Many women underestimate the importance of having your male partner involved in the fertility journey. It’s not just the contribution of his sperm but his presence that will either help you reach your goals of becoming a mother faster or prolong the journey.

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Key Takeways

10:14 Preventing heart disease

15:20 Male partners and data

20:26 Male health in fertility

25:32 Treating both partners

Memorable Quotes

"His calprotectin was 161. Ideally we want it under 50, and ideally I want it under 25. So 161 tells me there is an insane amount of inflammation in his colon and specifically more towards the sigmoid colon."

"Change. Okay. Because if you want to be a go getter and lively and accomplish a lot of things in life and you want to build a family and your test says that you are actually cells are that of a 51 year old versus 36 years old, it's like, oh my God, I don't like what? That's crazy. What can I do about it?"

"At the root of all infertility struggle is going to be some sort of microbial imbalance. There's going to be some sort of microbial imbalance and environmental toxic load. And those two are very intertwined because there's a lot of toxins that can pleomorph basically change the bugs, which will make them more pathogenic and more opportunistic."

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His system was pretty overloaded. And so when we did the oxidative damage score in general, like, his whole pathways were blocked. He's 36, and the age that he was given based on the level of oxidative stress that his body was under. And so they tested a lot of the genes for oxidative stress and, you know, his level from Nutrients. He was 51. So that was a big hit for him, for his ego, and obviously a huge motivation. So what I will say for my male partners, I never, in general, like, for my husband, I'll never tell him what to do until I show him some data, because he is so logical. He needs to see data like, why would I change this? Pregnancy is a natural process. So if it's not happening or if it's not sticking, something is missing. After having a family member go through infertility and experiencing a miscarriage myself, I realized how little support and education women have around infertility. I want to Change that. I'm Dr. Jane Levesque. I'm a naturopathic doctor and a natural fertility expert. Tune in every Tuesday at 9am for insightful case studies, expert interviews, and practical tips on how you can optimize fertility naturally. If you've been struggling with infertility, pregnancy loss, women's health issues, or you just want to be proactive and prepare yourself for the next big chapter in your life, this show is for you. All right, today, I want to share male fertility case with you. Now, I'm always working with a couple, but I want to highlight the male today day because a lot of you ladies are underestimating the importance of involving your partner into the fertility journey, even though you were told that his sperm is fine and you are, quote, unquote, the problem. So it takes two to conceive. And I've talked a lot about sperm quality and the parameters that we're looking at and what optimal ranges are for natural conception versus just can we find any good sperm to do ivf. And then, of course, there's a lot of people that are resorting to icsi, where they're actually injecting the sperm into the egg, because usually it's because the sperm is not strong enough. There's no motility. It's not swimming to the egg, it's not fertilizing the egg. And then, of course, there's issues sometimes with the egg where the zona pellucida, the outside layer of the egg, is too hard, and so then the sperm can't penetrate it. Point being is we have to start looking not just at the sperm parameters that your doctor has ran, but the overall male and their health, because everything, and I mean everything that the male does will reflect in their sperm. And I can't tell you this case right here. So this gentleman's name is Beau. And when they came to me, she's been diagnosed with endometriosis. She's been doing all of the things because he was, quote, unquote, fined. They assumed he was fined as well because he didn't have a lot of symptoms. And when they ran his sperm analysis, obviously he doesn't have an ob gyn, but their fertility specialist recommended to just go get a regular sperm analysis. And the results, there was like four things tested, meaning there was concentration, there was volume, there was ph and motility. There was no morphology, there was no breakdown of the motility, how much of it is progressive versus just motile versus immortile. And it was probably one of the worst results that I've seen from a perspective of. Not that his sperm was really terrible, but the markers that were tested were so little. There was very little detail on the actual test that I knew that there was something else going on. Point being is. Let me share this story. And when they came. So she has endometriosis. She'd been doing all the stuff, you know, from the natural standpoint, considering ivf, being told that you know, low amh, she's not going to be able to use her own eggs. She doesn't have any eggs. And of course, she wants to figure out why this is happening. And of course she wants to have biological children. He had the one sperm analysis done. He has some health issues, but he's never made the efforts to go to a naturopathic doctor or functional doctor. And this is very common for males. Now, if you want to work with either myself or one of my team members, and you are working on fertility, we require both couples, like both partners to be on all of the calls. Yes, there are some calls, once you're working with us that we can separate you. But for the initial portion, we require you to be there because we want to see and understand how you guys are as a couple, what has been done, where your holes are, where your blind spots are, and if we're the right people to help. So in this instance, when we started taking and looking at his history, he's had no blood work done of any kind. Then he had that atrocious sperm analysis that had barely any markers on it. And there was some ranges there that were not optimal that I knew I needed to investigate further. And then he had quite a bit of symptoms. He got sick with COVID and just couldn't shake it off. He had kind of that long Covid where he couldn't. His lungs felt full. He would wake up with them feeling like going into a panic attack because he catch his breath because there was so much fluid buildup in the lungs. Energy was low, motivation was low. He's had a bunch of rashes. He had some bloating. And so it wasn't anything that was super drastic, but he was just feeling blah. So when we got into all of the testing and I'm just going to share my screen, so if you're watching it through YouTube, you can see it. But if you're listening, I'm going to walk you through it. I'm just going to show you the highlights of the functional lab testing versus everything that we ran. Because it's a lot. You know, I get 100 pages worth worth of reports and I want to show you the highlights because for somebody who doesn't really have a lot of digestive symptoms, but who has a lot of skin symptoms or even a lot of lung heaviness in the lungs and mucus and the body's not processing that well, I want to look at the gut. The gut is the epicenter of our health. And it's either a place where it's a source of our strength or it's a source of weakness, meaning there's leaky gut. So things are leaking into places into the bloodstream that are not supposed to be there, like pathogens or even larger food particles. This is where we're talking about food sensitivity. But then you're also not detoxing well. You're not absorbing your nutrients well. And there's just a huge downstream effect when the gut isn't working. So the highlights from kind of the stool, the environmental toxic panel, and we did like an overall oxidative stress panel. His cal protectin was 161. Ideally we want it under 50, and ideally I want it under 25. So 161 tells me there is an insane amount of inflammation in his colon and specifically more towards the sigmoid colon. His other inflammatory markers came up. I don't want to say clear. There was a couple that were on the upper side, but this was the only one that came up really, really high. Of course, I look at what the. You know, if you're in the red versus in the yellow or the green, and then even when you're in the green, Are you in the optimal range or are you closer to, you know, starting to go into the yellow? So the calprotectin was huge. I believe MMP9 was another marker that was elevated for him, which is indication of high inflammation in the gut. So right off the bat, I know he has inflammation. Then we look at his ability to digest and absorb food. His pancreatic elastase, which is the enzymes that your pancreas is producing to be able to break down food, is at 134, somebody his age, so mid-30s, you should be close to the 4, 500 mark, not even 200. So like if you're at 200 and you're 30 years old, that's very low production of your enzymes. The good news is these are pretty easy to fix because a lot of the times you just have to slow down and start eating and chewing your food instead of, you know, eating on the go. So we know that he's not digesting and he's not breaking down his food well and he's not absorbing it well. And then when we go into fat malabsorption, he had an insane amount of cholesterol and fat in his stool. And he was this classic example of he eats pretty clean, but someone told him he should have more healthy fats. And so he doubled down on having healthy fats. He would have one to almost two avocados a day because it's just guacamole packs. And then I want to make sure I include some nuts and seeds. And then I'm using oils for my cooking. And then I'm having a fatty cut of steak, some bacon, whatever. And he was just having an insane amount of fat, so he wasn't absorbing any of that fat. There's also probably a huge. It's always combination of things, right? It's you're eating too much or your body is not breaking it down. And it's the combination is that, well, like he was eating too much. And then his liver and his gallbladder is just so taxed that there's multiple different reasons for that. We'll talk about that in a second. But then he's not efficient at producing that bile. And so bio is how we absorb the cholesterol and actually use it. And then of course the fat soluble vitamins are going to come with that, like your vitamin A and D and E and K. So he's not absorbing any of those things because the fat is just coming right out so that bile production isn't there. And the Quick fix is, hey, we're going to cut back the fat, and then we're going to really work on the liver and the gallbladder to support it. And then from the environmental toxic perspective, and this is where I really wanted to make sure there wasn't anything like, you know, there's the heavy metals, there's the mold, the yeast and the fungus, and then the industrial toxins that can be really damaging to our DNA and cause damage to the actual DNA, which, of course, is going to impact sperm quality. And that DNA fragmentation index is going to go up, but also just longevity and health of our being. When someone says that I want to prevent having cardiovascular disease, well, the first thing that you need to do is, is look at your labs and see where you are on that spectrum. Heart disease doesn't develop overnight. Usually when people come in with a heart attack, and then you see that they have high cholesterol and high triglycerides, and there's a lot of inflammation, and their blood sugar is dysregulated, that hasn't been happening for a month. That has been happening for decades. And so in our 30s is the time to prevent all of these nasty things that we see happening to our parents or just an, you know, older population in general. And a lot of my patients come to me and say, like, I want to prevent what my parents went through. This is how we do it. We look and we test and we see the stress that the body's under. So then we can, you know, give them a personalized protocol to essentially reverse a lot of these issues. So he had quite a bit of mold come up, gliotoxin being one of the higher ones as well. And gliotoxin is a big. It gets produced a lot by yeast and candida. Usually there's a candida infection. Now, typically, we don't have to see a candida infection in the gut because, and I didn't see it on the stool analysis, he didn't have, you know, a positive candida test. By the time I see it in the gut, usually the candida is, like, really overgrown, and it's a really big deal. But gliotoxin is an indication of yeast and fungal overgrowth, and he's very much experiencing that because since getting Covid there was that my lungs are heavy. I have a lot of mucus, I have a lot of wetness, for the lack of a better term, moisture that he just can't seem to get out. And then, of course, well, I don't want to go out for A run because it feels like I can't breathe and now I don't have energy. And, you know, it's a negative spiral. So white, a bit of mold. The first thing that I see when I see mold is we want to make sure that the house is good and they've had quite a few inspections and then we want to make sure that they have a clean environment, meaning that they are dusting on a regular basis. It's very common to dust as mold food. So if the house is accumulating dust, then the circulation in the house isn't good and then that is going to lead to mold down the road. So just prevention. And then there is a couple mold pieces, factors that came out that are found in grains. So whether it's corn, rice, barley, wheat, how the grain is processed and then stored and how long it's been stored for will accumulate the mold particles. And then when we have poor gut function, our body can't break it down and we can't get rid of it. We are designed as human beings to be able to break down mold. And when the system is overwhelmed, it's usually because we don't have. The mechanism is really slow to break it down. And usually it's because there's a lot going on, right? There's a high oxidative stress. So there's a spiral downwards. Just like there's a spiral upwards, the spiral downwards is. Well, the digestion isn't working well, so now you're going to accumulate more toxins and then you're exposed and then it's making more difficult for the body to process the toxins because the load continues to increase and that continues to take new nutrients away from you. And so it's like it's harder and harder to get better. The opposite is true. Once we start moving the digestions, when we start moving the liver and gallbladder, increasing drainage in, increasing your energies, supporting your methylation cycle, supporting your B vitamins, all that kind of stuff. All of a sudden the body's better at processing the mold. It can break it down, it can get rid of the infections, so on and so forth. So for him, this was a really big piece. And there was some heavy metals. They were not drinking filtered water, they were just drinking Berkey, I believe. And a lot of PFAS came up when those are the forever chemicals. When I see a lot of these forever chemicals come up, what I automatically. And someone who's eating well, they're not eating out frequently, I automatically think water because. Or unless it's like in their cookware. And they were already, you know, using stainless steel or cast iron. So they weren't using anything that would have the exposure to the pfas. And they weren't eating out very frequently. So right away I'm thinking water supply. Unfortunately, this is something that happens to a lot of people. And once they do get it tested, sometimes some of the chemicals will show up, like, you know, with their water treatment plan that they decided to go and see if they tested. And they're like, yep, it matches up to what they're seeing on their labs. Sometimes it doesn't. The problem is there's, you know, 80,000 chemicals, probably more now, and they're testing for like 200. So chances are they're going to miss the other 7,970 9,800. But point being is, we want to create a clean environment. And his system was pretty overloaded. And so when we did the oxidative damage score in general, like, his whole pathways were blocked. He's 36 and the age that he was given based on the level of oxidative stress that his body was under. And so they tested a lot of the genes for oxidative stress and you know, his level from Nutrients. He was 51. So that was a big hit for him, for his ego, and obviously a huge motivation. So what I will say for my male partners, I never in general, like, for my husband, I'll never tell him what to do until I show him some data because he is so logical, he needs to see data. Like, why would I change this? I don't understand what the problem is. Once he sees and understands what the problem is, it's very easy to change the behavior. And so I treat, I mean, all of my patients like that. But I think with the male patients, it really helps them understand why they need to make the change. Change. Okay. Because if you want to be a go getter and lively and accomplish a lot of things in life and you want to build a family and your test says that you are actually cells are that of a 51 year old versus 36 years old, it's like, oh my God, I don't like what? That's crazy. What can I do about it? Right? So my male patients are always very eager to start because they know that I don't want to be in this red, I want to be over here in the green. How do I do it? So let me tell you why it's important to bring the male partner on board. And I hope to share this couple's case once they are pregnant together. But I'm just going to share this component because I think it's really important. There was a really big transformation for him. Of course, we got him on the supplements and all the right things and the saunas and the red light therapy. And so within a couple of months, here is the frustrating part, I guess, if you will, ladies, is that males will always get better a lot faster than us women. And the reason for that is that their metabolism generally tends to be faster because of the muscle mass that they have and also because they don't have hormonal fluctuations. They do have hormonal fluctuations, but it's just a daily thing versus a monthly thing. And it's just more based on their testosterone. Yes, estrogen will fluctuate, yes, progesterone will fluctuate a little bit, but it's so little in comparison to what we women go through. And so for us women, we have to work with our menstrual cycle and optimize that where for the male, they don't have to worry about that. So they do tend to get better faster. But what I always say is I need my male patients to get better faster as fast as possible. Because energetically, Beau was not leading his family. He was tired, he was sick, he was unmotivated. And while he had his partner frantically looking online, trying to figure out what to do, she's in this anxious state. Her husband is kind of sick, but not, not really sick. And she doesn't really want to worry about him, but she also doesn't feel this leader present in the family who she can lean on. And I think if we step back and look at the energetics of what it is to be pregnant, pregnancy is a very vulnerable state. So as a woman, someone who is a go getter, proactive, a planner, type A, you don't like to be vulnerable. Guess what? Pregnancy is a vulnerable state. So I need you to practice being vulnerable. And who is going to protect you during the time of pregnancy? It's going to be your partner. So if you don't feel safe around your partner and your nervous system doesn't feel safe or you're worried about him, subconsciously, you're almost like, I can't really get pregnant because who's going to take care of me? Even though you desperately want to have a baby, subconsciously your body is like, I don't feel safe because it's already in a vulnerable state. So if your body's already in a vulnerable state, it's hard for it to then go into even a further vulnerable state, if you know what I'm saying. So it's really important for me as a practitioner to get the male patients feeling good, meaning that their health is improved, their energy is improved. They now can take on the load of maybe doing some more meal prep or helping their women go to bed earlier and maybe taking their phones away lovingly or whatever, like doing things together, becoming more of a leader in the family, stepping into their masculine energy. So then you as a female can step into your feminine energy. Okay, this is the transformation that I talk about with my couples. It's not. When my couples sit down with me, I always say, the couple that gets pregnant is not the same couple that's sitting in front of me today. There's a transformation that needs to happen and there's a shift for both of you. And the male presence is very, very important. It's not just the sperm that he's going to provide. It's who he is in the family and the role that he plays. And are you able to lean on him and feel safe around him and be vulnerable around him? Because you are prepping for that, right? Being vulnerable and being taken care of when you're pregnant. And postpartum, I have some couples who have gone through postpartum periods and they're, like, shocked. The women are shocked how bad they feel. And the men are like, man, I'm so glad I'm in such better health because I can take care of her. We need to have that preparation well ahead of time. Not once, you know, the postpartum hits. You know, for some couples, the body just won't let them get pregnant pregnant because it's in such a vulnerable and depleted state for either both the male or the female. So the first, I don't want to say, like, there's two main reasons why I need the males to get better faster, but it's just to even be part of the process. And the first one is what I just described. Their energy, their presence. They're leading the family and being able to support us as women. The second reason is I cannot have the male be the source of infection. What I mean by that is at the root of all infertility struggle is going to be some sort of microbial imbalance. There's going to be some sort of microbial imbalance and environmental toxic load. And those two are very intertwined because there's a lot of toxins that can pleomorph basically change the bugs, which will make them more Pathogenic and more opportunistic. So those two things go hand in hand for this case. Endometriosis is, I think, every case of infertility. The root cause is going to be some sort of microbial imbalance. This is especially true for endometriosis. There is an infection that is driving the disease progression, that is driving the immune system dysregulation, that's driving the inflammation, that in adding to the estrogen overload and the histamine and the whole thing. So Beau, he had some. You could. We knew he had some infections because of his lungs and he was sick and. But we're not associating that with reinfecting her. We even know that he probably has a lot of yeast and fungus. And so, sure, it didn't show up on the gut. I believe it actually showed up on the urine, like the organic acid test, that just didn't share that. But he is a source of a fungal infection for her. And it's because we're intimate together, but also because we cook for one another, we hug one another, we touch one another. And whoever you are living with, you are sharing microbiome with. And so if I'm just trying to impact her without him, she's going to continue to relapse, and that's exactly what happens. And so she feels really bad because she feels like her body is broken, but in reality, it's. You're living with a source of infection. Right? And it's not about who is who, because we don't know if she's the source of infection. And then she's passing it to him, and then she'll heal it, but he now has it, and it doesn't really matter. The point is that we need to treat both partners. So I cannot have a partner living that. I have no idea what's going on for him. And Bo is this perfect example where he was in terrible. He was fine, but he wasn't great. But because his wife was going through so much more, it was more important to focus on her, not him. Now I focus on both. And when he gets better, faster, then he can actually support her a lot more, so then she can get better at her own rate. So I hope you guys, this makes a very strong case as to why male fertility is not just important for the health of the child, because it is. It's 50% of the DNA contribution. And we know that, like any sperm parameters, whether it's motility or concentration or morphology or DNA fragmentation, vitality, they're all associated with either A good or a bad outcome of the pregnancy. And that could be a miscarriage or it could be complications down the road in the pregnancy like preeclampsia or preterm birth. Male fertility. And the male contribution is important. It's 50%. You cannot, like, if there is a practitioner that doesn't involve the male when you are working on fertility because they don't want to have the uncomfortable conversation with you that says he needs to be here. Or maybe it's lack of knowledge. This is why I share this. Because even if you're a practitioner listening to me and you are specializing infertility and you are not seeing male patients, you need to stop doing that. You're doing this couple a huge disservice. So I hope that this is a very strong case for you guys as to why you need to involve the male partner. Because the sperm usually comes fine and, oh, the cholesterol is a little elevated, but it's not bad. Meanwhile, your man is tired, he's carrying an extra 20 pounds, he has random rashes, he's snoring like crazy. Those are all signs of poor health. If he gets healthier, you'll get healthier. And usually when you get healthier, he will as well. But we as women, if, we tend to feel like we're nagging when we're constantly telling the guy what to do. Because for the guys, they don't go on feelings, they go on logic. And so if they haven't listened to all the podcasts that you have listened, and if they haven't ran the lab work that you have ran, they don't have the reason to make a change. They don't. In their eyes, nothing is wrong. They just think that you're taking it too far. Where is. I say I don't know what's wrong, but let me just see. I'll run some labs and if nothing is wrong, fantastic. You don't have to do anything, but if something is, then we have something to focus on. And that approach really helps because usually there's lots to focus on. Okay, we just need to make sure that we involve the mail from the get go. So like I said, I hope you guys find this is a very strong case. Share this with your mail partner. Remember, it's not just about their sperm quality. It's actually their presence, their energy. And we want to make sure they're not a source of infection. And what I mean by that, it could be really subtle. It doesn't have to be STDs and STI it's just if they have more fungal or yeast overgrowth, if they have a parasite and then you're showing up with a parasite, you just are going to keep going back and forth. So we need to make sure when we treat fully treat the root cause, we are addressing the whole house as opposed to an AKA both male and female partner as opposed to just the female. Thanks so much for tuning in you guys and I'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. To read the full show notes of this episode, including summary, timestamps, guest quotes and any resources that were mentioned on the episode, visit drjanelevesque.com forward slash podcast and if you're getting value from these episodes, I'd love it if you took 2 minutes to share it with a friend. Rate and leave me a review at Rate this Podcast.com Dr. Jane the reviews will help with the discoverability of the show and who knows, I might share your review on my next episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and let's make your fertility journey your healing journey.