Top Research-Driven Supplements For Fertility

Summit Welcome and Mini-Course Intro 0:00

Hey, where are your co-hosts of the Beyond infertility summit. Dr. Carrie and Dr. Aumatma And we have an incredible lineup of speakers for you. In addition, Dr. Aumatma and I have created a mini crash course for, you know, every day you can expect a mini lecture from us covering foundational content, helping you gain context and insight before deep diving into the day's interviews. We hope that this will serve as a helpful context to get deeper understanding through the day's interviews. Hello and welcome back to the Beyond Infertility Summit.

It's day seven. It's the last day of the summit. I hope that you have enjoyed all of the content so far, but it's not over yet. We have amazing content for the rest of the day today. And as you know, I'm your host, Dr. Aumatma So today on our mini course series, we are covering the top supplements for fertility, male and female. What I want you to know, before we dive into the nitty gritty of the supplements is you do not need to take each and every one of these supplements. Please, please, please don't take each and every one of these supplements.

You really need to focus on the ones that are important for you. So as I'm going through supplements, this is not just a long list of things. I'm actually going to point out, like who this is good for, who this is not good for, and the dosages of each of the supplements, if you decide to deep dive further and you want to take it further with the Masterclass series, then we will cover more about the nitty gritty is what you should know about each and every supplement.

Melatonin and Rhodiola for Fertility 2:00

Because the reality is not all supplements are made equal, not all quality is made equal. Not all forms of supplements meaning magnesium, for example, citrate versus malate versus carbonate is going to be absorbed very differently in the body and is going to do very different things. So this just take this as like the starting point. It's not the end all be all, but in the next 10 minutes I'm going to try to cover each and every like the top ten, essentially supplements that I use again and again in my practice.

They've helped so many people and it does need to be customized for you. So melatonin is probably my first and favorite melatonin supports egg quality. Studies have shown that IVF outcomes improve with melatonin, specifically if they were combined with myo inositol and folate. So that's a really good tidbit to note. It's going to help increase the number of mature oocytes. This means that if you went into an IVF cycle and maybe all of the the eggs that they were hoping to retrieve were not mature enough, they were immature.

Then really think about this supplement. Also to note that not everyone needs to supplement this if you can. The priority would be to optimize your cortisol and melatonin pathways. So that means on the basic level, get really good quality sleep, make sure you do the blackout curtains, get rid of the blue light, etc., etc., and at in the morning, make sure to get exposure to natural sunlight or day lamps that have at the right angle and all that, so that you can really support the production of natural melatonin.

That's the optimal. But if you have immature oocytes, then it may be worth it to combine or add in some melatonin. Men should not take melatonin. There are some very small scale studies that have shown that melatonin, a melatonin supplementation in men actually reduced sperm count and quality. So don't expose your man to this. Ideally, you don't. You just want to optimize sleep, cortisol and melatonin pathways. Number two Rhodiola. Rhodiola is my absolute favorite. I love it. There are so many uses for it.

It's been used for men that have erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and in women it has restored normal menstrual cycles. It has restored menses to women that had amenorrhea or lack of menstrual cycle. And most of all, it's an adaptogen. It helps your adrenals function better, which in this day and age I'm not sure who doesn't need that. So Rhodiola is one of my favorites. I usually like about 200 milligrams in the morning. It can be found in various forms, but the liquid extracts are going to be more potent.

So that's a really great one. It does support and because sorry, going back to the RHODIOLA, it does support egg quality and the maturation of eggs. So egg quality is really, really important as you guys know. And because Rhodiola supports the function of the mitochondria, you're going to get amazing bang for your buck. It's, it's like one of those like lesser known

Hormone Support: White Peony, Licorice, and Vitamin D 6:00

about supplements or herbs and it's it works like magic. So I love that one. If there's anything that you could just add in, that would be the one. Okay, so white peony and licorice, this is a formula that is specific to supporting the improvement of the LH to FSH ratio. So this is for ideally most of the time women with PCOS, but for women that have like that really high. LH But really low FSH or lower normal FSH and that's it. That's the only people that it's really going to support. So if this is not you don't take white peony and licorice together.

Next, I think we're on number four. So let's go to vitamin D. Vitamin D has been shown to be expressed, meaning there are receptors in the ovaries, in the endometrium and the placenta. So it's pretty much important for hormones, the quality of eggs, the lining of the uterus and the health of the future baby. So it's extremely important, but it's really ideal to have vitamin D in an optimal range. So this is not one of those like supplements to take willy nilly. You really want to measure, you want to know how much vitamin D do you actually need before supplementing and then you want to dose correct as your levels go up.

So it's not something that, again, you don't need to be on this forever. There are a couple of studies that found increase in IVF success rates with increasing vitamin D levels. There have been some there are some recent studies that have shown improvement with vitamin D supplementation on sperm health as well. So helpful for both. But you really need to get to that optimal level to be actually supportive. The next one we're going to is ashwagandha. You may or may not have heard about this one, but it's I consider it kind of a superfood and the way that we dosed this is actually a food, not a supplement.

So I personally like the ancient ways of using herbs as they were meant to be used in the cultures that they came from. So ashwagandha is an Indian. ayurvedic herb It's considered an aphrodisiac for men. So for male sexual dysfunction, erectile dysfunction

Ashwagandha and Essential Fatty Acids 9:00

as well as infertility, it's also enhanced since it enhances spermatogenesis, meaning the production of sperm. And it's going to help support increasing sperm count one study, it was a relatively small study. It showed 167% increase in sperm counts. So pretty amazing for the men in women. It's also beneficial for sexual function and enhancing libido. So that's a really great way to or that's a really great use of this or the side effect or the side benefit, we should say, is that ashwagandha is going to support the HPA axis that's the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis essentially helps your body reduce serum cortisol levels means less stress hormones floating around in your bloodstream is going to be a good thing.

It also helps lower anxiety. So for people that expire and frequent anxiety, they are stressed out. This is a really great way to integrate a superfood into your diet. The way that I like to, to use it myself and how our clients use it is about a tablespoon in warm nut milk at bedtime. That's the ideal way. That's how it was traditionally used was it's actually in dairy, but dairy is not so great for fertility. So we put it in milk, like ideally a homemade milk or a nut milk that doesn't have a lot of other stuff in it.

I actually found a nut milk at Trader Joe's that was super clean, just nuts and water. I was very impressed. So look for the nut milks that are just like nuts and water or make it yourself. If you're going to use the milk, you can also put it in water with a little bit of sweetener. Stevia, a little even a little honey at a time as holyoak, unless you have blood sugar issues. So you get to go on that. Next, we're going to talk about essential fatty acids. They improved sperm concentration, motility and morphology in men especially great for men with high inflammatory markers.

So if they have low omega three levels, lower cholesterol or high LDL, they'll the low lipo density proteins or the bad cholesterol. If that's high, then essential fatty acids are really good way to support

CoQ10 for Egg and Sperm Quality 12:00

lowering LDL, increasing cholesterol overall, etc. In women, it was shown to also increase decreased inflammation and it really helped the women that had lower for cut ability. That's a fancy term for the outcomes of pregnancy, meaning they carried to term. It helped to lower for cutting ability which leads so essential fatty acids in women actually also lowered inflammation. Of course, women reported better ovulation with essential fatty acids. And for women that had the lowest for ability this is for credibility is the ability to carry to term.

So women that had lowered for canned ability also had lowered essential fatty acids. It doesn't necessarily translate, but essential fatty acids are shown to support healthier pregnancy outcomes. Next, we go to CoQ10. That's probably one of the most popular supplements for fertility. And here's the research on CoQ10 improves FH and LH in men. There's no effect to serum testosterone, which could be a very good thing for guys that have high levels of testosterone. But are not really effectively making sperm.

It also helps mitochondrial function. It increases ATP production. So overall, it has a really good benefit on sperm count, motility and morphology. The dose that was found to be most helpful is 200 milligrams of ubiquitin, all for women, it gets a little bit trickier. So for women, what they found was that the CoQ10 lowered gonadotropin requirements and higher peak estrogen levels, meaning that women were able to have higher fertilization rates when they were undergoing IVF. So CoQ10 is really great if you need higher fertilization rates or if you had a poor IVF outcome.

The other women that it really helped is those that specifically had age related decline in oocyte, quality or quantity. It also was helpful in women with premature ovarian failure. So really we're looking at the three specif peak times that I think about using CoQ10 is women over 40. When women have poor ovarian reserve or they are undergoing IVF,

Black Seed Oil and Selenium 15:00

those are the the best studied uses of ubiquitin or CoQ10. And the dosages for most of them were actually around 600 milligrams. Believe it or not, that's a really high dose of ubiquitin. While it's relatively expensive, but you need that high dose if you're going to be effective. So that's what you got for CoQ10 last. Actually, we have a few more to cover. Black human seed oil, really great for sperm health and we generally use it as a food organic, cold pressed black human seed oil about a tablespoon twice a day with food helps to improve motility and morphology and has a slight increase in semen volume for women.

It can be. There aren't that many studies on fertility specifically, but it does affect thyroid markers. So it would help decrease BMI or body weight. It would help decreasing age and could potentially help for women that have anti TPO antibodies. So it's really specific use, but those are some uses that are really, really helpful in very specific women. The thing that we need to be careful about here is that too much black human seed oil could potentially cause an elevation of estrogen. So if we're thinking about someone who has maybe high estrogen levels, we want to make sure that we're monitoring this a little bit more closely.

Next, selenium. We're almost there, you guys. Selenium in men increased testosterone. So for men that have low testosterone or maybe have low LH and FSH and need to improve their sperm concentration, motility or morphology, it's really great to have some selenium in there. 200 micrograms is the daily dose that's recommended in these studies. You don't want to go too high on selenium. It could be toxic and make sure to not give this to someone or not. Take this if you have high testosterone levels.

So if the testosterone levels are high, it's really kind of contraindicated because it will cause the testosterone to go up pretty significant. Only in women, selenium is potentially helpful. It's shown to have a link with good fetal development. That means it really helps the baby in the development of the baby. It's also shown to decrease the chances

Glutathione and Closing Remarks 18:00

of hypotensive episodes later in pregnancy. So this is hypertension or and or preeclampsia. It might be really important to put in selenium as a preventative. It has also been shown to improve thyroid function. But again, there's no direct benefit to fertility. So if you're deficient in selenium, definitely take selenium. But if you're not deficient, then a micro dose of selenium like 100 micrograms per day just as a maintenance doses. Great. And then your prenatal should have about 200 micrograms.

So to have that good, healthy babies development as well as preventing hypertension later in pregnancy, last but not least, we're there. Glutathione and Glutathione is one of my favorite. So if you stuck around this long here, it is good that I found the reduced form of Glutathione Ideally you want this in a liposomal form of good is iron because that's where you're going to absorb it. The best we actually have, I'm not affiliated with the company, we just have a bunch of this Glutathione So we have these liquid bottles of Glutathione that are absorbable through the buccal membrane.

So in the mouth love it. I am loving it. I see a difference when I take it. It's a lot lower dose, believe it or not, but you're absorbing a lot higher percentage. So if you're going to take it by mouth, that's the way to do it. A lot of the studies are done on IV Glutathione which is a whole different beast. You need a prescription, you need a doctor, etc. So if you're taking oral Glutathione ideally you the studies are on like 100 to 200 milligrams of reduced Glutathione which means it's an uphill of some form or a 100 milligrams of liposomal good with iron or 30 milligrams of the oral buccal Glutathione which is amazing.

It tastes so much better than the liposomal form. So many people complain about that. So that's my go to improve sperm motility and morphology in men and for women, it plays a pivotal role in okay activation. That's sort of like waking up those eggs to develop and protects against reactive oxygen species. If you heard one of my talks earlier, there are 1000 mitochondria in the ovaries. That's a lot of mitochondria. So protecting against oxidative damage is really, really important because the more oxidative stress you have, the lower the quality of those eggs.

So oxidative stress is associated with follicular growth. Corpus, lithium formation and embryonic growth, good with iron, has shown to have a positive effect on lowering oxidative stress within the ovaries. And on the endometrial lining it also increases treg cells. So it maybe super helpful for women who have autoimmune infertility and or recurrent pregnancy loss. So there you have it. That's all of my favorite supplements and herbs for fertility. I hope you got so much out of this. We're going to do a deeper dove into all of this because it was so fast and there is more to be covered on what not to take as far as supplements go, what to watch out for other antioxidants and supplements for fertility.

So there's a lot more to cover. It will be covered in my master class coming up really soon. So look out for that and I'll talk to you soon. I hope you enjoyed the amazing talks on our last day together officially for the fertility summit. I'll see you soon. Bye.