lose fat quick. You can lose inflammation quick.
**Unknown:** So, you know, if your partner has gone on a, you know, uh, did some trendy diet or did a cleanse or, you know, did a water fast or whatever and lost a bunch of weight, they lost a bunch of inflammation. So that's just reiterating that inflammation is present in their body on, you know, when they're in their normal lifestyle. And if you have inflammation, you're going to have issues with blood flow. And if you have issues to blood flow to the penis and to the testicles, you're going to have fertility issues.
**Unknown:** In addition to this, which some of you may have heard of, is that they're finding a... One, they're finding a lot of pharmaceuticals in tap water, oral contraceptives, you know, 'cause so many women are on birth control, and they're urinating out the metabolites and the byproducts of birth control. Also, most, um, medical facilities, they don't throw drugs out because in case, um, people go through garbage and, and steal the drugs. A lot of it is flushed down toilets, so you're getting the actual drug into the water supply by it getting flushed down toilets.
**Unknown:** You're getting the byproducts from the people taking the drugs. And then they're also finding a chemical compound called atrazine, and atrazine is something that they've actually found will, um, castrate a frog in their studies. Essentially, it'll turn a male frog asexual, so the... now the f- the frog is no longer male or female.
**Unknown:** So what the fuck is that doing to us in the microdoses in tap water? And so at the end of the day, you know, you go to a restaurant, you're drinking tap water. That's what they're giving you unless you're ordering bottled water. Of course, you know, we can't trust bottled water companies.
**Unknown:** Most of that shit's tap water. It, it's... We're getting exposed to contraceptives that are also affecting fertility. So there's a lot of things that need to be considered here, and as women, we need to stop thinking that we're the problem because there is a lot of opportunity for the male to be part of the problem, and there's a strong probability that he doesn't have symptoms, and he's walking aroundNot knowing that he has high blood pressure, not knowing that he has the start of prostate issues, not knowing that he has a boatload of chemicals that are built up in the prostate, not knowing that his urinary system is compromised by heavy metals and different chemical compounds like oral contraceptives.
**Unknown:** These are all things that have to be looked at and considered because they could be playing a huge role. And g- guess what, guys? It ain't fucking cheap to do IVF, and it's fucking brutal for the woman. Like, there are women that...
**Unknown:** It is so hard to recover from pushing all of those hormones into your body. Like, your brain goes haywire because it's like, "What is happening?" It is not a fun process for women. And when women go through that process in order to get pregnant, chances are their pregnancy is rough because the body... The, uh, we manipulated the body to, to create a pregnancy.
**Unknown:** So the pregnancy is not always gonna be healthy. And guess what? The kid's not always healthy. So you fight so fucking hard to have this baby, and then all that beautiful vision or image that you had of having that baby is not what you thought because you're in doctor's offices, because you're, you're dealing with colic and crying, and he won't breastfeed or she won't breastfeed, and there are gut issues, and they're in pain, and they're not developing.
**Unknown:** And, you know, it- it's like the snowball starts going down the mountain, and it really doesn't stop. And now this, you know, what it should be is this beautiful experience, and it's not that. So at the end of the day, this is... We should be avoiding fertility treatment at all fucking costs.
**Unknown:** We really, really should. And we should be getting to the root cause. And the root cause, yes, it might be correlated to what's going on with the woman, but we cannot not look at the male and the health of the male. And it's not your conventional tests.
**Unknown:** This isn't just about looking at the quality of the sperm. This is about looking at all of the things that we talked about today, because all of them are equally as important. So with that, if you are looking to have a deeper dive into the female aspect of fertility, head over to our podcast. Go to the little search bar.
**Unknown:** You will find a different podcast all about that. But please share this with your friends that are struggling with getting pregnant, and share this with them so that the male can understand their role in this. And maybe they resonate with some of the things that we talked about. Maybe they resonate, "Oh my God, my urine has been wacky.
**Unknown:** I do urinate all the time. I do start and stop with my urine. Oh, I did get told that my prostate is enlarged." You know, again, this is just grounds for knowing where to investigate, getting better testing, understanding the big picture so that we can actually create a natural, or conceive naturally and create a very healthy pregnancy, which of course results in a very healthy baby. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio.
**Unknown:** We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments. Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
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