Why Infertility and Fatigue Often Go Together with Aumatma Simmons, ND

Why Infertility and Fatigue Often Go Together with Aumatma Simmons, ND

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the energy MD podcast where we help you resolve your long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome naturally so that you can go back to living your best life. So today we're going to be talking with my good friend, Aumatma Simmons. Dr. Aumatma Simmon and fertility, which has some very interesting crossovers with chronic fatigue. So let's learn a little bit about her. Dr. Aumatma is a seasoned naturopathic doctor and board certified in naturopathic endocrinology.

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with 18 years of clinical experience. Dr. Aumatma also trains doctors seeking to specialize in fertility and is the bestselling author of Fertility Secrets, What Your Doctor Didn't Tell You About Baby Making, which showcases her restorative fertility approach. She has been featured on ABC, CBS, and Fox, along with hundreds of podcasts to share a message of hope for all those struggling with fertility issues. Make sure to check out her podcast, Egg Meets Sperm,

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for leading fertility education. Aumatma, thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Evan. It's great to see you. Likewise. Yeah, last time we did this was in 2020, so it's great to get a refresher and see how things go. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I guess let's start off with, you know, what people currently know about fertility or what's, let's start off with the...

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with the problem with the current conventional paradigm when it comes to fertility? So I think the biggest issues in the fertility space are still the same that I would have said five years ago, which is most people are told that fertility is gonna drop off of a cliff at 35, that's for women. We are ignoring the...

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growing population of men with fertility issues. So male fertility has been going on a decline. And in the last five years, very severe decline, that decline is going to continue for probably another 15 or 20 years, by which point they're predicting that most men will be azo-spermic, which is basically no sperm. Yeah, in the next 15 to 20 years. So that's the development in that space. And then

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The third is this idea that we're gonna solve every fertility issue by just going into a fertility clinic, getting an IVF and then leaving with a baby. And the stats on that are not changing that much. So really like the success rates of fertility clinics as published by SART, which is the organization that monitors and kind of

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has published reports on what the success rates of clinics are without the name of the clinic. It's an anonymized report, but the average success rate for a woman under 30 is gonna be about 35 % versus by the time she's in her 40s, it's down to like five to 2%. So fertility clinics are kind of the go-to for so many people, but we're missing the boat in terms of

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how much they're actually able to support. And there's a ton of people that are getting this like diagnosis of unexplained infertility. And that diagnosis to me just says, hey, we haven't really figured out what's going on for you. And we're not really willing to look any deeper than what we know about hormones and like giving you IVF treatments. So.

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So I think that's kind of the landscape that we're still working in. um you know, my hope always has been like that, not that IVF is wrong or bad, but if we can move into a world where we look at women and couples as a whole unit and go with trying to understand why someone's body is not.

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being able to conceive, which to me is more of a symptom than a disease. So the symptom is I can't get pregnant, but the root cause is always present. And I've tested like 7,000 couples at this point. I've talked to that many couples myself. And when I'm talking to them, I'm like, listen, I'm willing to

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put you in the bucket of actual unexplained infertility where I cannot figure out why you can't get pregnant. But I'm still waiting for a couple that I can put into that box. So after talking to thousands of people, I'm like, well, almost every time there's a reason. So if we can actually get to people sooner and be able to

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understand like, hey, your gut is gonna affect your fertility or your adrenals are gonna affect your fertility, then, and getting that support sooner really stacks the odds in people's favors. So for the last three years, that's what I've been working on is essentially a tech solution that can help people understand that they have potential root causes.

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here's what they are, here's how to test for them, and then here's the solution of what they can do to support their underlying issues so that fertility can get to optimal. So did you say you've been working on a tech solution? Yeah, exactly. It's like an AI algorithm based thing that essentially helps to assess root cause of fertility issues. It can probably assess root causes of lots of things, but the goal is really

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to get to those people that are just starting out on their journey or like maybe 18 months, 24 months into their fertility journeys and are still in that place of like, I don't know what's happening. I don't know why this is not working. I'm considering IVF. Maybe I've tried a cycle and it didn't work. So they're in this place of like unknown and those people are really getting the worst end of the stick. So.

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Those are the people that I really want to reach and say like, hey, if we could get to the root from an analysis that takes you 10 minutes to fill out, we are going to be able to support you to at least move your fertility towards optimal. Not saying you're going to get to optimal tomorrow, but you can actually move the needle maybe enough to like have the next IVF cycle work.

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So, um yeah, that's kind of the goal with this tech startup thing. And that's what I'm super excited about right now. Awesome. And so what are the root causes of infertility? There are lots of potential root causes. But I think if we were to put it into buckets, there are some major factors that just come up all the time. And those are going to be things like toxins, which

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We know from tons and tons and tons of data that there are many toxins in our environment, a lot of which are reproductive toxins that are taking a hit on our hormones, sperm health, quality, and embryo quality, as well as like the ability to carry all the way to term. So the toxins are a big one. And that's a simple, like, here's a list, like what are you using in your day-to-day life?

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Like if you're using a bunch of these, you probably have a high toxin burden and you need not only to detox, but to shift your environment so you don't keep getting exposed to this stuff. So that that part's relatively simple. Then the next one is gut inflammation. And we can put into this bucket things like food sensitivities, microbiome issues, um digestive enzyme deficiency, H. pylori.

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There's a bunch of things that fall into this arena that are taking having an impact on how the gut is supposed to support hormones and the metabolism of hormones and how it doesn't do that very well if it has these the presence of these microbiome issues that shouldn't be there. So that's number two. The third one is adrenals and thyroid and

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those two are big enough on their own. But if you have adrenal dysfunction, circadian rhythm dysfunction, which is slightly different, it's still adrenal driven, but you can have, I just saw a woman yesterday whose melatonin is like off the charts. And I was like, do you supplement melatonin? And she's like, So then that tells me like, it's usually gut inflammation actually that drives

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these microbes to produce high amounts of melatonin, which is not actually the norm. And then you ask her and you're like, can you get out of bed in the morning? She's like, no, I'm exhausted. I hit the snooze button like 500 times, right? So I'm like, well, it's not your cortisol. Your cortisol is actually fine. It's your melatonin. So uh circadian rhythm dysfunction and how well the thyroid is functioning.

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And the thyroid hormones are interesting because you can have antibodies to the thyroid, which is potential uh trigger for recurrent pregnancy loss. We see that relatively frequently. And then we have things like um the TSH is normal, but T3 is not optimal. And the conversion from T4 to T3 is really important.

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but T3 to T2, is a hormone that we don't measure that actually has receptors on the ovaries. So really important to have that conversion happening all the way through. And what we'll usually see there is consistently lower basal body temperatures kind of correlate to ovarian function relating to thyroid hormones. So that's kind of the root cause piece over there. And then we have

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some of the more common things that people think of when it comes to fertility, PCOS, endometriosis, uh high estrogen, low estrogen, low progesterone. So all the hormonal imbalances that kind of uh correlate in some ways to fertility outcomes in women. And then, so that was just the women. And then the male side kind of mimics it on the basics. toxins, gut,

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gut health, gut inflammation, adrenals, thyroid are also gonna correlate for men in most cases. So that, and then on the male side, the hormone piece is relatively simple, high testosterone, low testosterone. Are you supplementing? Did you supplement in the past? So those are kind of the scope of things that we're analyzing also in the uh tech side. Very cool.

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And so the toxins, are we talking about heavy metals, chemicals, molds, anything else? Just the basics. So phthalates, um BPA, BPS, glyphosate, which is a big one. Glyphosate is going to kill the gut microbiome. So anything that's non-organic that we consume, food, drink, et cetera, but also glyphosate.

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that's sprayed on cotton, which then affects the vaginal microbiome. So vaginal microbiome, actually that has been more recent development in fertility medicine, which is how the reproductive microbiome, so vagina, fallopian tubes, cervix, uterus, all of the microbes, they're different in every part of the reproductive system. And all of them have an

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and affect or could negatively affect fertility outcomes. So there's correlations between specific microbes that can be present that then um make it harder for someone to get pregnant, for implantation to happen, and uh for the implantation to sustain long enough to have a healthy baby at the end. So um some very cool research happening in the vaginal microbiome world that is

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important and comes up relatively frequently in our work. Interesting. Have you noticed an increase in infertility since 2020, since the pandemic, since COVID? Oh, that's an interesting question. um Yes. Yes, there's definitely an increase. And I would say if I

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If I remember correctly in 2018, 2019, the stats were like one in eight couples between the ages of 18 and 35 that struggled with fertility issues. Now that number is like one in six to one in five. So the stats overall have definitely shifted. And, I think like people are more stressed, right? Like world

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situation is very much tenuous. And I think it's leading to a lot more anxiety, distress related uh fertility struggle in addition to the usual stuff that's happening. Yeah, it's you know, it's seems like the body wants uh a balanced environment in order to produce a child.

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I always remember hearing the story of the Australian kangaroo where if they encounter stress or there's stress around them or they feel stress that the fetus will stop reproduction, right? You can be in the process, like you can have the egg that has been fertilized, but it'll stop propagating the process during times of stress, right? So if it's like, there's...

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stressors from mental, emotional things or physical things like, like what I see with people with long COVID, a lot of them are having reproductive issues and that's because their hormones are now off. They now have this new insult in the body, which is causing all sorts of inflammation, right? It seems like it's any of these things that cause disruption from the normal that doesn't allow for, for, um, healthy fertility to happen. Is that accurate? Yeah.

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And I've been correlating it to this idea of safety in the body. So when our body triggers a feeling of unsafe, whether that is coming from mold or COVID or the environment or the relationship, the way that that's going, or a boss who's just not great to be around or work with, all of

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any one of those things could trigger our nervous system to go into fight or flight. And that shift into fight or flight and a one-time shift is like, okay, your body will find homeostasis again. But when you're constantly being triggered in multiple ways, it becomes really hard to restore the nervous system back into safety mode. And uh

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I did a TED talk on this recently. So this idea of are we, if the body is detecting unsafe, the one thing that it does not need for survival is reproduction. So for my own body's survival, which is always the priority, the one thing that I could do to conserve energy and move energy back into survival mode is to

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shut off reproduction. And sometimes that's temporary. So you see someone who's more stressed, they're gonna have an occasional anavulatory cycle. But if that continues month after month after month, the potential for anavulatory cycles to just continue is possible. And they may not even realize it because they're not testing often enough to know that that's what's happening.

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So the shift back into safety, and there's always gonna be a flip-flop. I hear a lot of our community saying, oh, but how can I just always be in safety mode? It's so hard. And uh I'm like, I totally understand. I go through this too. So we have several ways to support the nervous system to stay in safety mode.

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or to hit the reset every time we go into unsafe. So that response is normal. It's like protecting your body, right? Like that is its basic mechanism. But every time you shift into that and stay there, that's when the problem is. You shift into that, recognize it and hit the reset button, you're good. So it's just like, how often can you reset then?

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to make sure that you're in safe mode. um that, yeah, so that's been really interesting for me because it's like, if there were one root cause under all root causes, I would say this is it. Like every time we're in unsafe, we have shifted out of reproduction and you can have either.

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ah survival or you can reproduce and you can't do both at the same time. Wow, that's such an important concept. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The same goes for like healing in my community, right? If you're not feeling safe or not able to cultivate that safety, it's very hard to get better and your hormones are going to reflect that and your immune system is going to reflect that and your challenges getting rid of these toxins or getting rid of infections, etc. are going to reflect that.

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And so then can you give us a little bit more specifics about like what that looks like in terms of getting back into safe mode? Yeah, I call them hacks because like who wants to sit and meditate for three hours a day? I used to, but I don't anymore. I used to when I was in medical school, I would sit and meditate for three hours every day. And they're like, don't you need to study? And I'm like, no, I'm meditating. And I was literally like it.

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You know, like I'm good. If I meditate, I just sit there and absorb everything and I don't need to study. And they're like, okay, whatever works for you. So, but now it's very difficult to do that. So.

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There are several, there's so many hacks and you can like, literally if you put into YouTube nervous system resets, you will get hundreds of videos on how to reset your nervous system. They all work, right? So there's nothing that's like, hey, use my technique because it's better. It doesn't really matter. Use whatever you like. But um the ones that I go to often because I feel like they're easy to access, uh one is just start with the breath.

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and start with breathing in and out of the nose. Anytime you're breathing out of your mouth and it mimics panting, it almost triggers the fight or flight mode. So you wouldn't breathe through your nose if you're running in the jungle from a tiger. So just think about it that way. So breathing in and out of the nose, easy, slow, deep breaths is great. If you want to take that to the next level, box breathing, which is like,

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six counts in, six counts hold, six counts out, six counts hold. That's a really nice way to calm the nervous system down in the moment. And these are 20 to 30 second resets. They're not like, do this for an hour, do a few breaths, you should be good. So that's the second one. Some of the ones that I quoted in my uh TEDx talk were,

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slightly more studied. So there's one that's called body scanning and you're basically like scanning your body for sensations and there's no judgment about what the sensation is. You might be like, oh, that feels really light on my shoulder. Fine, whatever. Just observe it. And you're scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning. You go through three cycles of that, which takes about five to 10 minutes. And it is

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Basically what the research showed is that 10 minutes of body scanning per day decreased stress hormones by 23%. So you don't need to meditate for an hour. You can do this little thing, right? You can let your mind wander while you're scanning. That's fine. Like a lot of people have trauma around meditation and they're like, Oh my God, it's so hard. I can't get my mind to stop. That's not the purpose of it. So

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I like the body scanning because it helps people just like relax their brain and not feel like they're doing it wrong. There's nothing you can do wrong about it. The second um tool that I quoted in there was also researched and this one specific for uh menstrual cycle regulation. So they found that when women went to bed at the same time every single night and woke up at the same time every single morning.

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they improve their reproductive hormones by like 42 % or something like that. 40 something percent. So that is a very simple technique that sounds simple. It's super hard to do because you get to the weekend and you're like, all I want to do is get my extra two hours of sleep and you can't, you got to get up at the same time every single day. I don't care if it's the weekend, do it.

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ah And then if you want to, again, if you want to add another layer of support to that, you can ah get sunlight first thing in the morning, which helps kick on the cortisol mechanism and shut off the melatonin production. So that's really helpful. ah Another dose of like five minutes of sunlight in the afternoon, if you can, and or in the evening for sunset, if you can. So all of the sleep.

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all of the sun exposure helps to regulate cortisol and it is basically giving that feedback to um the system of like how much cortisol your body needs at that moment in time. So if you can sync with the sun, it's really cool. If you can't, it's okay, no pressure. Get the sun in the morning, that's the most important. And then at night, um I'm sure you're gonna talk about this a million times, but for...

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our people were like, hey, you cannot get blue light exposure for at least two to three hours before bed. So if you're going to be on a screen, which I am guilty of myself, um then I have to wear my blue light blockers. That's the trade off. So if you want to be up at night and on a screen and that's your relaxing time, then fine, cool, no problem. Get some blue light blockers that work.

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ah make sure that you're filtering out the blue light from your eyes because if your body gets a lot of that blue light, it keeps you from producing melatonin. And melatonin is the one hormone that is nurturing and rejuvenating the reproductive system in both men and women.

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If your body's not producing melatonin adequately, you're not getting that replenishing, rejuvenating action that should be happening every single night. So, and you can't supplement your way out of it, right? For men, I would not recommend supplementing melatonin at all. There's some research against sperm health for men, but for women, supplementing melatonin is not the same as producing your own. So.

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really getting your body to optimize as much as possible so that it can produce it is ensuring that you have good egg quality as much as you can possibly create on your own. And then if you still, we still have some ladies that are like, okay, I stopped taking melatonin. I am doing all the things you tell me. I can't sleep through the night. Then they get melatonin as an extra, but it's not the go-to first. So.

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So those are um techniques that I really like. And then the last one is anything that supports oxytocin is gonna support safety. So for me, oxytocin is the safety hormone. And um there are lots of ways to simulate oxytocin. Essentially anything that increases a sense, an experience of a sense.

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is going to stimulate oxytocin. So for example, if you're cooking and like really smelling the food as you're cooking it and like the spices and all of that, that's gonna stimulate oxytocin production. um another example that I use a lot is like dancing and feeling the movement of your hips is producing oxytocin. um And then my favorite way is because I'm...

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super into it is like being around uh circles of women, especially for women is really supportive to producing oxytocin. So while people are going through the fertility journey, the tendency is to like kind of isolate a little bit. And instead of that, it's actually like finding a support system and finding people that you can be around that are supportive of your journey.

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um And then like connecting with them regularly in a way that is nurturing. Maybe it's over some food uh That's really supportive to making oxytocin which then helps support safety in the body Very cool. I wonder if that works virtually in community as well and whether that's more of a pharaoh mode in person thing I I don't know that there's research been done on it, but I do think that

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there is something special about in-person. I don't, I, if there were studies on this, it would be really cool to see if there was a difference. But my suspicion is that because we're such like, oxytocin especially is just such a sense driven hormone. So your senses are less stimulated when you're on video, right? Even if you're looking at someone, it's way different than me. Like,

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holding your hand and giving you a hug and be like, oh, it's so good to see you. You're gonna have a different experience with it. So probably something is better than nothing. And as much as you can, cultivating this local tribe is really helpful and beneficial.

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Cool. I actually just pulled up some research that shows that there is not only released in face-to-face groups, but also in certain forms of virtual and social media interactions. There's actually some studies on the NIH website in person and online social synchrony. Social synchrony. Feeling imitated, coordinated movement or shared emotional states increased endogenous oxytocin levels, which enhanced

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bonding and emotional expressiveness in both laboratory and communal group settings. Nice. That's pretty cool. Nice. Yeah. Send that over to me. I'm curious to get more into that. Yeah, I will. Yeah, I'm so pleased that you're doing that nervous system retraining work. We actually started including that as part of our program about six months ago because we saw the same thing. saw that

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You know, everybody has nervous system dysfunction. Everybody needs nervous system retraining. We tell people that we don't know if it's 90 % of your issue or 10 % of your issue. So you have to do it in earnest. So I really appreciate that you've got such a focus on it. It's so important. Yeah, I feel like it's becoming so evident in many fields that this is at the core of all of it, right? It's like.

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If we're in fight or flight survival all the time, that is not supporting the way our bodies were designed to function. yeah, and it's like especially true in women, right? Most women were gatherers, not hunters. So our physiology is really not trained for survival and

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is not trained for that like fight or flight mode as frequently, yet we're in situations that are similar to men all the time nowadays. So I think that we're starting to see the repercussion of that. uh it's like being able to shift it is gonna have impact on so much of our health and wellbeing, not just fertility.

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Right. So yeah, so even with all this increased stress that we're experiencing in the world nowadays, we also have an increased awareness and we have these opportunities where people can really feel empowered. mean, all those things that Dr. Amatma just shared with you for folks who are listening and watching, know, go ahead and implement those. You know, it's something you can do right now, completely free. Yeah, exactly. The best part about it is it's free. Like you don't have to go buy supplements. You don't have to go do anything.

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You're doing something that is naturally supposed to be part of our lives. Like this is something that we were doing naturally for centuries and we just stopped doing it. right. And if you find, you know, for people who are listening, if you find that you have resistance to this, you know, schedule it, put it on your calendar, you know, if you're willing to go for a massage or if you schedule other things that you attend,

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You know, in order to be successful, oftentimes you have to put it on your calendar and when it pops up, you have to do it, right? There's no excuses. If you want to get better, you have to take this agency, right? Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. Um, so let's talk about testing. Um, can you give you a little bit of kind of like where I'm at with testing over the last year, what I found after being fooled by incorrect tests, um,

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you where I thought, you know, some, but we, had had, had done all the testing on people and, and we had treated them and then at 12 months we're like, why aren't you getting better? We repeat some tests and then we figure out that actually the testing was imperfect, that these urine tests oftentimes are really tests more of excretion and they're not really testing total body burden. So what I do right now in our program is that we treat people.

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Regardless of what they come in with in their test, we treat them for heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, all different kinds of infections, all different kinds of molds, all different kinds of heavy metals and doing the nervous system retraining to make sure we don't miss anything. So I'm super curious about your approach to, testing and how that fits in with, uh, with fertility. Yeah. Um, I think I'm of two opinions. Probably one is that there's probably a degree of

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things that we can figure out just from what you tell us, right? And that's the tech assessment piece is like the technology smart enough to figure you out relatively accurately. It's a little scary. So a lot of people are like, well, I want to do all of your testing. And I'm like, cool, we are happy to order it for you. It's like $2,000 to do all of the testing.

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You don't need it. Like maybe just start with what this is telling you and save your $2,000. So it's optional. In a period of time where it's early, they don't necessarily have significant fertility issues or they haven't spent significant amounts of time on the journey where they're like, oh my God, we're gonna run out of time. We've been doing this for five years. We really need to get some answers. I think that's a really good starting point.

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for the people who have been struggling for longer. And I would say my patience for that is probably like either you've suffered from a loss, one pregnancy loss, not three, a pregnancy loss, or you have been trying for 12 to 18 months or longer, or you've been through an IVF cycle that failed. All of those are triggers for in-depth testing.

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And the testing that we will start with is going to be on the male and female side, a CBC with diff. There's a lot of immune markers that show up on basic blood chemistry that we're like, hey, you probably have XYZ off of the white blood cells. And then we'll test them further and they do. So that is a really good starting point.

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hormones for women on cycle day three, LHFSH, estradiol, AMH, prolactin, and then thyroid testing and thyroid antibodies on the female side, along with like blood sugar, liver enzymes, the basics ah that I feel like every person should have once a year that most people are like, why didn't my doctor do all of this? I don't have an answer to that. ah

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So doing all of that on the female side and then on the male side, it's pretty similar like blood sugar, liver enzymes, testosterone, what else? This kind of, I think I said blood sugar insulin, homocysteine, that's the one I was trying to think of, homocysteine for like just checking out methylation, how well is it working in the body? uh

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homocysteine levels are high, then often methylation is a little wonky and we'll try to address it with supplements and food. If that doesn't work within eight to 12 weeks, then we're doing more testing, which is around epigenetics. So that's kind of the baseline of testing. If like, again, if someone is already well on that road and is like, really need some answers faster. uh

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um Then semen analysis, uh Dutch urine hormone testing for women to look at metabolites of estrogen specifically. um Cycle mapping, which is to get a view of what the estrogen and progesterone are doing for a whole cycle instead of just the spot test. And then um vaginal microbiome testing.

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That's kind of our foundations package of figuring out, like, let's look at as much as we can to figure out where to go next and what are we missing and get the information. And usually those six tests kind of cover what most people have going on that is affecting their fertility outcomes. So 80 to 90 % will get an answer.

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There is gonna be maybe that 15, 20 % that were like, yeah, we did all that. We see some things, but we don't have a specific answer yet. And those are the people that are gonna maybe need more testing in addition to that. And then second tier stuff is gonna be things like mold. I don't know about you, but it feels like it's showing up more and more.

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Oh my God, why does everyone have mold? So mold is a big one. um Toxins. usually we like kind of like you were assuming some level of detox is always needed. But um for people that are in specific environments or work workplace exposures, we're doing a little bit more.

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Toxin testing to figure out what toxins they're being exposed to so we can get a little more dialed in so that's kind of the overview of all of the tests that we still stick by but again, I I feel like there's a lot that you could do and A lot of people come in with like oh, I've done all of these tests and I'm like great. This is good information What did you do with all the tests? They're like nothing my

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the person that ran the testing said they were not great. And I'm like, what? Like, they didn't do anything with all of this? So it's a really good starting point. And usually if people have those results already, great, let's just have a look at them and see if all of the factors were addressed. And if not, then we can go do more. Nice. And so do you find that

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There's a certain number of people that will get pregnant just from replacing the deficiencies in hormones and vitamins and minerals and lifestyle habits.

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uh Yeah, a good percentage will. There is, I think that most of what that testing will point to is things that are very well researched, right? Like there's so much research on vitamin D, for example, which I forgot. Of course, it's in the basics. uh Vitamin D is connected to

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poor egg quality, poor sperm quality, implantation failure, recurrent pregnancy loss, failed IVF outcomes, like so many things. And essentially like if that's the only thing that shows up, like just go take some vitamin D, you're done. And they're like, what? She's crazy. And I'm like, no, that's all you need to do.

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Everything else is fine. You need some vitamin D go fix it and and they'll message back and they're like, oh my god, it worked It's a miracle uh But more often than not I think that if there's a complex situation where people are like have the cortisol circadian dysfunction and thyroid issues and autoimmune issues and like

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there's a stack of things, then we're looking at, okay, this is going to take a little bit of time. It doesn't have to take forever, but like four to six months to address all of the underlying issues that we figure out. And then we can see, okay, are your hormones optimal? Yes. Okay. Then you're good to start trying again. And most of the time that will work. Very cool.

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So before I let you go, uh two things. One is why did you say in 15 years, men are going to be many men are going to be as those spermic. Yeah. Okay. That's what it says. Yeah. And so why do we think that's the case? Is that toxins and infections and all the all the environmental insults or is there something else? I think it's mostly the toxins.

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Honestly, like so many of the toxins that are in our environment are estrogen mimickers. And essentially, if you have a ton of estrogen floating around in the body, in a male body, the brain gets the message, oh, there must be too much testosterone because testosterone converts to estrogen. The brain goes, oh my God, so much estrogen, make it stop and shuts off testosterone production.

43:07

If you don't have testosterone, A, you get the testosterone epidemic that we have currently also. um More like, I can't remember the statistics, but like 40 % of men are like low testosterone levels and they're talking about the 18 to 35 range. They're not even talking about older men, right? So very young men with low testosterone levels, we have to start wondering like, what's happening?

43:37

Why do these men need T-shots? So I think that's at the crux of it is the estrogen mimicking compounds that are really doing wreaking havoc in the male physiology that is then shutting off testosterone and shutting off sperm production. The other piece is probably what a lot of men are not hearing from their doctors is

44:07

If you take testosterone shots because the symptom that you have is low T, then the use of testosterone is going to shut off sperm production, not turn it on. So testosterone is the best like birth control that there is on the male side. We don't need to invent new birth control. We already have it. It's called testosterone.

44:36

exogenous testosterone. So testosterone shots, patches, pills, whatever is going to shut off sperm production. again, the like the, the problem we're trying to solve is not being cut at the root. It's like the symptom of it, which is take testosterone because you have low T, but

45:02

let's figure out why do you have low T you should not as an 18 year old man need testosterone. So, so I think that that is at the crux of so much of this and uh unfortunately, it's only getting worse. So there's a lot of toxins that are researched to affect male fertility and uh

45:31

we're not doing anything about them. So unless you're doing something about it on a personal level, there's nothing happening on a global level that is going to impact it. So that's, I think that's most of it. I wonder also if, ah and this is like a bigger exploration in my brain mostly, which is our men.

45:59

Is there an effect of something is shifting where men have poor physiology and it's a symptom of something else. And I don't quite know what that is, honestly. So I feel like it's happening in many places where men's health is being addressed or attacked. uh

46:28

And we see a lot of men that are struggling in so many different ways. And I think that it's like as a culture, we're reaching a point of burnout and exhaustion and and like chronic fatigue that is uh kind of affecting men in a different way.

46:57

Yeah, yeah, I agree. All these insults, whether they're toxins, infections, electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, like we know that they disrupt DNA. We know that they're going to have an effect on reproductive systems. And it seems like the sperm is especially sensitive to that. Kind of like what you were talking before about how you really need to have that balance and that sense of safety. And it's very hard to have that and have reproduction happen successfully.

47:26

when there are so many insults. Yeah. So we've come to the end. Thank you so much for this. For those listening, I hope this was valuable. If it was, give this a thumbs up and like and subscribe. And as you can hear, this is a complex issue, right? You know, you can definitely start to do the nervous system retraining stuff yourself, but definitely connect with Dr. Amatma where she's going to give you her information in just a second here.

47:54

But you you need, if you ever want to get anywhere successful in life, you need to have a coach. You need to have a guide. You need to have a doctor. You need to have somebody who's going to walk you through that path and make sure you're addressing everything so that you can actually get to the finish line. So Dr. Amama, for people who are interested in connecting with you, where's the best place for them to go? The best place is Instagram at Holistic Fertility Doctor. um Very active in the chats and the DMs. So just message us there. If you want.

48:23

Our direct website is Holistic Fertility Institute. And then a lot of people have been saying how much they're getting out of the podcast. So egg, meat, sperm for the podcast. Wonderful. Thanks so much for joining me today. was great to see you again. Good to see you too. Thank you. So if you have chronic fatigue, whether it's from long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, go ahead and click the link below to watch my latest masterclass.

48:50

where I go deep into our four step process that has helped thousands of others resolve their symptoms naturally. After you watch that video, if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit to work together, you can then get on a free call with me. All right. Thanks so much. I'll see you over there.