Episode 266
Title: The Undiscussed Role Of Men In Fertility
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
What's up, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. 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 of the, the, 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, uh, I want to 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, uh, a one sided journey, this is, 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 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, 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, and I fucking find it hilarious when they call women that are pregnant.
I think it's what it is to be over the age of 30. 33? They call it a geriatric pregnancy? Like, I'm sorry, go fuck yourself. Like, I'm just gonna say that. 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 mental well being that I have.
In addition to physical well being, I think it's insane that we're condemning women that are older and almost implanting in their brain that they're going to need some type of help from conventional medicine. Like that is such utter bullshit and that's, if anything, that's defying science, that's defying.
And any basic understanding of the fucking human body. Don't even get me started. 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, let's, 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.
And most men that you talk to above that age are on some type of prostate watch or prostate medication. It's, they're also on blood pressure medication and they're on cholesterol medication. That is the trifecta. 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, 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, because 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, they hit this point in their, 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.
And this isn't just clients because I always end up in conversations with people about their health and well being and it is, it is so, so, so common. So let's backtrack here. Okay, so cholesterol is rooted in a liver issue. If you've listened to any other podcast, liver is the, 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 estrogen. livers. If your liver is taxed out, if you know it or you don't, you're going to 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. 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, um, 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, rectal dysfunction and things like that.
That's usually a combination of things, blood flow included, but a different topic. Okay, so if you have high cholesterol, you have a fucked up liver. It's inevitable. They work together. 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.
There are so many men that are walking around with silent infections in their urinary system ejaculatory duct prostate because they're all connected. If you want to get on Google and look at the anatomy of a male, the urinary system and the, male reproductive system, they're, they're connected, um, the way that it's set up.
So you're, if you get an infection, uh, in your urinary system, and if it's from the kidneys down or from the, you know, the urinary tract, aka ejaculatory duct from that up, it's going to affect your prostate. It's going to affect your testicles. It's going to eventually affect all those areas. So those systems are completely intertwined, but most men.
are asymptomatic. 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 there. They feel burning with urination. They feel frequent urination. They have, you know, pain in their bladder. They have weakness in their pelvic bowl.
They, you know, Take an antibiotic. They get a yeast infection. They have vaginal issue, itching, and irritation. They get an admirable 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 recurrent infections are getting it from their partner.
They're getting it from their partner because 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 starting or stopping when he goes, uh, no big deal. I don't know. Could have been some, a fluke or he's urinating and then 20 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.
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. 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, in your 40s and your 50s. 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. 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. It could be, uh, bacteria could be 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 things oozing out of the tip of their penis. 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 them. 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 investigating, you know, and their doctors are not investigating it. It's just like, Oh, well we check your prostate because you're old now, which is ridiculous. But um, 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, I mentioned something about mercury and aluminum earlier. Nobody is exempt from heavy metal exposures. We were getting exposed to different types of toxins from tap water, showering in that water, food, pesticide residues, and kerosene, 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 is 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.
And really the, 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 I don't know what it is about people thinking like blood pressure, heart, and oh, my heart, 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 you're, 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 because 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.
If it was, you know, a sport they did often or it was something they did 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 duct.
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. 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 in 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. 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. In reality, especially in the U. S. Just look at men once they especially get into, you know, their forties and fifties, like they look inflamed if they don't look like you could put a pin in them, they're going to pop.
It might be their face. It might be their neck, you know, and also people like women get very frustrated and men can lose weight quickly. Men can lose weight quickly because yes, they don't have the hormone orchestration that we do, but you can only, you don't lose fat quickly. You could lose inflammation quickly.
So you know, if your partner has gone on a, you know, 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.
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, because 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 people go through garbage 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. 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 castrate a frog in their studies.
Essentially, it'll turn a male frog Asexual. So now the frog is no longer male or female. So what the fuck is that doing to us in the micro doses 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. Most of that shit's tap water. 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 around not 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.
These are all things that have to be looked at and considered because they could be playing a huge role. And guess what, guys? It ain't fucking cheap to do IVF, and it's fucking brutal for the woman. Like, there are women that 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 of the body. We manipulated the body to create a pregnancy. So pregnancy is not always going to 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 their, their, their gut issues and they're in pain and they're not developing and you know, 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. 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. 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.
You will find a different podcast all about that, but please share this with your friends that are struggling with getting pregnant and, 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. I 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.
