What Helps Fertility And What Hurts It With Lily Nichols

Wouldn’t it be helpful to have straightforward nutrition and lifestyle advice for enhancing fertility? And to know what to avoid that may hinder your ability to get pregnant? Lily Nichols offers just what you’re looking for on today’s podcast. Lily is a Registered Dietitian/Nutritionist and the author of Real Food for Fertility.

Today, she goes over her recommended macro and micronutrient ratios for a healthier body (i.e. home for a baby) and what to do to have higher sperm and egg quality (so you can improve your chances of carrying the baby to term). Lily covers food, of course, but also lifestyle choices that we may not have realized impact our fertility (like our intake of alcohol, caffeine, and also our stress levels).

Visit Lily’s website: lilynicholsrdn.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Lily Nichols.

How does stress affect fertility? What about caffeine and alcohol? What foods should we eat if we want to maximize the possibility of getting pregnant, and what should be avoided? This is episode 530, and our guest is Lily Nichols. Lily is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and the author of Real Food for Fertility, among her other books.

In this episode, Lily gets specific about the foods that hinder fertility by reducing sperm and egg quality, and she talks about those that enhance it. She also discusses macro and micronutrients and why it’s important to avoid ultra-processed foods when you hope to have a baby. She also talks about the effect of the lifestyle choices we make, like insufficient sleep and a stressful, fast-paced lifestyle, and what those do to negatively impact fertility.

Finally, she reminds us that couples who are subfertile or infertile don’t mean that it’s just the woman’s problem. It could have to do with a man. Lily offers tips to maximize sperm quality for the men and egg quality for the women in this episode, so you can have the right conditions for a healthy pregnancy. This is the third episode in our series for young adults, where we’re talking to them and also talking about topics that are relevant to them. I hope you find this helpful. If you do, please forward this episode to a friend.

Before we get into the conversation, it is the 25th anniversary of the Weston A. Price Foundation. If you love this show or have benefited from any of our initiatives, join hands with us in education, research, and activism. You can become a member for only $30 for the year using the Code POD10. Since this is a special year, 2025, we will put your name into a raffle to win some Wise Traditions friendly prizes. Join us for only $30. Go to The Weston A. Price Foundation, click on Become a Member, and use the code POD10. Welcome to the Weston A. Price Foundation Family.

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Welcome to the show, Lily.

Thanks for having me back.

Fertility Reboot: Is Preconception Planning The Secret?

We loved what you brought in round one when we first had you on as part of the Motherhood Series. We were like, “We have to have you back,” because you touch on so many important points. In this episode, we want to focus on your latest book, which is Real Food for Fertility. I want to start with the question about preconception planning. I know that’s one of the chapters in your book. That must be a foreign notion to people. Explain to us what that even means.

Preconception planning means giving yourself a set period of time to be more intentional about your food and lifestyle choices. You can optimize your chances of conception and improve egg and sperm quality before you get pregnant, which ultimately improves the trajectory of your pregnancy and risk for pregnancy complications. You’re going into pregnancy well-nourished. That also helps you oftentimes recover better postpartum. We’re trying to think about the long-term, not just getting you pregnant, but making sure you’re in optimal health prior to conception, so everything that follows downstream is smoother, including your baby’s development, too.

Wise Traditions | Lily Nichols | Fertility — Real Food for Fertility

Did our parents or grandparents do this sort of thing?

There are anthropological notations of extra attention given to certain foods preconception. If you go far enough back in history, like in some of Dr. Price’s work, he would note that certain communities would put an extra emphasis on giving couples who were going to get married or planning to conceive more fatty animal foods, more organ meats, and more seafood. In some communities, it was specific types of nutrient-dense shellfish that were reserved for these couples.

We’ve fallen away from a lot of those traditions. Many of our grandparents or great-grandparents didn’t even necessarily put in that extra effort prior to conception. Fertility challenges were not as common as they were in the early and mid-1900s as they are nowadays. I don’t think they put in a whole lot of extra thought into it.

Would it have been optimal to do some of these more historical ancestral things? Sure, but it also wasn’t quite as necessary as nowadays because fertility as a whole, our nourishment, our circadian rhythm, stress levels, and organic food production were the default before industrialized agriculture. Everything was more aligned with optimal human health back then, where you didn’t require it as much as nowadays.

I think of people who used to say, “My husband looks at me and I get pregnant.” There was fertility abounding. Perhaps they didn’t have to be as careful because there weren’t as many toxins, stressors, and all the things you’re describing. Let’s go there for a second. What are foods that don’t enhance fertility? What are lifestyle things that don’t enhance fertility? Let’s talk about the things to avoid.

Fertility Fails: The Ultra-Processed Food Trap Revealed!

From a food perspective, our shift to modern ultra-processed foods is a travesty for fertility. These foods generally have been so processed that they don’t have much in the way of micronutrients. Meaning, vitamins and minerals. Oftentimes, they’re pretty much concentrated sources of refined carbohydrates and sugars, such as refined grains, corn syrup, and whatnot. You’re not getting any nutrition with it. They’re made with these low-quality industrialized seed oils, which have replaced the traditional animal fats that we used to rely on as our primary source of fat.

When that happens, we end up with a situation of typically overnourishment in terms of calories, like excess energy, but low nutrient density. This wreaks havoc on our overall health. It dysregulates our blood sugar, which dysregulates our insulin levels. Insulin levels have a direct effect on our reproductive hormones. You start lacking certain micronutrients that are key for your thyroid to function properly. Your metabolic health is compromised.

Your mitochondria don’t work as well, so your cell’s ability to make energy is compromised. That’s huge for both egg and sperm quality. The egg cell has the highest concentration of mitochondria of any other cell in the human body. When you start taking away the key things that support mitochondrial function, you see egg and sperm quality get compromised. Thus, conception becomes compromised as well.

We’re in a place on the food front where this heavy reliance on ultra-processed foods has gotten us into big trouble. 58% of the average American’s diet, their calories come from ultra-processed foods. Over half of our calories are coming from ultra-processed foods. Maybe not the readers of this show, but from an average American, yes. That’s simply displacing all these other things that we need to support our body’s optimal health, hormone levels, and fertility.

When you say ultra-processed foods, you don’t just mean fast food. You mean things that we could pick up off the grocery store shelf that might even have all the right labels. Let’s say it’s organic corn chips, a box of cereal, or granola. We don’t think of these things necessarily as ultra-processed, but they certainly are compared to the diet of our ancestors.

It depends on the definitions you want to use. There are research teams that have specific definitions for what qualifies as an ultra-processed food and what percentage of ingredients need to be ultra-processed in order for it to count for the research study. Usually, it’s things that you could not recreate in your own kitchen even if you wanted to because the ingredient list is so illegible with processed food items that you couldn’t make it yourself.

Maybe an organic corn chip wouldn’t necessarily qualify if it were fried in good-quality oil. There are tallow-fried organic corn chips. Something like an extruded puffed corn snack coated with cheese dust would fall in the category of ultra-processed. Processing occurs on a spectrum. For me, when I’m looking at whether or not a so-called processed food is going to be overtly problematic or not, I’m looking at whether the way in which it has been processed has removed nutrients from it, or whether we have added ingredients to it that are overtly harmful. If it falls into that category, I’m generally like, “We need to be eating less of that.” Something like an organic corn chip fried in tallow or something is not necessarily off the table for me.

Caffeine & Alcohol: Are Your Drinks Destroying Fertility?

It’s interesting what you’re saying in terms of what qualifies as ultra-processed. That’s exactly the kind of food that Dr. Price said to avoid. Principle number one of the Wise Traditions diet is no refined or denatured foods. What they’re doing is they’re taking a food that might have some value, an ingredient, and then they’re changing it to such a degree that it becomes damaging and not helpful to our bodies. Talk to us for a second about alcohol and caffeine. How do those affect fertility?

Alcohol is an interesting one. Overtly, if you look at it, alcohol is a toxin. It puts a burden on our liver to process and detoxify. That pulls nutritional resources in order to pull that off. A lot of it comes down to the quantity. Traditionally, there are some things that have alcohol that would’ve been consumed, maybe a naturally fermented beverage, but you probably wouldn’t be consuming quite the concentration of alcohol as you would from a vodka or something like that.

We do find there’s a lot of research on alcohol and fertility, and we do find that it can affect hormone levels, specifically estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and luteinizing hormone levels. Since it’s affecting detoxification and our liver is involved in hormone metabolism, specifically, it’s removing hormones that have done their job and been used up. Your body metabolizes those to excrete those.

Alcohol is a toxin. It puts a burden on our liver to process and detoxify.

We find that it can spike more harmful estrogen metabolites when you’re consuming an excess amount of alcohol because the liver is overburdened. It can’t do all of its other jobs. Alcohol is something that you need to approach with caution. I’m not personally concerned about the tiny amount of alcohol you might have from drinking a kombucha or something, but it’s hard to justify regular or especially higher consumption of beer, wine, spirits, and whatnot.

When it comes to caffeine, caffeine is an interesting one, because sometimes, there are traditionally consumed beverages that have some caffeine. The way in which we utilize caffeine in our modern world is that people are so run-down on their energy that they drink their coffee for that fake boost to their energy levels. We find that it tends to spike cortisol levels, which has downstream effects on the reproductive hormones as well.

I will also say that, especially for women, but some men can fall into this category as well, coffee becomes a replacement for breakfast. It has appetite suppressant effects. Some people lean on that to try to limit their caloric intake. When you start getting into that habit, you end up with challenges. Anytime your energy intake is compromised, we see a drop in hormone production, especially among women. We have to be careful in how we consume caffeine and how much. I usually recommend that people save their caffeinated drinks until after they’ve had breakfast, at the very least. This lessens the chance you’re going to have a huge cortisol spike as a result. Also, keep an eye on the quantity of caffeine.

For women specifically, since we have our menstrual cycle that reflects back information about our overall health, if you do have menstrual cycle issues where maybe your cycle length is weird or you have heavy bleeding, cramping, PMS, or something like that, you might want to try to specifically decrease your caffeine intake over a couple of months and see if it has an effect on your cycle. It often does. Find your sweet spot for whether you can even consume caffeine or how much you can consume without it compromising your ovulatory function or your cycle health.

That’s fascinating. I hadn’t heard anyone address that before. How did you come across that in your research for your book? I’m curious.

I co-authored Real Food for Fertility with Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, whose whole practice is on fertility awareness and the menstrual cycle. There is nobody I know of who knows the research more clearly than she does. She is the one who felt probably more strongly than I did about limiting caffeine intake because she sees it in her client’s charts.

You will see these cycle issues. Everything else is perfectly dialed in with their nutrition, their lifestyle, and whatever, and they’re still having cycle issues. The last thing people want to do is address the caffeine or the coffee intake. She’ll get her clients to do it, and lo and behold, 1 or 2 cycles go by, and that issue resolves.

That led us to dive into the research further on why that might be happening. Sometimes, the best findings come from following the breadcrumbs of what you’re observing in practice. Lo and behold, you do see that it has some effects on fertility. Is it the caffeine itself, or is it the way in which people consume caffeine, or the habits that go along with it? People who drink a lot of coffee are more likely to be smokers. You have some habit stacking that can happen in one way or another. We’re not completely anti-caffeine, but if you’re having issues, this is one of the things you could look at to optimize.

Beyond Food: Lifestyle Habits That Make Or Break Fertility

That makes sense. That leads us into part two of my question about lifestyle choices that affect our fertility. What are things that go hand-in-hand with infertility concerns because of lifestyle habits?

There are quite a few of them. One of the big ones is sleep and our circadian rhythm. We have a sleep deficit problem in Western society with how overworked and overstressed we are. I want to call out from the get-go anyone who is a parent of young children, and I qualify. Sleep disruption is sometimes par for the course.

How can you find a way to get as much deep, restful sleep as possible? A lot of that comes down to paying attention to our choices in the hours leading up to sleep and the environment that we’re sleeping in. Is your room dark? Do you have lights coming in? I have a neighbor who will put on these super bright lights that shine in our bedroom window. We have blackout curtains so that no matter what’s going on out there, I can sleep in a dark room. That affects your melatonin levels and your reproductive hormone levels.

Get serious about the blue light exposure at night.Once upon a time, we didn’t have incandescent light bulbs. Now, we don’t even have incandescent light bulbs. We have those obnoxious flickering LED light bulbs. We have our blue screens in front of us before we go to bed. How can you mitigate that? It could be either avoiding those things or potentially wearing blue light blockers before bed. Getting to sleep at a reasonable hour is a huge one.

Another one is exercise. What are our activity levels like? In previous years, we had a lot of activity built into our day. Maybe we weren’t hitting the gym super hard for an hour, doing high-intensity interval training, but we were out collecting firewood, gathering berries, and hunting. We were out and about a lot more, so our activity levels were different. That can sway fertility in either direction.

We have an issue with people being completely underactive, and that affects us. We can have the issue of people over-exercising and under-fueling, which can lead to complete cessation of the menstrual cycle in its most severe presentation of hypothalamic amenorrhea. We have to find a sweet spot of exercise where we’re getting some movement, which is good for us, but also fueling enough so that we’re not in an energy deficit.

Lastly, I would say stress is a huge factor. What are the ways in which we are mitigating our daily stressors? Some of this stuff is unavoidable, like the way in which we have to work to earn money and pay for all the things. Sometimes, our schedules are a little crazy, but in what ways do you have control over the stress? What ways can you implement stress relieving activities, hobbies, conversations with friends, therapy, or whatever it takes to help us find a state of calm? Our stress has a major effect on our reproductive hormones, which affect our thyroid, cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, and ovulation. Everything is impacted by stress, so we need to be serious about mitigating that.

It’s interesting. I’m leaning into my intuition at this moment and thinking that if I were a baby, I wouldn’t want to come into a space that was agitated and stress-filled. I wouldn’t want to come into a room like that, let alone a womb like that. Maybe on some level, the egg and the sperm are responding to that environment or that stress level, and you might not even be aware of it. You’re so used to it. To you, it’s like music in the background of your life, but it’s affecting your fertility, right?

Yeah. When the body senses stress, one of the first things that it tends to shut down is reproductive hormone production. We can survive without being fertile. There’s a difference between surviving and thriving, though. If our fertility is in a good place and our reproductive hormones are in a good place, ultimately, that’s a sign that our body feels safe enough to get pregnant and carry a pregnancy, which is so energy-intensive.

It’s so much work for your body to grow a brand-new human being from scratch that it makes sense that when your body senses some sort of a stress signal, whether that’s external stress, emotional stress, or a nutritional physical stressor, like a severe deficiency in a number of nutrients, we’re going to take back off on the hormone production. Your body doesn’t want you to get pregnant until the conditions are optimal. That’s one way to look at it. Sometimes, it’s a hard pill to swallow because our lifestyles are stressful, but sometimes, it’s a bit of a wake-up call.

You alluded to this earlier when you were saying that it’s like we’re overfed but undernourished. We might have the right caloric intake, but not exactly the right elements we need to build a baby, so to speak. Talk to us about that a little bit as we focus on what we should be doing to nourish our bodies with food.

Nutrient Powerhouse: Fueling Your Body For Baby-Making Success

You can take this from a couple of different angles. Some of it comes down to a macronutrient balance. If your diet is heavily reliant on ultra-processed foods that we alluded to earlier, that is higher in carbohydrates, higher in low-quality fats, and generally pretty low in protein. When you look at the actual foods that make up that diet, they are lacking in a lot of whole foods that have key not only macronutrients but micronutrients as well that are required for hormone production, egg quality, sperm quality, and so on.

For me, optimally, we’re looking at a diet that has a good amount of protein. There’s tons of research on the higher requirements for protein that humans have compared to what our outdated dietary guidelines are. Arguably, our protein intake should be about double what those recommendations are, with some wiggle room in either direction.

More active individuals err on the higher side, and smaller people or less active individuals may not need quite as much, but everybody needs more than our very outdated RDA. For women, it works out to 45, 50, or 55 grams of protein a day. That’s not enough. You need to double that. When you look at doubling your protein intake, naturally, you have to look at, “Where do I get protein from?” Our highest quality protein, which has all of the amino acids that our body needs to function, is animal foods.

Optimally, we’re looking at a diet that has a good amount of protein.

We are looking at high-quality, well-raised animal foods, such as meat, poultry, fish, seafood, shellfish, eggs, and dairy products. Plant proteins are fine in my book as well, but they don’t have the full array of amino acids. It’s not the same protein quality and utilization, but those can be additive to what you’re getting from animal foods.

Beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds. You can go into the intricacies of how you prepare them to optimize digestion, absorption, and all of that, but we need to be focusing our energy on getting more high-quality animal foods that will hit the mark for protein needs. Also, when you look at which foods are most concentrated in the very nutrients we need for egg quality, sperm quality, mitochondrial function, and all of that, it’s these animal foods.

Part of the animal food consumption, I will add, would be having some organ meats come into the diet, which we see reflected in some of the traditional recommendations on some societies that emphasize certain foods prior to conception. Oftentimes, organ meats were emphasized. They are uniquely high in a lot of different micronutrients that support fertility, including some nutrients that people generally look to supplements to get for optimizing egg and sperm quality. The richest source of CoQ10 is the heart. A lot of people aren’t consuming that unless you’re hunting yourself or doing a half or a whole cow or an animal share directly from a farmer. That’s a highly concentrated source of this very unique and bioactive antioxidant that supports egg and sperm quality.

Unless people say, “I don’t find these organ meats palatable,” the heart is a muscle. It’s muscle meat. It’s one of the easiest organ meats to include in my book.

We have a recipe in Real Food for Fertility for a beef heart stew. I have a recipe on my website from a long time ago, if you can dig it up, on Thai chili beef heart skewers, which are good. They’re in an Asian style marinade and then grilled. In Argentina, they do heart on the grill. It’s quite tasty. It honestly tastes a bit like tri-tip. It has a bit more iron in it, so it has a bit more concentrated flavor. It’s like a flavorful steak, but it doesn’t have the same flavor people associate with liver, which is a stronger flavor and maybe takes a little more finesse with cooking and seasoning to get it right.

In Peru, they also do hearts on skewers. It’s called anticuchos, which is very delicious. You’ve mentioned a lot of foods. I know in the previous episode, we did, too. You talk about what foods to include, including the eggs and the meats from animals, the organ meats, and so forth. How does this jive with those who are on a vegetarian diet? What are the challenges with fertility related to that?

Vegetarian Fertility: Key Nutrients You Might Be Missing!

This is quite the challenging topic, and one that I’ve danced around in some of my previous work. I have this book that we decided to put in a whole chapter, going through the research on vegetarian diets. I’m a former vegetarian. I still have loved ones who follow vegetarian and even vegan diets, so I get all the reasons that people might choose that.

The way that I approach this topic is not from this emotional, environmental, ethical, or anything from that framework. Although I acknowledge the reasons people do that. I’m looking at it purely from the perspective of nutritional adequacy. There are a handful of problems that arise on a vegetarian diet. Namely, there are a lot of different micronutrients where our intake is lower, or some of these nutrients can be non-existent in plant foods. It depends on which nutrient you’re looking at.

In that vegetarian chapter, I go through Vitamin B12, choline, Vitamin A, Vitamin K2, DHA, iron, zinc, iodine, and selenium. I could have added more to the list, but I was going with the nutrients that have the most robust research on the effects on fertility, the effects on whether or not intake is significantly different from omnivores, vegetarians, or vegans, and which ones are more tricky.

There are some nutrients, like iodine, for example. You could, conceivably, get enough iodine on a vegetarian diet, especially if you include eggs and dairy products. If you’re fully vegan, your only major source of iodine is seaweed. Are you regularly including seaweed in your diet? Are you not regularly including seaweed? That makes the difference.

You look population-wide at what are iodine intakes by different dietary types, and you see lesser iodine intake as animal food goes down. We’ve seen this population-wide in certain parts of Scandinavia where fish and dairy consumption are a lot less than they were in the previous ten years. We see iodine status has gone down by more than 50%. What’s the result of that? Delays in conception. We know that iodine-deficient people have half the chances of conception in any given menstrual cycle than individuals who have sufficient iodine levels. Do you see how it gets into all these little intricacies? That’s data that I go through.

Another area to consider is the protein content of the diet and the protein quality. Interestingly, our dietary guidelines don’t have a separate guideline for protein for vegetarians. I uncovered when I was researching this that that choice was made because the assumption was that vegetarians were getting more than 50% of their protein from animal foods, such as dairy and eggs.

If you think back to the ‘90s, most vegetarians in the ‘90s were consuming dairy and eggs. I think of our vegetarian friends and family members. Quiche was on the menu a lot. There was a lot of cheese added to the dishes. Even though they’re getting beans and lentils, they’re getting a lot of high-quality protein on the side. That’s not happening anymore as people go towards more severe restrictions on animal foods and plant-based everything.

This research found that because the protein quality, amino acid makeup, and availability of protein are a lot lower in plant foods, vegetarians need at least 20% more than an omnivore. Add that onto our already higher protein requirements than the guidelines as a whole. How are you going to meet that on a whole food vegetarian diet? If you’re not including dairy and eggs, it’ll be challenging. You have certain amino acids that you don’t even consume on a vegetarian or vegan diet that have beneficial effects on fertility, like taurine, carnitine, and creatine.

There are a lot of different areas to look at. I didn’t even touch on the macronutrient balance, but that’s another thing. Typically, vegetarians get a high proportion of calories from carbohydrates. It’s typically 60%. Their protein intake is typically 10% to 12% of calories. When you look at the data we have on how macronutrient ratios affect the function of our ovaries or our ovulatory function, you see the lowest ovulatory function.

Meaning, the highest chances of having issues with PCOS or anovulation, where you’re not ovulating whatsoever, in individuals who are getting 60% of their calories from carbohydrates. It throws off the ratios of even the very raw materials that our body needs for hormone production, blood sugar, balance, and all the things. It’s something we need to think about more.

Are You Nutrient Deficient? Spotting The Signs & Getting Answers!

When you and Lisa see clients, and I know you’ve seen so many in the past, what symptoms did you notice among people who were nutrient deficient, whether they were vegetarians or not? Let’s say I am a woman who wants to get pregnant. I don’t even know that I’m low in choline, CoQ10, or any of the things you’ve mentioned because I haven’t done any analysis. What would some symptoms be that would let me know, almost intuitively by noticing how I feel, that I might be nutrient deficient?

Unstable energy levels. Not feeling energized throughout the day is a big one. You may be all over the place. Usually, if they’re doing caffeine, they feel a spike in energy, and then they crash later on, or they could feel low energy all the time. If you’re paying attention to your menstrual cycle, you might have irregular or erratic cycles. You might skip cycles or have long cycles.

You may not have very noticeable signs of ovulation. Usually, around the time of ovulation, there’s cervical fluid present that you’ll notice when you’re wiping after you go to the bathroom. In individuals who are significantly undereating, for example, their hormone production is so low that they often won’t have any cervical fluid or cervical mucus.

In individuals who might err on the side of polycystic ovarian syndrome, their bodies are trying to ovulate, but they can’t quite do it. This is why they have these long, drawn-out cycles between menstruation. They might have odd cervical mucus patterns where it’s not a distinct time of ovulation. The body is trying to ovulate, but it doesn’t.

You may have painful periods and cramps. People think that PMS and cramping are normal. It’s quite common, but it’s not normal to be completely debilitated by your cycle. Differences in bleeding, whether excessive or scanty bleeding, can be a sign of hormone issues. There’s a whole array of potential symptoms that you might notice. Certainly, if you’re trying to conceive, delays in conception would be a reflection that we need to zero in on this and work on some deep replenishment of nutrients.

To be fair, if there are delays in conception, it might not have to do with a woman’s nutrient stores. It might have to do with the men, too. Let’s talk about sperm quality and its impact on fertility.

Arguably, the most important life skill that you can develop is the ability to cook whole, nourishing foods that taste good. It all starts in the kitchen.

Men’s Fertility Matters: Boosting Sperm Quality & Pregnancy Health

100%. This is a big issue in the fertility space where we put all the attention on the woman, like, “There are delays in conception. We have to run a bunch of labs and see what’s going on with her,” and we don’t look at the other partner. In couples that are facing challenges with conception, someone called infertile or subfertile, the chances that the man has some contributing factor to it are about 50%. Fifty percent of the cases there is male factor involvement in this issue, and we’re not looking at it closely enough.

Part of the reason that that is not happening is that our sperm quality guidelines have substantially declined over the decades. Male sperm quality has gone down over the years, but then they changed. They adjusted the reference ranges for so-called normal sperm quality, like motility count and morphology, to match what is being observed in the population rather than keeping those at optimal, and then being like, “We have a huge problem here.”

I know what you mean. Back in the day, they would say a kid is running fast on the track if he can do 1 mile in 6 minutes or something. Then, they noticed everybody’s running slower, so they said a kid is running fast if he can do 1 mile in 8 minutes. They changed the goalpost for sperm quality.

Let me give you an example. Back in 1980, a normal sperm concentration was anywhere from 20 to 200 million sperm per milliliter. Now, it’s anything over 15. Sperm motility in 1980 was anything over 60% motility. Now, it’s 40%. Sperm morphology back in 1980 was greater than or equal to 80.5%. Now, it’s over 4%. That’s a twentyfold difference in sperm morphology.

Even if we change that standard, that doesn’t change the outcome. We can play with the numbers a little bit, but it doesn’t play out well in real life.

The reason that they brought those down is that they’re trying to delineate who needs actual intervention. You’re not able to get pregnant without modern technology, but it leaves this gray area of subfertile men. You have some sperm that are healthy. Not many, but some, so there’s still a chance you could get your partner pregnant, but those chances are slim. When studies have looked at whether we could delineate complete infertility from subfertility and optimal fertility, we do see delays in conception among these men who have this not-so-great sperm quality, but don’t quite qualify as infertile by the World Health Organization guidelines.

We’re going to invite people to check out your book to learn more about how men can change their lifestyle and their nutrient stores to be more fertile. I want to ask you a question for the skeptic’s sake. What do you say to the person who’s like, “My cousin smokes, has the worst lifestyle ever, and doesn’t eat well, and he still has ten kids. Preparing for fertility, conception, and all these other things is for the birds.”

We do see that sometimes. I’ve seen that in clinical practice, too, where I’ll have a client who seems so unhealthy. Maybe their pregnancies have quite a few complications, but they are fertile. They’re getting pregnant one after the other. Sometimes, things are a bit unfair. I do think, though, some of these people may have hit the jackpot in genetics or family history.

Our health, our sperm production, and our egg quality as women are affected by what our parents and grandparents did. Maybe you’re from a family that had pretty healthy genetics and a healthy diet in previous generations, but your choices could be impacting the next generation. You can get pregnant, and that’s fantastic, but the genetic expression of that baby or their epigenetics, ultimately, is impacted by what you’re doing.

One of the things that we draw in in the sperm chapter and probably in the egg quality chapter as well is that sperm quality impacts the health of the pregnancy as well, because the sperm determines the function and health of the placenta, probably even more so than maternal DNA. When you look at the genetic expression in a placenta, it more strongly expresses paternal DNA than maternal DNA, which is why there seems to be a link between low sperm quality and the risk for a woman having preeclampsia in her pregnancy. It does play a role.

Ultimately, look at pregnancy complications. The highest rates of pregnancy complications go back to some issue with the placenta. The placenta is this extra organ that your body grows to send nutrients to the baby, remove waste products, create and regulate hormones, and create ketones, proteins, fatty acids, and all sorts of things that the baby needs for optimal growth. Without a healthy placenta or healthy attachment of the placenta to the inner lining of the uterus, you’ve got complications with the pregnancy.

You’re able to get your partner pregnant, and that’s fantastic, but maybe we want to think about what the trajectory of the pregnancy is and what is best for your baby’s future health. We have even more research looking at a link between low sperm quality and some of these issues developing with the offspring. It’s not just the woman. We have to be thinking about both here.

I love that. We would love to talk to you again sometime. Maybe we’ll do ten episodes with you. Who knows? This has been a wonderful conversation. I want to wrap up because time is pressing me to do so. I have a question I love to pose at the end. You answered it last time. I don’t know what you said. You can either repeat that or say something new. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, maybe even in light of our conversation to improve their fertility, what would you recommend that they do?

I’m going to say cook more food at home. That way, you have control of the ingredients and the quality of the oil. It costs a lot less. Arguably, the most important life skill that you can develop is the ability to cook whole, nourishing foods that taste good. It all starts in the kitchen.

I love it. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Thank you.

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Our guest was Lily Nichols. You can visit her website, Lily Nichols, to learn more. Here is a letter to the editor from the Wise Traditions Journal 2025. “From frail to fit. Last week, a friend asked me if it were true that one nutritious meal a day could reverse illness. I share Dr. Price’s summary of this from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, pages 391 to 393. Dr. Price talks about the meaty marrow stew, sometimes alternating for organ meats or fish stew as the foundation of this meal, and how the children improved with this one meal per day.

Thank you for all the resources that you provide to make this information available and accessible. I know that not everybody has that book dog-eared like I do, with every organ reference marked and highlighted. This book, the resources the foundation provides, and the community I’ve found have changed my life and completely changed the trajectory of my children’s health.

I had a body scan done. I’m not a huge fan of these tests, but I wanted a baseline for the coming years. I had that scan done, and I was in the 99th percentile of bone density for my age. Two years before I found the foundation, I broke a toe from barely bumping into a chair barefoot. It stuck out sideways. I had herniated a disc, and I could barely walk. I had been so fragile for so many years.

I know the fat-soluble vitamins and the crux of it all, and I have made them a consistent priority, but honestly, I was pleasantly shocked to see the results of the bone density exam on paper. This stuff works.” This is a letter from Janine from Frazier, Colorado. Janine, thank you for your amazing testimonial. It does work, and I’m so glad you found that to be true.

If you’d like to write a letter to the editor, you can do so. Write to us at Info@WestonAPrice.org and put Letter to the Editor in the subject line. If you want to get these journals, which are jam-packed with amazing information along the lines of what you find on the show but more nutrient-dense, even, become a member. Go to The Weston A. Price Foundation, click on the Become a Member button, and join for $30 for the year if you use the Code POD10. Thank you so much for tuning in. Stay well, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Lily Nichols

Lily Nichols is a Registered Dietitian/Nutritionist, Certified Diabetes Educator, researcher, and author with a passion for evidence-based prenatal nutrition. Her work is known for being research-focused, thorough, and critical of outdated dietary guidelines. She is the founder of the Institute for Prenatal Nutrition™, co-founder of the Women’s Health Nutrition Academy, and the author of three books: Real Food for Fertility (co-authored with Lisa Hendrickson-Jack), Real Food for Pregnancy and Real Food for Gestational Diabetes. Lily’s bestselling books have helped tens of thousands of mamas (and babies!), are used in university-level maternal nutrition and midwifery courses, and have even influenced prenatal nutrition policy internationally.