#387 Alexander Cortes: The Fertility Crisis No One Is Talking About

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Infertility now affects 1 in 5 to 1 in 6 couples

something has changed

a lot of things have changed in our environment and we're not addressing it

fertility is like a sixth vital sign for overall health

you know if you were to consider

like what is a truly optimized healthy organism

it's one that can easily reproduce

if you cannot easily reproduce

male or female

if you have irregular menstrual cycle

if you have an unhealthy sperm

something has fundamentally gone wrong with your metabolism

and you need to address it

do you have three to five factors that are kind of universally working against people when it comes to fertility

in the realm of lifestyle

environmental toxins

all that just

things that people can actually address today

like all these systems are interrelated to each other they can't really separate them out

what's what's good for your brain

and what is good for your gut health

and what's good for your mitochondria

and what's good for your immune system

and what is good for muscle growth

it's all the same thing

like it's all the same thing

you can't there's

there's no such thing as a fertility diet

and [00:01:00] that's oppositional to a muscle gain diet or a metabolic diet

it's all the same thing

right

eat your whole foods

get your necessary supplementation in

based on what you know your body actually needs

and then reassess every so often

Hey, Jack. Welcome back to the meat mafia podcast, brother. Good to have you. Good to see you again. Dude, you were on episode 82 of the Meme Office Podcast. You've been doing well. It's been a minute, man. Yeah, we're almost up to 400 episodes here. So, um, we started out doing a bunch of virtual episodes, did a bunch of, um, episodes with great people who are inspiring us on X and other platforms, um, people like yourself, and switched more over to the in person model, and now just trying to get a little bit back to You know, having some conversations virtually and, um, you know, with some of the people who've just continued to inspire us in the health space.

You'd be in 1 of them. So hope to have you back. Good to see you [00:02:00] again. Do likewise. Um, yeah, this is kind of sparked after, um, exchanging some notes on, uh, some concepts around lifting slowly as you, uh, you commented on that I post and gave me a little course correction and we went back and forth a bit. Um, just around some lifting stuff.

So I feel like X is just such a rich platform for sharing ideas and you've been doing it, how long have you been on X for, uh, at this point, like, I would say full time on X since 2015. So we're actually going on the 10 year mark. Dang, which is actually crazy to think about. I didn't realize it was that long.

Yeah. So it's been a decade. What started, what started, uh, your journey on, on actually sharing information on there? Cause, uh, you know, you've got your newsletter, you've got up to 42, 000 people on the newsletter. Um, this is the idea of just putting yourself out there and sharing information on your passion.

How'd you, how'd you originally start that? And, um, [00:03:00] yeah, I'm sure over the last 10 years, you've seen a lot of things change. So a quick backstory, like I'm going to be arrogant. Assume most of your listeners know who I am or heard about me, but if you need any backstory, go back to episode 82. We dive into it a bunch.

Yeah. So I've, I've been a personal trainer now for 15 years when I started personal training was 2010. That was right when social media was starting to take over. I realized one, two, three years in a training that. The social platforms, which at that time was, you know, Facebook was the dominant platform.

Yeah, then YouTube, obviously it's also Instagram that these things were taking over like the public consciousness and the ability to garner an audience by sharing content, which now called content, you know, back then it was more blogging, but the ability to grow an audience through blogging through video.

Uh, through insights, through knowledge that was huge and it gave you incredible leverage and it was, it was unparalleled in world history that anyone could do this. You know, there was [00:04:00] no, there's no prior comparison you can make to any other past historical error for the ability to reach thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people at scale from a device instantaneously.

It's just, it's still unreal to me. Yeah. And I saw early fitness influencers, uh, I mean, some of who are, some of whom have passed away, like my mentor, John Meadows, they were making videos, they're producing content, they're writing articles and they had an audience and they had a business. So I set out to do something similar.

Uh, back then there was no such thing as an influencer content maker. It was just, everyone was figuring it out. You were just making stuff. Enjoying the, enjoying the experience. So I started blogging and then 2015, in 2015, I started to get more politicized since I had seen a lot of socioeconomic, social demographic.

Uh, sexual, social dynamic changes throughout my twenties in the United States. Uh, I felt the United States and Western civilization as a whole was going [00:05:00] in a, uh, destructive direction. And Twitter, as it was then, I realized was a bit more politically attuned and I liked it because you could post really fast, 140 characters a minute, 140 characters a post.

So I posted a lot and there's lots of interesting people on there, obviously. And, you know, that was 2015 and then 2016 election came. Uh, 2016 to 2022 was sort of the dark era of censorship. I kept posting through it, uh, kept meeting like minded people. Eventually Elon bought the platform, now it's X. Uh, now we have freedom of expression, much more than before, freedom of thinking, uh, to be more accurate.

And I was able to create a business out of it. I was able to meet people. I met my wife through X, through Twitter. Really? Yeah. I've met all my business partners through Twitter. I've, I've done a lot of things because of the platform. Like I'm going to be, I'm always gonna be very grateful for it. And I've realized having been on it this long.

And there's so many intelligent people in the world that [00:06:00] I would say all the, it's like a power distribution, the top 1000 people on earth, all the heavy hitter sort of intellectuals and every spear, everybody knows each other. And there's very few degrees of separation between people. It's been extraordinary to me coming from a very blue collar, middle class kind of background, like the social.

Ladder. I've been able to climb if I'm being honest. Uh, and it's all been because of these online tools all been because of forums like X, where you can talk to anybody, you can meet anybody, and if you have good ideas, if you have valuable things to share, uh, you will connect with like minded people and, you know, at that point, the sky's the limit.

Totally. Yeah. It's one of my favorite aspects of X is that it, it feels like the most merit merit cratic, uh, platform that we have, where if you actually. Have good ideas, thoughts, and for the most part, you can't really dress up your, your tweets outside of good writing style. [00:07:00] Um, you know, you can put, throw a few good pictures on there or video or whatever, but for the most part, just, it seems like the access to just really, um.

You know, incredible thinkers and people it's, it's so thin, um, you know, if you, if you have a few good ideas and a few good posts that do well, like you really do have access to some of the sharpest minds out there. Absolutely. It's made me realize, too, that all the smart people in the world, they're all looking for someone else to learn from.

Totally. If you're someone where you're intellectually curious, naturally skeptical, you like to inquire, you like to learn things, you're autodidactic. X is the best platform. Totally. Without question. Yeah, well said. What's, um, what's been your experience the last year, just observing the health movement, kind of go through this transformation and really enter?

I would say like this alternative health movement has now entered like the full, um, you know, mainstream narrative, which is, it's super [00:08:00] interesting to be a part of and observe and just see how it's digested by the mainstream, but it really does seem like things that. Most of us have been talking about on the platform for a while are now actually just part of the, the mainstream narrative, which is, which is, uh, encouraging from my perspective, but curious to see kind of how you've, you've observed it.

Yeah, it's how life has changed. I mean, I've changed a lot with my viewpoints, perspectives on so many things that, you know, health, body, environmentally related, uh, I mean, where do you even begin with that? But yeah, I, yeah, to. Yeah, I would agree. Things that were considered alternative 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago, they're now fully mainstream.

They're now within the public consciousness. Uh, yeah, it's been crazy to me that, you know, if you go back 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, being a personal trainer, working in health fitness. It was not considered prestigious at all. It wasn't even considered credible. It wasn't considered really anything. It had no real [00:09:00] reputational weight behind it.

Um, and now because of really the digital world, the internet, like the bros are in control quite literally. Uh, and so much AI, you often hear me, you'll see me talk about bro science, but so many bro science, alternative health concepts. Which were dismissed and caused crazy, you know, stuff from the circadian rhythm to phototherapy to de detoxification, uh, environmental contaminants, uh, you know, food dyes, food additives, uh, you know, even things with like strength science and high, the science hypertrophy and strength gain, muscle building.

A lot of observations there, which I, I write about more on like my, my newsletter, my, my blog. But all of them have been proven correct, or at the very least, directionally accurate. You know, people have in fact, uh, been making true observations. And then I, I think what changed the most or if it's a big catalyzer for that, like what would change so much in health that made people more health aware.

It was COVID because the whole world got shut down for a year, [00:10:00] two years in some places. Everyone was at home. Everyone was going crazy there. It was the final institutional pillar to fall. So, you know, before COVID, there was lots of people that questioned the media. They questioned universities. They questioned, you know, so called intellectuals COVID happened.

Then you have Fauci, you have this vaccine rollout with this completely untested vaccine and everyone that took it, you're, you're the experimental group. You have people who are losing 1 to 2 years of their life. Like, because of this Macy Medical Tyrion hysteria and it on a society wide planetary scale, it made people question things, made people question everything, made them question the narrative, made them question their beliefs, uh, and the level of information that was available, the level of, you know, analysis.

Where you have people who were, you know, obviously going against what was being said by the mainstream. It reached an insurmountable level. Yeah, and at that point, the illusion [00:11:00] broke down. Yeah, and the realization that those, the powers that be, those in charge, they didn't have our best interests in mind.

You know, these, these institutions, they didn't care about the health of the public. Uh, yeah, even medical tyranny itself. This idea that we can, we can force you to behave a certain way. And we're going to exclude you from participation in society unless you get this. This vaccination, uh, it broke people's minds in a good way and it led people to alternative resources they normally wouldn't listen to, that normally would not, didn't have legitimacy prior.

Uh, but now they became legitimized, uh, and you know, now we're at a point where RFK Jr is now the health secretary and we're going to investigate additives in food and we're going to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule. We're going to investigate the effects of electromagnetic radiation. This is all stuff five years ago.

You've been called a crazy conspiracy theorist. Yeah, and now it's now it's going to become part of public policy at the federal level or, you know, but federal inquiry isn't insane to think of the rate of change. [00:12:00] Like, I never expected things to change this fast. I honestly didn't, but they have. Yeah, it's actually.

I think from, from my standpoint, it feels like, you know, I'm 31, but in my adult life, I don't really remember feeling this hopeful in terms of like actual changes being like feeling there's actually going to be change made at a policy level. Um, it's just so just seems like there's so much red tape that in the past things have just moved very slowly.

And, um, it's been, you know, things just get held up in the political theater. And, um, It doesn't feel like that is this, what we're experiencing. It doesn't feel like theater at all. It feels like there's actual change that's going to be happening, which, um, yeah, I think there's an immense sense of hope within that.

Yeah, the pessimism is gone. That was one thing in the last four years, especially when Biden was in office. You can't, I don't know that you can truly ever quantify like social, emotional [00:13:00] state of health. You can poll people like, how do you feel about the direction of the country? And, you know, maybe a lot of people think it's going in a good direction.

Yeah, definitely. You can do that. But the pervasive pessimism, the vibe shift like that, you know, you can feel, you can feel vibe shift. You can, you can know that you can sense when people have a negative view of the future and how that affects all their decision making. You can sense when people have a positive vision of the future and that affects your decision making and the vibe shift the last really just a couple of weeks.

That's what was massive last few months. And the resignation that exists before that. Obesity has won. Disease has won. This is just how it is now. That was the attitude for a long time. Oh, now it's no, now it's no longer the attitudes. And you know, even though we have a lot of obstacles, obviously like, yeah, the American public is very sick.

Yes. Lots of people are aware they're obese, but these are solvable problems. Not everyone has to live this way. We don't have to live this way. We can change and we shall, [00:14:00] it might take time, but it's possible we can do it. Yeah, absolutely, man. Uh, I'm into that.

One of the things that I think is, um, is awesome about your message and the things that you're building and working on is you've kind of identified the canary in the coal mine, uh, which is fertility and honed it on that.

I'd love to just hear a little bit more about. When you started to really not shift your thinking, but start to be like, all right, I'm actually going to address this problem and start solving it because, you know, it's, it's massive, it's pervasive, it's societal level, existential problem where, you know, fertility is, you just hear about this, this kind of like constant story at this point, it almost seems like it's on repeat of, you know, guy, girl get married.

Um, they try to start having a kid and. They end up struggling for a very long time, which I would say our grandparents generation probably didn't, didn't really have that problem at all. [00:15:00] So I'm, I'm curious, just like when you started to gravitate towards that mm-hmm . And start to think about actually building solutions around it, which, you know, kudos to you for that as well.

Yeah. The fertility journey that was. It was unexpected. It wasn't something that I planned on doing. You know, when I started as personal trainer, it was like, I don't have a technical background. I'm not a doctor. Obviously I'm personal trainer. I'm a bro. As I like to say both seriously and jokingly, I'm a bro.

Uh, when I started personal training 15 years ago, I focused on muscle and strength gain. It's very simple. You know, muscle strength gain is not complex, even though sometimes science makes it that way. It's not complex. If you get people stronger, if you build more lean body mass, Uh, if you improve their cardiovascular health, it will be healthier people.

Uh, I didn't take the concept of environmental toxins or contaminants or detoxification seriously. Uh, at the time, no one else that I followed that I respected in the industry did. I thought it was bullshit like a lot of people. Uh, [00:16:00] you know, metabolic health, like down to the mitochondrial, biochemical level, I didn't focus on that too much.

Yeah, that was not something I had formal education in at the same time. It just seemed simple enough. Lift weights. Do cardio, eat protein, you know, I mean, and that by itself solves a lot of problems. Um, and I did that for a long time and then over the years I got more granular in my studies and as they developed a better understanding of metabolic health, uh, I realized that obviously there's more to health than just muscle, than just cardio, than just what you eat.

There's a lot of other factors, circadian rhythm, uh, environment, environmental toxins, you know, that those do play a big role. And then eventually that led me to fertility. I met my My wife, but one time was my girlfriend, um, we got married, we want to have kids. She had unexplained infertility from being on birth control for a long time.

She went off birth control, menstrual cycle took a long time to come back. Took two and a half years. We didn't get answers from regular doctors at all. Everyone told us the [00:17:00] same thing. It was, uh, it was either go back on birth control, which made no sense because that's what caused the problem. You know, and birth control, I already had a very negative opinion of, you know, I thought birth control is fertility poison.

That's what I call it. Uh, yes, some women can take it and they have no negative side effects. Sure. A lot of women take it and they have negative side effects. And the longer you on birth, you are in birth control. The more likely you are to have long term consequences from taking it. It takes a long time for the female body to restore itself back to a hormonal balance.

Hormone balancing is real for women. You know, that's not, women are not simple that way, or just you're, you sort of snap back into normal, optimal hormonal metabolic function. And so, you know, my wife and I, we were going to physicians, we were not getting any answers. We were told to go back and birth control, which at that point I thought was this epistemologically bankrupt to even say that, uh, the physician could say that with a straight face.

You know, these are all the things that make people not trust doctors, right? Yeah, the thing to create the problem will fix the [00:18:00] problem. That makes no sense at all. We also want to get pregnant. I was just absolutely disgusted. Uh, we got told you IVF. Okay, IVF does work. IVF is a miracle technology. IVF is a brute force, essentially hormonal surgical procedure to try to make a pregnancy happen.

It has a very high failure rate. Uh, we looked at, we looked into it. It wasn't something that we felt comfortable with, but we looked into it. People don't get told that IVF has a failure rate of anywhere 40, 50, 75%. Yeah, most of the time it requires multiple cycles mobile cycles IVF. You are easily spending because it's predominantly out of pocket 25 50 75 a hundred thousand dollars and it still might not work And you'll meet lots of couples when you when you start going through this infertility experience and you're married and it's something that only Married couples go through but you realize this does affect if you look at the numbers This affects tens of millions of people every year Uh, you'll meet people that have gone through four or five cycles of IVF multiple [00:19:00] miscarriages.

No pregnancy And they spent a hundred plus grand. Uh, and at the same time we were being told, well, IVF. Okay. How does IVF solve the problem though? Yeah. My wife has unexplained infertility, idiopathic infertility. What's wrong? So there's a, there's a term in medicine, like etiology, meaning essentially like the, the causality line of causality for disease.

What are all the causes that contribute to this disease state developing? Like, can you actually define those, uh, clearly? And if we can define those, hopefully we can do the right sort of investigations. We can solve the problem. Infertility, I realized, didn't have a defined etiology. There is no formal medical theory around infertility.

Why does infertility happen? We know that it does. Yeah, we know that sometimes it's for a very obvious reasons. Let's say, uh, you have, you're a woman and you have like blocked fallopian tubes. Okay. Like that's obstructive. Yeah, that's very, uh, yeah, that's, it's a, it's a structural issue that that's simple, but yeah, but how come some women keep having unexplained miscarriages?

How [00:20:00] come they're unable to get pregnant after a year of trying? You don't really get answers. And then the way normal lab values work, you can have lots of symptoms, you can have multiple miscarriages, you could have been trying to get pregnant for two years. If your labs are within the very large range that is normal, you'll just get told, you're fine.

This is a common experience for anyone that's ever been frustrated with the medical system. Your labs look fine, you're fine. Labs look normal, you're fine. But you know, as the patient, like something is wrong. There's something wrong with my body. I'm suffering from, you know, whatever it might be something from this case, infertility, that you can't tell me what's wrong.

So we went through this for two and a half years, and we started just going deeper and deeper into investigations as to why this could happen. And what I realized is that infertility in many, many cases, I'd say the majority of the time, infertility is a metabolic disease. The same conditions. That contribute to diseases of metabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, insulin resistance, hormone [00:21:00] imbalance, environmental toxification, all those things also contribute to infertility, or if not full blown infertility, what is now called subfertility.

And this affects both women and men. It's not just a woman issue. If you get into the world of infertility science, about one third of cases are because of the woman, one third of cases are because of the man, and then one third of cases are often times like a mix of both. You know, maybe it's one or the other.

You know, it's a 50 parity, you know, for men, I had preached for a long time about testosterone levels, declining testosterone levels have declined by 50 percent since 1970. You know, the average testosterone levels today are half of what they were four or five decades ago. I had never looked into sperm count.

It's just, I never, it never occurred to me too, because I wasn't trying to have kids in my twenties. I wasn't thinking about it. Right. Right. I looked into sperm count. The average sperm count across the entirety of planet earth has declined 55 percent since 1970. Right. Right. Wow. So the average sperm count, if you go [00:22:00] back 50 years, was about a hundred million sperm approximate, like in an average measure of ejaculation.

The average today is 49 million. Now historically, you know, like if you were to go to an infertility doctor 30, 40 years ago, they would have told you that once you get around to 20 million sperm, you're going to start having fertility issues. Now the average today is 49 million and then the infertility range got lowered to accommodate the fact that there was decline Similar to what was done to the testosterone range Average testosterone levels at one time were considered to be, you know, somewhere between, let's say, 500 to, like, 1, 200.

Then the, as testosterone levels started to decline, the average started getting shifted lower and lower. And what's the result of that? You have guys with, who are hypogonadal with low testosterone, being told they're normal. Your testosterone levels are normal. It's fine. Not a big deal. Doc, my testosterone levels are 300.

I'm 25 years old. It's a normal range. You're fine. The normal range is anywhere from 300 to 900 or 300 to 1000. [00:23:00] That's a 700 point swing. Yeah, right. 700 point spread. How does that make any sense that you could be at 300 and be normal, but then the top of the range is 1000? Right. Same thing with female hormones.

Same thing with female hormones. But yeah, so we went through this whole experience and I'm realizing that the root of a lot of these infertility issues are dysfunctional mitochondria because ovaries, you know, egg cells, you know, when women release an egg when they ovulate. have mitochondria in them, sperm cells have mitochondria in them.

If you get into the research and the data on people who are overweight or obese, very likely to have infertility or irregular menstrual cycles or PCOS. That's a huge herring problem. Same for the men. So, you know, part of it's attributable to people being overweight, at the same time there's also a lot of so called unexplainable infertility where you have younger couples who are experiencing miscarriages, infertility, low sperm count, and they're not necessarily overweight or, you know, grossly unhealthy, and then that's what got me to sort of like the recent rant I've been having about environmental toxins, [00:24:00] this stuff, you know, people often think it's, um, you know, it's being pedantic or it's fear mongering, you know, things about microplastics or parabens or biphenyl A or whatever.

You know, new car smell, you know, or they'll take the hormones of our supply. These things are affecting us It doesn't make sense that sperm count would sperm counts have declined by 55 Stock shrinks are climbing 55 percent infertility now affects one in five to one six couples Something has changed a lot of things have changed in our environment and we're not addressing it And when you go to get pregnant, if you know, if you're married, you have a wife every year You don't have a child is in there.

You're lost you're running off time

a another common misconcep we have fertility issues older. It's because you'r woman are old. That's not that is somewhat precise, What is actually declining? That was my big question because [00:25:00] it seems like that was like an easy blunt answer. It's because women are older.

All right, well, what is it that's actually making it more challenging for an older woman to have a child? You go to dig into the data. What do we already know about muscle? Every year past 30, you lose about 1 percent of your muscle mass. What are you also losing? You're losing mitochondrial energy capacity.

You know, oxidative phosphorylation ability is probably going down as you get older. What is the strongest biomarker that indicates the highest probability for success in IVF? Healthy mitochondria. So the couple, the women with the healthiest mitochondria are most likely to have Yeah. A successful pregnancy from IVF.

Mm. You go into the research on women with a high rate of miscarriages, unhealthy mitochondria. You go into the research on, uh, men who experienced more miscarriage with their partner because of damaged sperm, damaged mitochondria. So yeah, not to say that mitochondria is the answer, but again, it just made me realize like it all started to crystallize your [00:26:00] metabolic mitochondrial health.

That is what is affecting fertility. Fertility is like a six vital sign for overall health. You know, if you were to consider, like, what is a truly optimized healthy organism, it's one that can easily reproduce. Yeah. If you cannot easily reproduce, you know, male or female, if you have a regular menstrual cycle, or if you have an unhealthy sperm, something has fundamentally gone wrong with your metabolism and you need to address it.

Hmm. This is why I've been telling guys, get a semen analysis. Like, yeah, because that's the next question. Like, well, what do you do about this? How do you find out? Get a semen analysis done, get a testosterone panel, find out what your fertility status is now. Because if you wait until you're married and you wait until a year of trying to have a baby, and then you're getting told, you know, let's say, whatever, it's three or four years from now, you're getting told a year and a half into it, Hey, you know, like we've been trying to have a kid for 16 months, we haven't had one, what's wrong?

You'll, you'll get measured, you know, your doctor might take an interest in it. They'll tell you to go to a fertility clinic, maybe they'll tell you to do IVF. You're not going to get any deep [00:27:00] investigations. Most likely, do you, do you have, you know, 3 to 5 things, 3 to 5 factors that are kind of universally working against people when it comes to fertility, you know, in the realm of lifestyle, environmental toxins, all of that, just things that people can actually address today, whether it's, you know, um, Getting more sunlight or removing certain things from, um, their diet, getting a water filter, whatever, whatever it is.

Like there's probably, I think so many simple levers that people could probably pull. I had imagined. Oh yeah. There's a whole bunch of like very simple, I'd say relatively easier, straightforward levers. Um, number one, if you are overweight, obese, you absolutely need to address that. You know, just like without, like without, it doesn't need like a deep scientific analysis.

If you're overweight or obese, Your body is in a constant state of oxidative stress, fat, body fat, and it's a hormonally active tissue. You're, if you're a woman, you're probably going to have irregular [00:28:00] menstrual cycles. You are far more likely to have miscarriages, you know, like without question, uh, you need to lose body fat.

Same thing for men, you know, you know, for men, one of the things I learned that was surprising me, uh, sperm are extremely sensitive to stress. Hmm. So like we have this idea that you're a man, you can get a woman pregnant at any age. You can be 70. You're still, you know, firing off swimmers. At this point in time, it's probably not so much the case.

Sperm actually get made on a 50 to 70 day cycle. So the sperm that you have available today to ejaculate. They started being made two and a half months out. It's not like they're made from zero to 100 within 24 hours. It's actually takes like an eight to nine to 10 week cycle. It takes some time. So if you're a man today and you wanted to, you know, let's say replenish your sperm supply and have a whole new set of super healthy sperm, give yourself at least three to four months to do that.

Um, but you know, so to go back to answer the question though, so yeah, [00:29:00] obviously losing weight, losing body fat. I'd say that's number one. Uh, number two. Number four. circadian rhythm and sleep. So this is already a big one for, for testosterone. You know, if you get insufficient sleep, your distortion levels can be cut in half.

You know, there is no excuse for getting less than like six and a half, seven hours a night. If you're getting five hours or less, or your sleep schedules all screwed up and you haven't seen the, you haven't seen a dawn. In years you haven't gone to bed or past you haven't gone to bed before midnight in years.

You need to address that because sleep and circadian rhythm and mitochondrial function all intertwine. And how quickly would that lack of sleep show up in someone's blood work if they were to, you know, say leading up to their blood panel, they're working hard late into the night for whatever reason.

And, you know, maybe getting less sleep than they usually would with that show up in someone's blood panel. You know, they all show up within days. Days. Wow. Yeah, that's not something like you could argue that you might have one [00:30:00] night. You can get away with that where your blood work the next morning would still be normal ish maybe, but like within days that's going to affect you.

Yeah. I mean, this is the thing with the for, for guys, for anyone that works super late or they have like a, this is a fucked up sleep pattern. Yeah. You don't, you don't get away with it. It's not something where you can just sort of bounce back. It will, you know, it takes, you can, you can start screwing up your metabolic health within a few days.

It will take you like a week or two to reset yourself. The whole time that you're in that sleep deprived state, you're just in sort of a damaged dysfunctional state. There's no getting around that. There's nothing that makes up for that, that you can do. Right. Right. So metabolic health from a, from the standpoint of losing body fat.

Sleep. Body composition. Sleep. Absolutely. Circadian rhythm, you said. Yeah, circadian rhythm. Uh, nutrition. So this is a big one. Nutrition matters, obviously, hugely. For fertility, it's not so much about macros. So like the bro answer is like, you [00:31:00] need protein, fat, carbohydrates. Yeah, you do. You need all those things.

Yeah. We could, that's pretty basic. Micronutrients play a huge role in fertility, uh, more than people think. So it's not really about the macros. It's about the micros. So like, uh, if it fits your macros, if it fits your micros, that's what you want to focus on. Magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, selenium, like you need more than the RDA recommendation for these things.

You want to sort of hyper saturate your body, especially, you know, for women or for men, or if you have, let's say, low sperm count, or you have like an irregular menstrual cycle, or, you know, you have some issues with acute fertility, you want to go to a youth. Nutrients replenish state for a long period of time to get your body, you know, what it needs.

And, and this is something that our company does where we do much, much deeper dive investigations into like actual nutrient deficiencies and subsequent dysfunctions with like functional blood analysis, you know, and a few other tests. But, you know, like the basic answer is you want to hyper saturate [00:32:00] your body with nutrients.

So yeah, just getting the protein, just getting enough fat carbs. It's not, that's not going to be quite enough. Like, you really want to focus on the nutrient density of your food. Yeah. It seems like, it seems like that's, um, you know, something that our corner of Twitter and our corner of the internet is acutely aware of, but the nutrient density conversation seems like it's like.

About to take off, um, just around and I honestly think it comes back to a conversation that we've been having a decent amount of the podcast, which is just soil quality. And, you know, a lot of our farming practices have basically just extracted a lot of nutrients out of the soil. And that has subsequently led to a lot of the animals that we're eating.

Or, you know, just if you, I mean, if you're following a standard American diet, um, you know, you're probably eating a lot more processed foods, which is a lot more empty micronutrient, uh, calories. So, um, super important. And, um, I [00:33:00] think it, uh, a point to press into and double click on for a lot of people is just, you know, get those that blood work done and and see where you need to be reinforcing through single ingredient, whole foods.

Do you do you recommend supplementation for. Any of those micronutrient deficiencies? I mean, we do recommend supplementation, but it, it, I've, I've said this before a few years, supplementation, it should be specific. You know, for for infertility, like I, I am very pro supplements because you can just get very high levels of, you know, various nutrients, uh, you know, beyond what you might be able to practically get through food.

You know, but at the same time, supplements, uh, are not a solution for a broken diet, for an insufficient diet. You know, like if you want to get magnesium, yeah, you could definitely take a magnesium supplement. At the same time, you could also eat more various nuts. You could definitely eat more fish, fatty fish.

You can definitely eat various kinds of seeds. You want more potassium. Like, yeah, you can take potassium. You can also have bananas. You can have potatoes. You can have avocado. [00:34:00] You can have coconut. You want more vitamin B. You can take vitamin B complexes. You can also eat steak, obviously. You can have eggs.

You can have egg yolks. Same thing for all the other microbes. Um, so, yeah. Fixed diet first, like, you know, we have, we have fertility diets that we recommend to people, but you're very just facing very nutrient dense, you know, food lists and books on these things. At the same time, if your blood work does show the evidence of insufficiency or an imbalance, yeah, let's take that for a period of time and get those levels up.

Uh, and yeah, maybe address the metabolic factors, which are, uh, affecting your ability to metabolize those nutrients in the first place. Digestion is a whole nother piece to it. If you have a regular digestion, poor digestive gut health, you go into the research. gut health is very common for infertility, very common for PCOS, very common for miscarriages.

Like all these systems are interrelated to each other. They can't really separate them out with what's good for your brain and what is good for your gut health and what's good for your mitochondria and what's good for your immune system and what is good [00:35:00] for muscle growth. Yeah. Your skin. It's all the same thing.

Like it's all the same thing. You can't, there's, there's no such thing as a fertility diet and that's. oppositional to a muscle gain diet or a metabolic diet. It's all the same thing, right? Eat your whole foods, get your necessary supplementation and based on what you know your body actually needs. Uh, and then reassess every so often.

Like this is why we have, we have our clients and our patients do blood work, establish a baseline, you know, get as much data as you can start making measurable changes and then reassess the data after about three months and see where you're at. And then you can know, like, you know, if something's working or not working.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I want to circle back to the conversation because I feel like it's, it's, um, I just, I don't think we've fully got your take there. And I'm curious, was there anything about it that you, um, that really steered you in the other direction? Um, in terms of just [00:36:00] like side effects, health risks, things like that, or was it just more so like, this is an expensive bet to make.

So, I mean, the conversation around IVF, this is always a tension filled one. There is, you always have to acknowledge there's a religious argument, uh, that IVF, because you are creating or trying to create human embryos, that those are essentially entrapped souls and they are sitting in stasis, essentially, uh, and then you're implanting one and the other ones, maybe you're, you're saving them chronogenically.

So you have a soul, a soul, a human soul in stasis for forever that's trapped in time, right? They get destroyed. Now you've killed unborn children. And if that is your, you know, theological or religious belief, I won't argue against it. You know, like, I believe you. I understand why that made people uncomfortable.

It made us uncomfortable. Uh, the other argument that's made, uh, and this is made by Yeah, I just kind of depends on who religious authority figure is in the Jewish community like Orthodox [00:37:00] Jews tend to be very negative Anti IVF certainly a lot of Catholics are as well, but then you can also find rabbis sometimes you can find priests you can find people where their argument is that a woman who has never had a child it is If she is dead while she is alive So she's like in a living death because for a woman to truly express herself to the fullest extent of God's grace on this earth, she should have children.

The purpose of a woman is to be able to carry a soul and that by denying her that she is living as if she was dead. And so IVF is really like a miracle for these women because it enables them to have children. And, you know, in that sense, like, yeah, it is a miracle. It does allow many couples to have children that would not have otherwise.

Uh, you know, with some of my best friends, they've had multiple children through IVF because they were not able to conceive naturally. I I'm not going to condemn them for what they did or say it was evil. They have children. They're good people. They have, they have a pure heart, like they want to have child.

And they did, or they're somebody has multiple children. So, I mean, what I would tell people is [00:38:00] that's a conversation you'd have with God, but yeah, with, with FURTA, we're not, we're not an IVF company. Uh, we don't explicitly market ourselves to religious communities, but we are. Yeah, obviously available to people.

We're not an IVF company. We want to help people conceive naturally. You know, our goal is to help you avoid having IVF. Yeah. And we do that through assessing your fertility status, both the man, the woman, and having an honest conversation with you for the majority of people, their fertility status or fertility health is very improvable.

It can be changed through lifestyle, through supplementation, through diet. Through very concrete changes and stress and your environmental exposure toxins, there's lots of things you can do in some cases. There's nothing you might be able to do. Maybe you are one of those edge cases where you have essentially an incurable fertility condition and you'll need assist reproductive technology of some kind.

Yeah, maybe you're a man and you have aspermia, you have. Almost no sperm count at all, but maybe you can go into the testicles. You can do [00:39:00] an extraction, you can get some sperm, you know, at that point you're going to have to do IVF. Maybe that is a route for you, you know, or maybe it's a treatable condition and you actually can get your sperm count up.

It's just very low and it's just making these necessary changes, you know, and following various protocols. Um, you know, but yeah, our belief is that most couples can heal their body. Naturally they can restore their fertility naturally. And even if you can't do that, you can still get yourself into a healthy metabolic state too.

increase the probability success for an IVF situation. Do you, um, do you think that there's a spiritual component to this conversation? You know, you, you mentioned stress earlier and I think like, you know, for the most part, I think, you know, uh, spiritual practice and spiritual disciplines can help. In the, in the realm of stress on a fairly practical level, but do you think there's, you know, something to lean into there in terms of what you guys are doing, um, with Ferdinand, there is a spiritual component.

I mean, this is, [00:40:00] um, you know, this is a personal religious belief, but, you know, our, our position, my, my position is that the greatest thing you can do in life, if you want to have a kingdom on earth is to have children, to have as many children as possible and that to have children that you are responsible for that you raise.

You know, that is a, both biological and moral and divine duty. Now, the spiritual component to fertility, like couples wanting to get pregnant, you, and this sounds perhaps simple, but it needs to be said, you have to believe that your body is capable of having a child. You know, especially for the, especially on the female side, you know, women are very sensitive to stress.

You know, more even than men, women are very sensitive to stress. Uh, it's a very common story in the infertility community, where couples will go through. all kinds of treatments that, you know, they'll, they'll try various protocols. They'll try IVF, they'll try ART, they'll try ICSI, they'll try different procedures.

The IVF fails, all these things fail. And then they're finally able to [00:41:00] have a kid naturally after they essentially have a conversation with God, let go of the expectations, de stress, especially the wife is, is able to de stress herself and just sort of stop, you know, like the mental maelstrom. And then they get pregnant.

Now, obviously that's not something you can, there's no prescription there. Yeah. Yeah. I can't, I can't say right now, like if you're a woman listening to this, just give it to God and it will happen for you. Uh, yeah, I wish it was that basic. Like there's, there might be a lot of things you need to do. Like, I don't think it will be that simple, but there is a strong prescription component that you want to be in a loving relationship.

You want to be married. You want to be with somebody with their 100 percent there. They are there for you and you're there for them. And you both believe in each other. And you believe you have the capacity to have children and bring them into this world. And to heal if you're struggling with infertility and that has to be something that you give yourself to that you embrace.

I think for a lot of women, because we've been raised for many, [00:42:00] many decades at this point with like anti mother rhetoric or, you know, or parenthood itself has been very demonized, especially like having kids young, you know, even, or especially for women, like the idea of like being a mom has been very stigmatized.

There's this reluctance to embrace the identity of motherhood and like, how much does it impact your fertility? Like, Absolutely. Again, maybe, maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. Obviously, there's always women that they get pregnant on accident, right? Like that. We wish it was, it happened to everybody. You get pregnant the first time you try.

Great. Um, but a lot of women don't, uh, yeah. And I think that, you know, on an energetic level, not being willing to be a mother and having reluctance around that, that energetically makes you less likely to get pregnant. I can't quantify that. I can't add measurement to it, even though I'd like to, but it does.

Yeah, yeah, it speaks to something that, you know, I feel like, uh, you said it, well, it's like, it sounds really rudimentary to say it, but [00:43:00] like, you have to believe before some of these health changes happen, you know, I think about, um, Brett, who, you know, co hosts the show, he, uh, he healed himself of all sort of colitis through dietary changes and none of that would have happened if he had it.

Just kind of not thought that it was possible. And I, I think that the same team, same thing is true for, um, you know, all, all different sorts of, um, you know, health related topics or there needs to be an underlying belief that there's the capacity to change. Um, and I think that's rooted in, in our, uh, in our faith and our, um, you know, spiritual health.

It is. I would say that the most powerful form of medicine is belief. It's the human mind. Now, if you combine that with action, you'll, you can probably get the outcome you want. You can probably heal yourself. Yeah. Yeah. When we talk about belief, if we were talking about, this was a sports podcast and we're talking about the psychology of being a winner.

Yeah. This would be a repetitive, [00:44:00] it'd be a repetitive cliche conversation to believe you're a winner. You have to have supreme self confidence. You have to envision yourself winning. You have to have an abdominal mindset. You have to practice resiliency like that's. Yeah. Like, that's nothing new. Yeah. You can find that message in a dozen, a hundred, a thousand books, you know, the, the importance of confidence and almost being, you know, having delusional, uh, sense of achievement like 100%.

There's no, there's no, I don't think interesting discussion to be had there. Fertility though. Well, yeah, then we can make it super scientific, but is there a spiritual belief component to fertility? Yeah, there is. Yeah, without question. Yeah, absolutely. You, you had mentioned more of like kind of the cultural dynamics of, you know, masculinity and femininity.

I'm curious just to get a little bit of your take on that as well. Just kind of like stepping into that role of creating a family. How have you, how have you navigated that? And, um. Any commentary just kind of on, um, just in general, like stepping into those [00:45:00] roles as a new parent, um, you know, your wife now, you know, embracing her femininity, wanting to be a mother, um, ways that you guys have supported each other.

I think, I think all that stuff is, it's really important when it comes to starting a family, but also just kind of, you know, the health of an overall relationship. Yeah. So with masculinity, femininity, yeah, I'll preface by saying like, I had very good parents growing up. My parents were awesome. Mom's awesome.

Dad's awesome. I had awesome role models. I always knew I wanted to be a dad. It wasn't something that I had reluctance around or when I was younger, you know, very often for a lot of young people, like they can never imagine themselves being like a father or a mother, you know, or I don't think I want half kids.

That's, that's very common. Like antinatalism is very common, common. That was never my attitude. I never had an antinatalist attitude. I never thought that there were too many people in the world. Uh, I didn't buy into the progressive bullshit, like, how could you bring a child into this society? Like, that's all just fucking [00:46:00] woke garbage.

Human beings have been having children since the dawn of time. We had children through the Plague of Justinian. We had children, uh, through the Black Plague. We had children when the Mongolian Hordes were invading. People are always having kids. The purpose of life is to create more life. Biologically, divinely, the purpose of life is to create more life.

I don't Brooke any fucking argument about that. We'll stop. Yeah. Just fuck your arguments to the contrary. I don't, I don't care. So I knew that I want to have kids and yeah, when you're younger as a man, oftentimes that can be hard to imagine. For most men, they're, they're big struggle when they're young or a lot of men is getting female attention, having sex, and then hopefully, you know, hopefully if you're, you're healthy, you're well adjusted, you're socially normal, you realize that sex is actually very easy to get female attention.

It's easy to get. That's not hard. It's fun. You get girls, maybe you get a lot of girls. Good for you. Uh, what comes next? I never got trapped. Some men, some men get trapped, but I never got trapped in [00:47:00] the sex phase, so to speak, where you see this a lot, like in the red pill community, guys will be like in their thirties, forties, and like, they just want to get laid.

That's, that's great. At a certain point, you do have to grow up. And it's not to say that sex isn't awesome. Sex is fucking awesome. Uh, but I will say, honestly, as a, you know, being a married man, sex with someone you love is a lot better than with sex with someone that you just met that night. Maybe that makes me square.

I don't care. But I like being married. I love my wife. I love being married. Uh, we have a great relationship and I've always viewed being a man as a progressive ascendancy through different sort of arcs of character. Right. So you're born a young guy, you're born a baby, you grow up, develop the tools obviously to be independent in the world, go through your 20s to about 30, you develop a skillset, you develop true independence, you're able to support yourself, you're able to take on more responsibility.[00:48:00]

Eventually, hopefully you're able to take care of a woman, you're able to have a family, you're able to be a role model to somebody. Responsibility keeps increasing your, your personal power. That way we're capable of keeps increasing. Uh, some men, they don't want that. That's fine. I'm not talking to those guys for everybody else.

I'm talking to you. So I knew I wanted to be a father. I wanted to be a husband. I want to have children. Uh, and as your responsibility increases, that leads to more growth. You find out you're capable of more. It also requires you to, you know, pull out of yourself whatever internal qualities you might have.

So I've enjoyed that. I've enjoyed that immensely. And you know, that's something that I always, I wanted that. So, you know, so I created it and even before I ever was married, before I even met my wife, I knew I wanted my wife to be a stay at home mom. I didn't want my wife to work. I just, I, I, that's a very, uh, yeah, I've, I've criticized it before online, but like this, the sort of like the, we're like the boomer concept of like the work wife or the working wife or like, you know, uh, [00:49:00] you know, the woman that shared the glass ceiling, you can have it all.

It's all, it's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. Women are happiest when they're taking care of things and they got little projects. I'm quoting Matt Gold right now. Congrats, Matt Gold. Women are happiest when they're taking care of things, got little projects, and they're taking care of babies. Yeah. If you are one of those women where you want to have a career, fucking all power to you, that's not, it was not the girl for me.

I wasn't gonna waste my time with that shit. You know, my wife, I said, yeah, we both work from home. She's home. She loves being home. She's never, I mean, not that she's been in an office in a long time. She's never going back to a fucking office. My God, Jesus. Uh, so I mean, that's been my attitude about it and it's, it's worked out so far.

Yeah. Our, our big obstacle that we had, our challenge was her infertility issues, but we're able to solve those. You know, that, that was one thing when I was working with the human body for so many years, personal trainer, I always knew that people have the power to change, you can change your body, these changes to change the body, to change the mind that goes both ways, you know, chicken and egg, which one comes first, it happens simultaneously, [00:50:00] you can change your body, you can change your mind, your body has the capacity to heal and science right now is in an explosive state of growth, this is the golden age of health legitimately is, yeah.

We have so much knowledge available to us, and a lot of it's scattered, it's decentralized, but we can put together, we can make it whole, we can see the connections, and we can solve the issues, the illnesses that plague us, infertility being one of those things. We have, we have the ability and the means to do so.

So I kind of rambled there, I think the question was about something with Being a father kids marriage, but hopefully that helps somebody. No, no, that was great. And, you know, I just want to commend you for, um, identifying a problem. That's, you know, probably feels like, you know, bigger than, like, it's not going to be 1 person solving this massive fertility problem.

No, I mean, I mean, infertility, like this is the thing with the decline in the fertility rate. So the Elon tweets about this, I think, like every other day, uh, birthrate has gone down, [00:51:00] birthrate is going down globally. 100 percent it is. Without question, it's going down. It's a major issue in a lot of countries.

They have a really low birthrate. There's not enough people being born to replace. The people who are dying, you're gonna end up with this very older, top heavy population. At that point, I don't know how you grow an economy when you don't have enough young people. Like, when you have a negative population growth, you can't grow your economy, yeah, fundamentally.

And who's gonna take care of all these old people, right? Like, these are real issues. Uh, I don't have answers to solve that. Like there's all, there's gazillion analysis that go around every day as to why that's happened. Is it because of decadence is because of consumerism? Is it because of social media?

Like, yeah, you can do these deep dive analysis constantly. And there are probably our root causes worth trying to address, but underneath, you know, our position is underneath that. What I've seen is like, yeah, birth rates gone down. Part of the reason why it's gone down is because the people that want to have children.

Can't, which is what infertility is like, let's, let's focus on the tens of millions, hundreds of [00:52:00] millions of couples that want to have kids. And heal those people. I don't think we're going to fix the people, the people who have gone over to anti natalism. It's like, fuck off. Am I having children? I'm going to be a dink retard.

Okay, great. Go, go do that. Enjoy it. I don't care. I want to help the people do you want to have a child? Yes. All right. We're here for you. Yeah. Is there anything that you've, uh, uncovered since you started? Uh, Ferda, that has surprised you, um, you know, any anecdotal stories or just kind of piece of data that have stood out as, uh, you know, shocking.

The thing that has surprised me, I mean, and credit to all the hippies that talked about this for years, and I didn't take it seriously really, even until I started this company. So if we were going through this, uh, environmental toxins, detox is real. Like, it's real, like everything in our environment that's a chemical, they do, it does affect us, everything affects us, and it's not any one thing, like, yeah, we [00:53:00] can talk about plastics, yeah, there's lots of plastics, we can talk about petrochemicals, we can talk about fragrances, um, you know, we can talk about, you know, the depletion of nutrients obviously in the food supply, we can talk about food additives, these things, all these things in isolation are probably safe, like in small amounts, you can argue like they're all safe, But we're hyper saturated with them all the time.

So it's like chemical death by a thousand paper cuts. Yeah, there's, it's not additive. It's, it's kind of like this accumulative load, everything accumulates. And then heavy metals. That's another one. The thing that's been crazy to me is like, I'm constantly going through all these research with my team.

We're just like trying to find, let's like, let's find everything we can that affects fertility, you know, fertility and fertility and. Stuff like, you know, obviously, like, you know, the plastics are a common one. It's like men who, let's say, experience like, like zero sperm count have higher accumulation of biphenyl A microplastics, like their tissues and their testicles.

Now, does that mean it's just all about microplastics? Like, no, but that's interesting that the more [00:54:00] chemical saturation you have, the more it seems likely you are to suffer from infertility. Same thing for women. Heavy metals is another one. Like, I never took it seriously until I started doing this. Like, yeah, heavy metals, you got to detox heavy metals.

Sure, whatever, you know, 10 years ago, I didn't give a shit. I was like, your liver detoxes you. But then you get into the science of the stuff, and you find out that heavy metals, in fact, do accumulate in tissues. They do. Your liver is not processing everything out. It's not this perfect organ that takes everything out of you.

All this stuff accumulates in tissues. It accumulates in fat cells. It accumulates in organs. And over time, you know, it's not going to affect you in year one, but in year 5, 10, 15, 20. Let's say you're 35 years old. I want to have a baby. Or you're a 35 year old man. I want to get my wife pregnant. You've been, you've been trying for a year.

Oh, what's wrong? You'll get a semen analysis. Hey, your sperm count's 11 million. What? This happens to like, I talk about this all the time. This happens to millions of men and they don't know until they're in it. [00:55:00] Shit. What was that from? I'm like, I tell all the guys, all our clients, patients now, like, guess what?

You're getting blood tests and heavy metal testing. You're getting all this shit done. And it's probably going to find things. And you're probably going to have to detox. What does detox mean? Detox means that your body does in fact have the capacity to pull these endocrine disruptors out of its tissues to some extent, and you can excrete them you can piss them out, you can sweat them out obviously, you can use blood donation to get them out.

There are tools we have available. Detoxification is a real thing. You can also support obviously your liver health, but your liver actually can't do it all on its own. Maybe it could 50, 60, 100 years ago. But today, with everything that's hitting us all all different times. Electromagnetic frequencies are another one.

You go into the research, like, does that really make a fucking difference? Yeah, it does. Like, put, put your, put your iPhone next to your balls for a couple days, and then let's see your fucking sperm production. I guarantee you it's all going to be damaged. [00:56:00] How do we know that? Because every research paper that's been done on testicular function and electromagnetic frequency shows the exact same thing happening.

So it's like, yeah, for myself, like I, not that I ever did, I always carry my phone in my hand. I never put my phone in my pocket ever. Yeah. It never quite felt right to me to like have it close to my body. Yeah. I was right. 100 percent validated. But all this stuff adds up. It's all these small things that all add up.

Yeah. This is why living a, like a clean lifestyle. It's like, well, what do you do? It's like, well, yeah, yeah. Whole food diet. 100 percent sweating daily. You know, sauna. I've been on sauna kick now for like two years. Some people get sauna. Yes. Get the goddamn sauna. Because guess what? Sauna is doing fat and detox your body.

You got heavy metals, you got fucking plastic accumulation. You can't get everything out, but you can get a lot out. Get that thing, spend the money. Sit in it four or five times a week for a couple months. Or you could do like a 30 day detox of various protocols and sweat. Another thing, another big detoxification pathway that gets overlooked.

Low body fat percentage, especially [00:57:00] for men. You know, this is more for men. But you know if you've been overweight your whole life or you're just like a husky boy Get down to single digit body fat. You know what it's gonna do. It's gonna get all that shit out of your tissues You're gonna quite literally metabolize.

You're finally gonna break all down and burn it out. You know visceral body fat That's another thing we could talk about but like you you if you're if you're a man You want to optimize your virility you want to be fucking shooting off, you know 200 million 200 million sperm count loads get to you know, get to low body fat use this on for a couple months then You know, virility max, you know, with what we have a whole bunch of protocols for this and you'll be a healthier, more virile guy.

Mm. The 100 percent possible do. Yeah. So, I've seen you write about this a bit on Twitter, but you've talked about fasting a bit, uh, in terms of a detox. Um, how does that fit into this whole conversation with detoxification? So, fasting and fertility don't actually really go together too much. So, fasting is very effective.

It's very effective for some metabolic pathways. It's very effective for getting rid of, [00:58:00] uh, let's say, senescent cells, like damaged cells need to die. Uh, fasting can be very good for resetting gut health. So if you could, let's say, let's say you have gut issues. Okay, let's say you're someone like, you've always had bad digestion.

Combine some fasting, let's say 48 hour fast. And then also doing elimination diet, following it up. This is something I've used with clients to figure out what their gut issues are. It's like, all right, let's start with a fast. Let's get, let's get everything out of your system. Let's let your body kind of metabolize some of the bad bacteria that's in there.

And let's start like an elimination diet, like Carver diet, which is like meat and water. And then we'll kind of see what affects you. And over time, we can build up the gut microbiota. Um, does fasting though, like make you more fertile? No. You know, for fertility for men, you actually want to be eating. You want to have a regular eating pattern that's circadian aligned, basically meaning like eat three meals a day.

Nutrient dense meals. You basically eat like a bro. You want your body to have all the available nutrients and micronutrients to be making, you know, healthy sperm, be having, you know, high testosterone levels, [00:59:00] uh, you know, fasting is excellent for fat loss. Yeah. Very good for autophagy, but you know, as a fertility, you know, protocol doesn't really something doesn't really factor in.

Yeah, makes sense. Um, anything else on the detox subject that, you know, you mentioned a 30 day detox protocol. Um, there's obviously environmental factors, but if someone was looking to do a detox, do you have maybe, uh, just a few, a few, uh, pieces of advice and, and if you have like a protocol specifically, we can link it in the show notes here, but um, yeah, I would love to just kind of get your thoughts generally, you know, you mentioned the sauna, you mentioned the sweat.

Any foods that are, you know, detoxifying that you would recommend. Yeah. So let's do the sauna detox first. So sauna detox. So this is a question I get asked like a lot. Um, like, you know, so you do like a regular sauna or do you like a infrared, like, you know, regular saunas are way hotter.[01:00:00]

This, any sauna, if you're sweating a lot and it's hot, that's great. That's already a good thing. The compelling research I've seen, which I got this from Dr. David Iru, infrared saunas. So the temperature is not as hot as a regular sauna, but because the infrared saunas use direct heat. Pantrates deeper into the tissues, you get far more of a deeper sweat response, which ends up being better for overall detoxification.

Because there's a lot of stuff stored in the deeper layers of skin. Uh, the protocol that Dr. Root uses, it's a 30 day protocol, about, and you're using the sauna, I think, almost pretty much every day. And the infrared sauna, because it makes you sweat faster, and gets the body itself hotter, you don't need to be in it as long.

And you're doing like, multiple times a day, you know, short rounds, like 15 30 minutes, something like that. Someone's longer, you're going to be sweating. You're going to be getting very dehydrated while you're doing this. You have to replenish with lots and lots of electrolytes. The book, you look, look this up on Amazon, [01:01:00] um, sauna detoxification, uh, using niacin, Dr.

Dr. Rue. It's not detoxification. You use niacin, Dr. Rue. So it's very detailed in there. So you can use for 30 days. You can detox yourself of pretty much, you know, almost everything, maybe not all the microplastics, but certainly things like medications. Um, You know, various petrochemicals. He used this protocol very successfully with Gulf War veterans.

They had Gulf War Syndrome. Because those guys got, they got toxified with tons of stuff. Being in the oil fields burning. And then various, you know, chemical weapons they were exposed to. Various vaccines they were given. But you can use that protocol. And you have to use an infrared sauna for it. Uh, as you're detoxing, it's also recommended to use binders.

Uh, things like activated charcoal in the stomach that will bind in the toxins themselves, bind to let's say the medications, bind to the, you know, the drugs or whatever they might be to get them out of the system so your body doesn't reabsorb them. So if you really want to go down like the detox heavy pathway, you could do, you could use that.

And I'm also using niacin. Niacin [01:02:00] creates a flush response. It's going to open up all of your tissues. You're going to be itching and sweating. And detoxing. It's very intense, but you could do that. Um, yeah, I haven't done that protocol in particular. What I did when I got my infrared sauna, I used it about four times a week over about a six month period.

And it felt amazing. It felt fantastic doing it. And then at a certain point, like as my, you know, my wife and I, we've had two kids. We're going to have a third one. I stopped using the sauna because the sauna, the heat is very damaging to sperm. Sperm are extremely heat sensitive. So like simple tactical change, all the guys can make listening to this, get cotton boxers, start wearing those.

Don't wear polyester. Don't wear any, you know, like tight underwear, briefs, cotton boxers. Like you actually want to like, you want, you want your balls hanging low. You want to be able to breathe sperm or very sensitive, any kind of stress, heat, especially you can nuke your sperm count with excessive sauna use.

Yeah, if you have awesome sperm count and maybe it's not a big deal that you went from 150 to 75 [01:03:00] million, great, thumbs up. But if you're like the average guy now and you already have a mediocre sperm count, being in the sauna a whole bunch, it's not going to help anything. So the sauna detoxification protocol, you know, in a fertility context, like, this is something to do to get healthier sort of at the beginning of your Fertility optimization.

You don't want to be necessarily using a son all the whole time. You're trying to get your wife or girlfriend pregnant. Right. Makes sense. Well, dude, I want to be respectful of your time. Um, this has been an amazing conversation. Love all the stuff you're putting out there. Um, especially around this topic of fertility.

It's incredibly important. So I just want to thank you for all the work that you're doing. And, um, yeah, if you wouldn't mind just letting the audience know where they can find more information on you and all the things you're talking about, that'd be great. Yeah. So, uh, obviously I'm on X, uh, AJ underscore Cortez is my profile.

I have a newsletter that you can sign up through my website, uh, cortez. site, sign up for the newsletter. I talk about, we're, we're, you know, we're building the company in real time. So I'm [01:04:00] always kind of sharing like, you know, the startup stories, uh, around building the company that we are open for, for clients, for patients, uh, the website is joinferda.

com. Uh, so we, you know, if you, if you're interested, obviously in what we do, you can book a call there. Or if we, you know, can. Talk to you, um, you know, figure out if you're like a good fit, if we were able to help you and you can become a client that way. Awesome. Well, thank you again. Appreciate it. And, um, until next time, brother, we're gonna have to do this in person now that you're in Austin.

Appreciate it.