So many couples are forced into ART without getting this critical nutrient tested. Optimal vitamin D levels are important for egg and sperm quality, for increasing fertilitzation rate, for improving embryo quality, endometrial receptivity, improving hormone function, neurotransmitter function and so much more. If you have no idea what your or your partner’s vitamin D levels are and you are feeling pressure from your fertility clinic…this episode is for you.

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Key Takeways

6:07 Vitamin D's role in male fertility

11:12 Predicting and preventing certain miscarriages

18:19 Calcium signaling and sperm motility

24:56 Inflammation, autoimmunity, and fertility connection

31:34 Vitamin D's importance during pregnancy

34:38 Testing and supplementing vitamin D effectively

Memorable Quotes

"Vitamin D actually improves calcium signaling in sperm cells. And calcium is probably one of the most underestimated nutrients for both male and female fertility, but especially in males."

"If pregnancy is a natural process and it's not happening, something is missing. And don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for IVF, but in my opinion, everybody should be getting ready for IVF. Minimum six months."

"We want optimal levels, not just barely over the line of, quote, unquote, normal again. Abundance, right? Abundance. Vitality. This is true for both of you guys. So, ladies, for you and for your partner, for his sperm quality, for your egg quality, for your immune system function, for your hormones, for all these things that I just talked about, vitamin D is really important."

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You really need it for spermatogenesis, which is the production of sperm, and it does improve sperm motility and sperm morphology. So if your man's morphology is really low, meaning it should be above 4% and ideally 9, 10 and above, and that basically tells us, is he making sperm that's normal shaped, or is he making deformed sperm? And if the sperm is deformed, where is the deformation? Is it in the head, in the midpiece and the tail? So DN form vitamin D perspective, it helps with the production of sperm. And we'll dig into that a little bit later. From supporting testosterone, supporting cholesterol, supporting inflammation, and actually, you know, supporting the DNA formation and DNA fragmentation piece. But it helps with the shape and the structure of the sperm. And we tend to see men who have optimal vitamin D levels because it has a hormonal effect. Again, we'll talk about that in a second. Men who have adequate vitamin D levels have adequate testosterone, and when they have adequate testosterone, well, there is a huge trickle effect for everything, not just for sperm quality, but for their metabolism. And, you know, when we're talking about diabetes and insulin resistance, all of that gets improved. There's less inflammation, the mood is better, the testosterone is there. To its muscle mass. So immune system is going to even be better just from having more muscle mass. And the man just feels a lot more confident in himself, which is really, really important for the female in terms of fertility. Why vitamin D is important? It is. There's vitamin D receptors that are found on the ovaries. And so the connection between the egg and the sperm is that of the immune system when it first meets the fertilization. And what we're seeing is that there is vitamin D receptors on the ovaries and there's actually vitamin D receptors on the sperm. And so there is this interaction that has to happen in order. And the immune system is highly involved here. But in order for that connection to happen, we need vitamin D. And so vitamin D will actually help to regulate the development of the follicle and it will help to support that maturation of the oocyte. So when it's supposed to grow nice and big, that's vitamin D really helps with that. It's not the only thing that helps with that, but it's a big, big, big component. So when we have low vitamin D, again, you're thinking poor egg quality, you're thinking lower fertility rates, and even maybe not ovulating at all. Because the last thing that the body's thinking about is reproduction when the body is stressed. So the body has a hierarchy of importance. And ladies, we can live without ovaries, we can live without a uterus, we cannot live without our heart, we cannot live without our liver or our kidneys. Yes, sure, one kidney. So the body has an order of priority of where things are going. And so when we're deficient in vitamin D, the body isn't thinking like, oh, as soon as I get some vitamin D, I'm just going to go ahead and put it towards reproduction. It's going, I need this. I need this for my nervous system function, I need this for my immune system function. Like, immune system function takes pretty high priority because think about when there's a pathogen or any kind of inflammation, that's a fight orf flight response for the body. And so we have to have optimal levels in order to optimize fertility. Because the last thing that the body is, it's the last resort. It's fertility is something that we do when we're abundant, when there's a lot of vitality, not something that we do as a body. You know, the body doesn't think about it when we're really depleted. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty of pregnancies that have happened when we're depleted and we don't have this abundance and vitality and energy or nutrients, but we're seeing the trickle effect of what's happening for those babies that were born with mothers who were depleted and their grandbabies. Right. So infertility is a generational disease. And so the fact that the huge spike in infertility now is not actually something that you did, or it's. And again, not to put blame, but it's like we have to start looking at the mother and we have to start looking at the grandmother. And when all of these toxins and all of these things that got introduced that are screwing up with the body and we need to rebuild it back, essentially. So really huge for actual ovarian health and development of the follicle. And it's really important for creating a receptive environment in the endometrium. So endometrium receptivity is a real thing, and it is very much the function of the immune system. So you're going to, as I talk through this, you'll see that vitamin D is very, very important for our immune system function, and that is why it plays such a big role in supporting embryo implantation and being able to support pregnancy, the maintenance of pregnancy. So when we have low levels, of course we're going to see lower implantation rates and we're going to see a higher risk of miscarriage. And so I've talked, if you guys have been listening to me for a while, I've talked about there's certain miscarriages where there's nothing we could have done right here and right there.

We didn't know it was going to come. But there is some miscarriages where we can see them coming a mile away. We can see them coming. And whether it's because you have low vitamin D or because you have low progesterone or you have autoimmune disease and crazy inflammation and digestive distress, we can see and predict those things. And so my hope is that we, it's not that anybody is never going to go through a miscarriage, but my hope is that we do our due diligence and we prepare so then we learn from, well, what does the body need to be able to do this well? And do we have all those things so we can set ourselves up for success and decrease the rate of some of these losses or these issues with endometrial receptivity? I'll share another podcast with you of one of my current clients who they ended up Going through surrogacy. And then now we're working together just to see if she can carry as well. The amount of lead that she had in her body was insane. Insane. Like, it was just such insane levels of heavy metals. And the lead is for immune system and inflammation and embryo quality and all this. And they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to figure out why they can't get pregnant. And she has lead and low vitamin D and all this other nutrients, you know. So before we go down that rabbit hole, my hope is that we start optimizing these things and looking at these things because they're basic, but it's exactly what the body needs. So that's kind of from the fertility brush stroke overview. Now let's go into each individual section. And I'm not going to go through everything that the vitamin D does because otherwise this podcast would be two hours long. But we are going to go through the important ones and how they're related to fertility. So it does hormonal health. Vitamin D is really critical. And we're actually showing studies and seeing studies how vitamin D is acting like a hormone and a precursor to hormones. It has a regulatory effect. So it helps to regulate our endocrine system in. In women, it will influence the production of estrogen and progesterone and, of course, some testosterone as well. And we know that we want healthy levels of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone for women. In men, it will help to regulate testosterone levels. And we talked about testosterone. It's for libido, it's for your sperm production, for your partner, sperm production, for his muscle mass, his confidence, bone mass, mood, motivation, everything. So really simple. But vitamin D helps to regulate that process and helps to increase the production of testosterone. If you have pcos, one of the things we're actually seeing, and I would say that this is true not just for pcos, for endometriosis as well, because we're seeing low vitamin D levels in a diagnosis of any kind that has inflammation and an immune system involved. So pcos, I don't want to say it's directly related to immune system, but because there is usually so much inflammation and hormonal imbalance. So when we do supplement women with vitamin D, especially when they have something like pcos, and I'll talk about endometriosis in a second, we're seeing an improvement in insulin resistance. We're seeing an improvement in just the function of the ovary and the ability of the ovary to start to ovulate in that follicle to grow into mature. And then we're seeing the hormone balance restore. So we're seeing the estrogen and progesterone restore in comparison to the testosterone and therefore the ovulation, you know, basically being able to restore. When it comes to egg quality and ovarian function in general, vitamin D does have an antioxidant effect. So it helps to protect the oocytes, it helps to protect the eggs from oxidative stress. And if you think about, if you're over the age of 35, one of the things that happens is we start to see a decline in nutrients. Usually we're also seeing an accumulation of toxins, the production of ubiquinol, that's, you know, the active form of CoQ10 in the body starts to degrade. And so all of those things are contributing to lower poor egg quality. So one of my pet peeves is that if you're over the age of 35, and especially if you're over the age of 40, they just go, yeah, it's poor egg quality, and leave it at that. Whereas if I test your vitamin D levels and I see that the vitamin D level is low, I know that that egg quality is poor, partial, like, not a complete read, not the only reason, because of this vitamin D. But vitamin D is playing a big role in that. And so having the diagnosis of you have poor egg quality is not specific enough to me. It's way too simplistic and it's very dismissive. We want to, I want to understand why you have low egg quality because you can have high quality eggs up until you go into menopause. There is less of them, there's less eggs, but you can still have really high quality eggs. And we want to make sure that all your nutrients are on par. If, you know, fertility is a goal at an older age. Another interesting fact that we're seeing with vitamin D is that actually helps to maintain ovarian health because women who have higher levels of vitamin D also have higher levels of AMH hormone. So that is telling us about the ovarian reserve and what's left over. AMH gets influenced by the thyroid, it gets influenced by inflammation, and it gets influenced by vitamin D. So one of the questions I'll get a lot is, can I increase my amh? You can absolutely increase it, but the number is not going to go, you know, tenfold. It's usually going to maybe with some things like stem cell therapy or prp, when we're working on natural, without any other, I guess, invasive natural procedures, because if you think about stem cell therapy, it's still natural, but you're not going to see that jump tenfold. But you are going to see it. You're going to see the improvement. And I don't want my women to focus really hard on amh, because it's not just the amh, amh, fsh, lh, all those cortisol, thyroid, like all those hormones are going to play together. What we want to focus on is on the quality and understanding why that is low. Again, I'll never just test AMH and say you have poor ovarian reserve. We want to look at that, but we also want to look at the vitamin D levels, the thyroid, the inflammation, the immune system function. It's always a whole picture. You guys, please stop taking a diagnosis for what it is without having enough testing, because it can be really harmful for you, like spiritually, mentally, emotionally to hear something like, you have zero chance or 5% chance of conceiving. Because we see a lot of couples who can overcome that diagnosis. But I see a lot of couples who get crushed by that diagnosis and they stop trying or meaning, like they're kind of going through the motions, but they don't actually believe that anything can happen. So I want to bring some hope and some light. To those of you who have had poor diagnosis, my question is, how much testing have you had done? You know, what are they basing that diagnosis on? So, because vitamin D helps with AMH levels, of course, we see that the ovarian reserve is increased. So for those women who have optimal vitamin D levels, they tend to have better AMH numbers.

And of course, that tells us about their fertility potential. Potential when. Let's focus on the men for a second for sperm quality and male function. This is where it's very, very exciting and why vitamin D is important. So I told you that sperm has vitamin D receptors, and vitamin D actually improves calcium signaling in sperm cells. And calcium is probably one of the most underestimated nutrients for both male and female fertility, but especially in males. And this is something that I've learned from my mentor, Dr. Leah Hedgeman, because I always was like, you don't need calcium. You can get it from food. You don't need calcium. You can get it. You know, it's like, it causes hardening of the arteries and blah, blah, blah, blah. So calcium is really, really critical. And when I said at the beginning, you guys, if you have vitamin D deficiency, chances are you don't just have vitamin D deficiency. There's likely other deficiencies that are coming with it. And whether it's magnesium or calcium or vitamin K, sodium, potassium, yes. Sodium deficiency is like sodium is a really important mineral and it helps to push water into the cells. I'm not talking about eating poor quality salt, I'm talking about eating really high quality salt. And I actually test and I can't tell you how many of my patients, especially male patients, who are sweating a lot because they're exercising and they're so exhausted and so like they want to try to keep exercising but they can't. And I look at their sodium levels and they're so low, they're so depleted. There's no energy in the body. The body isn't communicating, the cells aren't communicating to one another and they're just sweating out all that salt they need to replace it. I've seen blood pressure improve in the positive direction, whether it went from, you know, having low blood pressure to having normal blood pressure. I've seen energy improve, I've seen adrenal function improve just from supplementing some salt. Whether it's LMNT electrolyte or actually just high quality salt like a Redmond or Crucial four is another one of my favorite companies that has Celtic salt salt. Like, it's fantastic. You can feel and taste the minerals in that salt versus something like table salt that you see at a restaurant. Anyways, sidetrack. But vitamin D helps to improve that calcium signaling which helps with sperm motility and then the ability for the egg, the sperm to penetrate the egg for that communication, the vitamin D receptor communication to happen. Vitamin D helps with the calcium, helps to get it moving towards in the right direction to bind and then essentially for the fertilization to happen. If your male partner, you've done sperm analysis and he has poor motility, we want to look at vitamin D levels, we want to look at calcium and magnesium, there's zinc as well. There's, like I said, all the electrolytes and vitamins and minerals. They're all really, really important. But vitamin D is one of those really big crucial ones. For another aspect for male fertility, we talked about hormone regulation. So support supporting testosterone levels, libido, sperm production and just reproductive health in general. If we take a step back and look at other functions, and this is for both males and females, but it helps with mood regulation. So it helps with the production of serotonin if you have anxiety or depression and if you've been put on the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So an SSRI that what an SSRI does is Keeps the serotonin around longer so you can have it longer in the system. And, and it's a feel good molecule, if you will. Obviously, when we have too much of it, it's not good. When we don't have enough of it, it's also not good. But it helps with the production of serotonin. And so what drives me nuts is if you go to the doctor and you express these symptoms and they just go, well, take this drug and it's gonna help versus going, I wonder what's causing this? Because we know low vitamin D levels can cause depression. I mean, think about the seasonal affective disorder. What happens in the winter versus in the summertime, how many people are depressed in the winter versus in the summertime. Right. There is a significant shift in the mood that people feel and have in the winter time. And that is directly linked to the amount of vitamin D that we're getting. And so we want to be having optimal levels of vitamin D for our mood, for anxiety and depression. And what I see in, like mood swings and just general mental health, which is obviously really important during fertility. And if you're struggling with infertility, you know, the roller coaster of the anxiety and the depression throughout just your own natural cycle, let alone when you're going through IVF and the big roller coaster of waiting for all the results and how many eggs did I get, how many did they fertilize and how many embryos? And now I'm going to do the testing and like, it's chaos, you know, and when you're already depleted and you're being put into that situation, it's also difficult to be able to manage it. And remember what I said, we as women, our reproduction is best at when we're abundant and when we're energetic and things are literally like, we have so many nutrients, so much energy, so much abundance, it's just spilling over. I think a lot of women feel that from a spiritual component where they have so much love to give, they just can't wait to have this baby, to give them so much love. But if I look at their physical body, they don't have that. They don't have an abundance of energy or nutrients. They're actually quite depleted. And so it's this disconnect between how they feel, like, ready emotionally to have this baby and to give them so much love. But physically their body's so, so tired and inflamed and just doesn't have anything to give. And I always say, like, can we give some of that love? That you want to give to your baby, to yourself, because that will actually help you get closer to your goals. So then we can increase that energy and vitality and that abundance. But like I said to me before, I'd be going on any drug, I would be making sure that it's not just vitamin D that can cause issues with anxiety or depression. We know iron levels, B level, like B vitamins, any B9, B12, B6, B5, B3, B2, like any of those will cause issues with methylation, will cause issues with energy production, detoxification, and can lead to anxiety or depression. And like I said, usually there isn't one nutrient that's missing, but vitamin D just plays such a big role. And I mean, I've seen people feel 10 times better. Once, literally it was like, I'm at a 10 and we'll get you up to 30 and you'll feel like a new person and then we'll get you up to 60 and you'll be like, oh, is that what I was supposed to feel like? You know, it's kind of crazy. Couple more things and then I'll wrap it up. I know it's a lot inflammation and autoimmune system and why it's important for fertility, again, both male and female, really important for the male aspect,

if his immune system is dysregulated because he's so chronically inflamed, he has chronic infection, he has a lot of toxicity, you're going to see the body pushing all the nutrients towards managing the immune system versus production of sperm. So similarly to how females don't reproduce or it's not the best reproduction, if you will, when we're depleted, when we're stressed, when we're inflamed, like it's possible, but it's not great. It's kind of the same thing for males when they don't have a lot of energy, a lot of vitality because they're inflamed. They're not going to make their best guys, right? The body, their order of priorities. They can live without testicles, they cannot live without their heart, without their liver, without their immune system, their gut, all of that. So the body has that list of priority. And typically when we have a lot of inflammation, what happens? It's not just vitamin D that's depleted, right? I hope you guys can kind of understand and see the picture now that it's like everything gets depleted because all the resources are now going towards dealing with this inflammation. And so for males, really, really important to regulate the immune system, because the reaction of the egg and the sperm is that of the immune system. It is vitamin D receptors we want to have, and calcium and other minerals, zinc, selenium, all these nutrients that can get depleted and will get depleted if there's a lot of inflammation. For females, it's. I don't want to say it's even more important, but because for the female, you have to accept the foreign body, which is the sperm first. So the egg has to choose the sperm and let it come in and let it fertilize. And if there is issues with the receptors or the immune system is dysregulated because it's so inflamed, because it's so toxic, because it's so depleted, it's not going to allow for that function to happen. It's just going to say, this is a foreign body. Get it out. I need to elicit an immune response to it. Where and even when the fertilization happens and you have this embryo, the receptivity of the endometrium won't be there because the immune system is so inflamed. And so endometriosis I said I was going to talk about this is actually an autoimmune disorder. And by the time it gets to mainstream media, I don't know, maybe it'll be a couple years, maybe five or 10, hopefully just a couple of years. But if you think about endometriosis and the level of inflammation and the dysregulation in the immune system is your immune system is supposed to recognize something that's not there and clean it up. And so when there is endometrial tissue that's growing outside of the uterus and your immune system is not recognizing it and not doing anything about it, but causing inflammation in other areas in the body, that's a dysregulated immune system that is autoimmune. So it's hard then for the body to say because it can't even differentiate between, like, its own tissue and where it's supposed to be. If you're putting a sperm in there that's getting fertilized and now it's supposed to implant in the endometrium. And the endometrium is super inflamed and super dysregulated, the last thing it's going to go is like, oh, yeah, let's implant this baby and let's make it, you know, let's form this beautiful connection between the endometrium and the fetus and the grow the Plain placenta. This is why when women are struggling with autoimmune disorders, they're usually prescribed a lot of immunosuppressants because they're just trying to suppress the immune system. So that's what the conventional system will do, the holistic system. What we do is we figure out why is the immune system so dysregulated, where is the inflammation coming from, what's the infection that's driving this, and where's the infection coming from? Because we probably need to be not just supporting vitamin D levels, but figuring out if the partner is probably a source of infection or you guys are just passing it back and forth. It's not to point fingers, it's to treat the root cause. And I see it all the time. It's, you know, the men have something, the women have something, and we're just passing it. And it's just this big pathogen pool and everybody's sick. You know, everybody has some inflammation and obviously can't get pregnant because like I said, that's the last thing that the body's thinking about. So when we have good levels of vitamin D, we tend to see way lower levels of systemic inflammation because your immune system now has what it needs to do its job. Again, not the only nutrient, but it's really, really important for that. And it just helps to modulate your immune system so it reduces the risk of developing autoimmune disorders. But if you already have an autoimmune disorder, it can help you manage it. One of the most common questions I get, like, is it possible to reverse it? Is it possible to reverse endometriosis or pcos or male infertility or. Yeah, it is. You're going to always have a genetic predisposition, but we need to understand what's driving the disease and the disorder. And it's not going to be a six month journey. So when I'm getting my patients ready for pregnancy, what we're going to do short term and what we're going to do to get help, you get pregnant now as quickly as possible without compromising. The result is very different than what I would do for someone who just wants to improve their health and reverse their autoimmune condition, let's say, because the timeline for that is much, much longer. And we will dive into all the possible infections testing and all the possible heavy metals and industrial toxins. Whereas when we're getting you ready, we need to make sure that the body is, quote, unquote, as clean as possible, but it's not going to Be perfect. Because if we find out, you know, the heavy levels of lead that I talked about in one of my patients, it's like, well, we have to get it down to a comfortable number. But I don't know if this is something that's gonna take years to get out of her body, because heavy metals is one of those things. Once it's a Pandora's box, once you open it, you don't know how much is gonna come out. And so we just have to help the body process as much as we can so then it's not circulating, and then just keep it at bay until we're done having babies, we're done being pregnant, and then we can support. So there's lots of stuff. You know, there's not a single case that's the same. I very much go by feel and what's going on for the person and what I think is happen, terms of the exposure and how their immune system is handling stuff. But point being is we need vitamin D to support our immune system function. That is the point. So the last thing that I want to talk about is why it's important for pregnancy and fetal development. So if you happen to get pregnant and you have low vitamin D levels, here are some, you know, risks, if you will, that are associated with vitamin D, low vitamin D levels, and why it's so important. Important to optimize it. And if you're pregnant and listening to this podcast for some reason, please, for God's sakes, go test your vitamin D levels, because you need vitamin D throughout your entire pregnancy. And I'll tell you, I can't tell you how much you need because you should be testing if you have a level of 10 versus a level of 60.

There's a very different big difference in terms of how you're going to be supplementing that. Right? It's either 10,000 I use a day or 1,000 to 2,000 I use a day. I've had to supplement 10,000 I use for a long time for somebody to get their levels up because they were so deficient. There were so many things going on with their immune system and inflammation. That's not abnormal. Okay? So we always test and we look at what the person needs when you are pregnant, it regulates the placental function. It helps with fetal development, it helps with reducing gestational diabetes and preeclampsia and preterm birth and even things like C sections. We're seeing women who have lower vitamin D levels. The C section rates are much higher, and we are seeing much Higher rates of C sections. That's not the only reason, but it is one of the reasons. And then when we look at the development of the fetus, all of the things that I talked about in terms of the hormonal health and immune system, system function and neurotransmitters, what you feel, the baby will feel, but then there's also the bone mineralization and development of the skeleton and, you know, the teeth and everything else that's involved with that. The muscle being able to. Just because it functions. Vitamin D is so closely related and functions so closely with calcium and magnesium and all the other electrolytes that I've been talking about. It is literally the foundation in terms of building your baby from scratch. And what I always say is, like, the foods that you eat are literally becoming your cells, and when you're pregnant, the foods that you eat will become your baby. And so things like vitamin D, when we are exposing ourselves to the sunlight, then our body is making vitamin D and we have to have, you know, good liver function and good kidney function to be able to convert the vitamin D from inactive to active form. That's the building block for literally, like I said, so many aspects of your health and your future baby's health. So vitamin D, in my opinion, is really, really important to supplement. And so here's what I'll leave you guys off with. You should be testing vitamin D levels and looking at the ranges. If you're in optimal versus in just. Okay, what I'm seeing is the ranges are changing. And so I'm telling you that if you're on the US side, it's 60 to 80 nanograms per milliliter, versus on the Canadian side, it's 100 to 150 nanomoles per liter. We want optimal levels, not just barely over the line of, quote, unquote, normal again. Abundance, Right? Abundance. Vitality. This is true for both of you guys. So, ladies, for you and for your partner, for his sperm quality, for your egg quality, for your immune system function, for your hormones, for all these things that I just talked about, vitamin D is really important. So once you test, then you can see how much you need, because you might need 2,000 IUs, you might need 5,000, you might need 10,000.

You might need that high dose for three months, you might need it for five months, you might need it for a year. I don't know that this is why we retest. It honestly surprises me how little the conventional system tests, because I used to think in, like, if you think about Naturopathic medicine or you're a kook. You're not. You just have crystals and you're guessing and symptoms like, we don't know if there's science behind to it. And I'm like, actually, it's crazy that I am the one that telling the conventional system that you should test things before you prescribe anything, including vitamins and minerals. I think it's crazy and bananas that we're just expected to go, yep, yep, everybody needs vitamin d. Just take 2000ius. I've seen people take 2000 I use for years and be in such low numbers for their vitamin D levels because they're just never getting enough and so the body can't actually bounce back. And then we say things like, oh, vitamin D doesn't work. I guarantee you it works because we know the importance and the nutrients. And if you just search vitamin D and male fertility, vitamin D and female fertility, like, help punch it into Chad GPT. If you're using Chad GPT, watch how much stuff comes up. It's crazy. So we just need to start bringing this information out and then I never supplement it alone. You are ideally supplementing it with vitamin K, vitamin K2, and ideally you're also supplementing other minerals, whether it's calcium, magnesium, zinc, sodium, potassium. Like I said, if you just do vitamin D, it's better than nothing. But just know that there's probably a couple of other things that are happening and if we supplement it together, we can be a lot more effective and efficient and make sure we get the results that we want, which is whether it's a healthy pregnancy or a better quality embryo or, you know, implantation and pregnancy maintenance. It's simple stuff that works in the body naturally. Like it's, we don't need drugs. There's no drug. It's just the actual vitamin. And you know the question around, well, what about if I'm in the sun and is that enough? I don't know. You just test it. I've had patients who are in California and they have great vitamin D levels and I have patients in California who have terrible vitamin D levels and both get sun. And so there's a lot of other components to it and this is usually the other minerals that come into play or what's going on with the immune system. If there's a lot of inflammation, autoimmune, you get it. So I hope you guys find this helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me a message on my Instagram. Please share this podcast with you can share it with your partner, but share it with anybody that you think that will find it helpful. Like I said, we should not be going through IVF unless you know that your vitamin D levels are optimized at the very minimum. Ideally, a lot of things more optimized, but like this is the most basic thing that should be optimized before we even consider ivf. Because I've seen people get pregnant just by having optimal vitamin D levels. Like that was the thing that was preventing them from getting pregnant. Is not having enough vitamin D so really, really important. Thank you so much for being here, 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 Dr. Jane Levesque.com for 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 ratethispodcast.com forward slash 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.