How to Optimize Fertility in Both Males & Females

You might have heard that carrying your phone in your pocket can reduce your testosterone levels and sperm count. And guess what? That is true ... Should you avoid putting your phone in your pocket? Certainly your front pocket, I would suggest, yes, if you are somebody who is seeking to conceive.

If you plan to conceive children or to try and conceive children in the next 90 days, you definitely want to avoid exposing your testicles, that is your scrotum, to elevated temperatures. So, that means definitely avoiding hot tubs, definitely avoiding hot baths ... Hot showers are probably fine. But if you're going to go into a sauna, for instance, you might want to rethink that decision.

Keeping the testes about two degrees cooler than the rest of the body is absolutely key. If sperm get too hot, they die.

Seat heaters in cars, for instance, terrible idea, just terrible idea, if you're hoping to conceive in the near future.

If you are a heavy drinker, if you are a smoker, or if you are a regular user of cannabis, especially if you smoke cannabis or vape cannabis; you create a lot of reactive oxygen species that disrupt the chemistry of the seminal fluid which disrupts the sperm cell.

There are strong data showing that cannabis reduces fertility ... Whether or not you're male or female, smoking cannabis is a bad idea if you want to conceive a healthy child.

One bout of so-called binge drinking, which is 5-6 drinks in a given night... if you're a woman or you're a man, greatly increases both the likelihood of mutations in the embryo that would result from a fertilization and at the same time... a greatly reduced probability of fertilization.

Avoid going in hot tubs during the period in which you're trying to conceive children. You should also avoid going in saunas... And if you do go in the sauna, you can bring an ice pack there, and you can put it on the testicles in order to offset the heat of the sauna and keep the testicles cool while in the sauna.

For females 30-years-old or younger, if they have intercourse with ejaculation around the time of ovulation... on average, that will result in a successful fertilization and pregnancy about 20% of the time on the first month of attempting.

For women who are 35 years or older, about 25% of successful fertilizations lead to miscarriages ... By the time women are in their early 40s, so 40 or older, the probability of miscarriage after a successful fertilization is going to be about 50%.

If you're trying to conceive, just keep the laptop off of your lap. Just put it on a table or standing desk or whatever—just keep it off of your lap.

If your goal is to have a healthy fertilization and pregnancy, well, then by all means, just don't carry [your phone] in your front pocket. Then people say, well, what about back pocket? Or what about backpack? Look, it's very clear that avoiding being too close to the phone is probably better for your sperm quality than putting the phone very close to your testicles or anywhere else on your body...

Zinc dosages that are pretty high of about 120mg taken twice per day... with meals can significantly increase testosterone ... It seems that high levels of zinc can increase spermatogenesis and testosterone levels very significantly.

There isn't really a big difference in terms of sperm quality if people wear boxers or briefs or don't wear anything under their jeans or shorts at all.

One in five couples that have issues with fertility, the issue ends up falling on the biology—that is the quality—of the sperm, or a lack of number of sperm.

The electromagnetic fields and the heat-related effects of smartphones can indeed have a detrimental effect on sperm quality and, yes indeed, on testosterone levels, as well.

The data indicate that sperm quality declines when people start using a mobile phone ... The fact that people are using mobile phones is reducing sperm count and quality.

It's pretty clear that using deliberate cold exposure can be healthy for the sperm because of the ways not that cold directly supports testosterone or sperm quality but rather because cold reduces heat.

If you are a female and you are having regular menstrual cycles... and you are following intermittent fasting/ time-restricted feeding, well, then chances are pretty good that it's not disrupting your fertility and likelihood of fertilization & healthy pregnancy.

How much L-Carnitine? ... If you're obtaining it in capsule form, 1-3g per day of capsule-form L-Carnitine is what's been suggested to improve egg quality and sperm quality.

In many women, in the four to five days prior to ovulation, there is a dramatic increase in libido.

For women who are aged 34 to 37, the probability of conceiving in that first month of trying—and certainly every month thereafter—is about 11%.

For men who are on TRT or who are taking testosterone from an external source, the number of sperm that they're going to make is going to be dramatically reduced.

It does seem to be the case that people who use cannabis even once, the sperm that are generated during that particular month or two months during which or after which they use cannabis have less forward motility and possibly altered morphology.

Puberty is actively suppressed up until a certain point. It's also actively suppressed... by the tonic release—that means the ongoing release around the clock—of a hormone called melatonin ... In children, prior to puberty, melatonin is released more or less constantly.

Many people believe that one of the reasons that puberty is happening earlier and earlier in females is because of the accumulation of more body fat at younger ages than was observed 30 or 40 and certainly 100 years ago.

In the United States, around 1900 or 1903, the average age of menarche, the onset of puberty, in females was about 14-years-old; whereas, in 1990, the average age is 11.

If you heard that the ovulatory/menstrual cycle is 28 days long, that's true in some cases, but that's not always true. It's on average 28 days long. There are some females for which the ovulatory cycle will be shorter—it can be as short as 21 days—and other females for which it will be 35 days long.

Vasectomies are a very effective form of birth control ... They are reversible. That is, vasectomies are reversible, but not always.

The more frequent the ejaculation, the lower the concentration of sperm in each ejaculate.

A period of abstinence ranging from 48 to 72 hours prior to an ejaculation increases the concentration of high-quality sperm within that first ejaculation [that] occurs after the abstinence period.

As long as we're talking about vaginal secretions and mucus, it's important to point out that a number of commercially available lubricants can actually be detrimental for sperm health, even if they don't contain spermatocyte.

The egg in females and the sperm in males are part of what's called the germline ... The cells of the germline have genes that cannot be modified by the behavior of the individual that houses those genes.

If you take a female animal... and you expose her to the scent of a reproductively-competent male for a series of days, but maybe even as short as a few hours, and she is also not regularly being exposed to the scent of her father... she can undergo puberty earlier.

There is zero data to support the idea that the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle are linked in any kind of causal way.

Over the next second half of the ovulatory cycle... levels of progesterone in the second half of the ovulatory cycle are going to increase by 1400-fold.

The concentration of intra-testicular testosterone is at least 100 times higher than the concentration of testosterone anywhere else in the body.

The semen parameters and ejaculate parameters that most clinicians want to see if you were to give a sperm sample would be somewhere in excess of 15 million sperm per milliliter of ejaculate.