Toxin Swaps To Boost Your Fertility

Carrie Jones, ND, FABNE, MPH

Dr. Carrie.

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Dr. Aumatma. We have an incredible lineup of speakers for you. 

Carrie Jones, ND, FABNE, MPH

In addition, Dr. Aumatma and I have created a mini crash course for you. 

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

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. 

Carrie Jones, ND, FABNE, MPH

We hope that this will serve as a helpful context to get a deeper understanding through the day’s interviews. 

Aumatma Simmons, ND, FABNE, MS

Hey, welcome to the Beyond Infertility Summit. Today we’re talking about toxins. Of course, I’m your host, Dr. Aumatma. Let’s get into it. 

Here are the five most important toxin swaps to make. If you are trying to conceive, the first and foremost is, of course, plastic. It’s everywhere around us. The most important thing is going to be the food, water, or other things going into your body that are in plastic containers, especially those exposed to heat. Everything plays a role here. The more you can swap out, the better. 

I would start with your food containers, leftovers, that kind of thing. If you can start by replacing all of those plastic containers with glass, that’s a good starting point. A lot of people have asked me, What do you do with the lids? Because they’re always plastic. There’s no such thing as a metal or glass lid. In that case, if you’re concerned about that, and we should be, you can leave it uncovered till it’s fully cooled down, then put the lid on and stick it in the fridge. Don’t heat glass containers with plastic lids on top. Leave the lids off; find another way. If you want to cover it, you can cover it with a paper napkin. That’s a great way to not expose yourself to more plastic. 

The other ones that stand out for me are, of course, water containers or water bottles. Get rid of the plastic bottles. Please, do not buy filtered or spring water in plastic bottles unless it’s an emergency. You don’t want to drink out of this stuff. Even the plastic containers that store water sometimes you go into an office and they have those water dispensers and they’re all plastic. Bring your water. If you work outside of the house, bring your water with you. Bring enough water for the whole day so that you’re not drinking water that’s been sitting in plastic jars for how many months before it was delivered to you. 

Those are easy things to swap out. They’re going to make a huge difference to estrogens, or, I should say, the estrogen-mimicking compounds that are in and being released into your food and water, and all of the things that you’re exposed to are detrimental to fertility. Your hormones. don’t buy the stuff that says it’s BPA-free. That’s a tactic to get people to buy plastic, even though it’s still got bisphenol compounds, which are the endocrine disruptors affecting your estrogen and all of your hormones. Don’t feed into the hype you want to stay with within the glass metal—not aluminum, but stainless steel. Those are the best alternatives that we have. As much as you can eliminate those from your life, you’re going to feel better and support your fertility. 

Number two: fragrances. Let’s get rid of fragrances. A lot of people are into candles and air fresheners, and those plug-in things are car fresheners. Get rid of it. Get rid of it for your man, too. All of the fragranced stuff. Even health and beauty aids that have fragrances are going to affect your hormones massively. The phthalates in those fragrances have been shown to affect air quality, sperm quality, and implantation. They’re just going to affect everything fertility-related—your hormones and your partner. Make sure that guys are usually, I don’t use that many fragrances, but I don’t use that many toxins. I don’t put that much stuff on my skin. Cool. You’re breathing it in. If you have a car freshener in your car that you spend an hour in every single day,

The swap here is to move towards essential oils and buy things that are essential oils. If the ingredient on a healthier body product says fragrance, that’s not an essential oil. It’s sometimes misleading on the front of the label. You want to flip it over. If it says fragrance on there, mix it. Buy something without the fragrance. We love our house to smell good. But even the natural candles that are made of soy and essential oils still have fragrance. Instead, we bought it, and I was a little bit concerned about the plastic in the essential oil dispensers. If you’ve ever seen those essential oil dispensers, regardless of what they are, they’re sometimes ceramic. They are still lined with plastic on the inside. Instead of those, there’s a company called LOXIM, L-O-X-I-M, and I’m not affiliated in any way. That company makes an essential oil dispenser that you can just attach your glass bottle to. There’s no plastic. I love it. It makes your house smell good. It’s so potent, it lasts forever. We’ve had an essential oil blend in there, and we just keep rotating it all around the house. We love it. That’s a great way to swap out the stuff that smells good but is toxic for your body for something that still smells good but is nontoxic. That was number two.

Number three: Is going to be your makeup and beauty aids. I’m sorry, but the average woman is putting 127 toxins on her skin, which is the biggest organ of our body. It absorbs everything we put in, just our digestive tract. If you won’t eat it, you won’t put it in your mouth. It probably doesn’t belong on your skin. You guys can tell I have plenty of makeup on. There are makeup and beauty brands that are doing amazing things. I wish there was a resource I could point you to. The company that we used to point our friends and clients to is no longer there. You want to look at my Amazon store because I do have a list of all of the companies that have clean beauty products. I’ve just been compiling this list because it’s kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot of product out there. It’s a lot of mislabeling. Some will say, super clean, and it’s not. 

You want to make sure that either someone has pre-filtered it for you or you have a way to filter it yourself. How to read the ingredients. One of the resources that we are going to give to you is the Divas Detox Guide. which shows you and teaches you how to read labels on health and beauty products so that you can get educated for yourself if you don’t understand my product choices. No problem. You can get it. Make sure to download the Diva Detox Guide. That’s going to give you so much information about how to do these health and beauty swaps in a way that still works for you and gives you what you need. I love makeup. I’ve loved it since I was 12, but I have found all of the alternatives that work for my skin, my tone, and all of that. It’s not reacting to even some of the natural stuff that is reactive sometimes, so just kind of finding your sweet spot with it is my suggestion, and it takes some time, and it’s going to feel like, this is so expensive. The reality is that it’s less expensive, I feel than some of the big mall stores, Sephora, or something like that. I feel like I spend less money on makeup since I switched to natural, nontoxic products. 

Swap number four: Is going to be your menstrual products. I know something you all don’t want to hear about, nor do you want to talk to me about it. But we need to talk about it. Tampons and pads are sprayed with glyphosate. Because, say, cotton is the biggest plant sprayed with glyphosate, which turns into pads and tampons, which we are inserting into our vaginas. My vagina is not so happy. You may want to switch to menstrual cups, and or period panties ideally. Those are my ideals. I love menstrual cups. I rave about them all the time because I kid you not. My menstrual pain went from eight out of 10 most cycles to two out of 10 just from making the swap. For all of you who have horrendous cycles, this is easy, it saves you money, it’s more comfortable, and you don’t have to change tampons all day. It’s amazing. That’s my first suggestion. I know people kind of get skeevy about it; honestly, it’s a little bit of a learning curve, but once you get into it, it’s going to be amazing, I promise. I have loved it. Many women come back to us and say, Thank you so much. You changed my period of life because I no longer sit in massive pain all day long. That’s number four. 

If you don’t have menstrual cups or period panties, then you can look into organic pads and tampons. I don’t trust it because, even though the organic pads and tampons were grown without their pesticides and glyphosate and all of that, all of these farms are next to each other in the Midwest. If the farm next to you is spraying, there’s no way that your plants are protected from that and are organic, so they can consider her organic because they didn’t spray it themselves. But the reality is that a neighbor’s farm is spraying glyphosate on their cotton plant. You can only do so much with the organic stuff. 

Number five: Is going to be intoxicants. I was trying to write a nice way to say it, but they’re technically called intoxicants for a reason. That’s your alcohol, your marijuana, cigarettes—all of the things that we are using in our society to help us with stress are toxins. There are a lot of cool ways these days to swap out intoxicants for things that are not intoxicants. But these are the toxins in alcohol and marijuana, specifically. There’s a lot of research on how this affects your fertility, whether you’re a man or a woman, and specifically, cigarettes are awful. The last time I searched, there were 7,000 studies about how cigarette smoke negatively impacts fertility, negatively impacts pregnancy outcomes, and negatively affects the health of the future baby, so cigarettes should just be done. 

How do we still have people who smoke cigarettes? We need to get rid of them. If you’ve been a smoker for a long period, you will need a long period to recover your egg or sperm health after the consistent or chronic use of cigarettes. It takes a while to undo the damage that these intoxicants do to your body. If you are a marijuana smoker or user, I should say that marijuana has all kinds of effects. The smoke inhalation is one part of the effect. The others are going to have, you’re going to affect the absorption of nutrients. You’re impacting the way your hormones function. Unfortunately, it triggers cortisol. It is putting your body under stress, even though you feel more relaxed. It is not a trip. Please. If you are consuming any of these things, I don’t have an ethical issue with them. I just have a fertility issue with them. Get rid of it. It’s going to support your fertility so much. 

We’re going to dive deeper tomorrow into the supplements for air quality and sperm quality. Make sure to tune back in. Thank you for being with us today. We have an amazing lineup of speakers for you today, so make sure to not forget to check out the speakers, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow. See you. Peace.