Episode Summary
In this episode of the Empowered Nutrition Podcast, Erin Skinner sits down with Alexandria DeVito, a functional nutritionist specializing in fertility and preconception health. Alexandria, who is the founder and CEO of Poplin, discusses the importance of preparing your body for conception through comprehensive preconception health strategies. They delve into how factors like diet, lifestyle, and environment can impact fertility and overall health, and how a thorough understanding of one’s health baseline can lead to better outcomes for both conception and the health of the future child.
Episode Highlights
- The Importance of Preconception Health: Alexandria explains why preparing for pregnancy extends beyond just diet and involves a thorough assessment of various health markers, including blood, hormone, metabolic, nutrient, and immune status.
- Functional Nutrition Approach: Alexandria discusses the benefits of a functional nutrition approach to fertility, which includes understanding and addressing nutrient deficiencies and hormonal imbalances that traditional tests might overlook.
- Testing and Baselines: Poplin offers extensive pre-pregnancy wellness testing, covering more than 70 biomarkers to provide a detailed picture of an individual’s health. This allows for more personalized and effective fertility and preconception planning.
- Impact of Diet on Fertility: They explore how nutrient-dense diets, including healthy fats and animal products, can support reproductive health. Alexandria debunks myths around fat and cholesterol, emphasizing their role in hormone production and fertility.
- Partner Involvement and Age: Alexandria highlights the importance of both partners being involved in preconception health and how improving biological health can impact fertility, regardless of age.
- Poplin’s Offerings: Learn about Poplin’s comprehensive testing services and resources, including their app and educational support for preconception health.
Resources Mentioned
- Poplin: The first pre-pregnancy wellness company offering comprehensive testing and support. Visit Poplin’s Website to learn more and use promo code ENP50 for $50 off their premium test panels.
- Alexandria DeVito’s Book: Nine Months is Not Enough: The Ultimate Pre-Pregnancy Checklist to Create a Baby Ready Body and Build Generational Health.
Connect with Us
- Visit our website for more episodes and information.
- Follow us on social media for updates and health tips.
- Subscribe to our podcast and leave a review!
Ready to dive in? Listen here.
SUBTITLES:
Hey there and welcome back to the Empowered Nutrition Podcast. Whether you’re trying to cook a baby or not. I hope you enjoy this episode. I am certainly done with my baby making times, but I still thought this was a great discussion around the things in our environment that impact health, our doing health-wise as a society, and what are the most impactful things that we can do around nutrition and other factors that can help optimize our health. But really this is wonderful discussion we had with Alexandria DeVito, who is a functional nutritionist specializing in fertility and preconception health. She wrote a wonderful book called Nine Months is Not Enough, the Ultimate Pre-Pregnancy Checklist to Create a Baby Ready Body and Build Generational Health. And she’s also the founder and CEO of Poplin, which is the first pre-pregnancy wellness company. She is trained in functional nutrition through and also has her functional medicine certified practitioner credential. So she’s just a wealth of information on upstream health, especially when it comes to preconception fertility, prenatal nutrition, and postpartum nutrition. So hopefully you enjoy this episode with her and also feel free to check out Poplin, which is a company where you can get your her, their amazing panel. That’s all meant to look at prenatal nutrition factors that could be impacting your health pre-pregnancy. So enjoy the episode.
Alexandria, welcome to the Empower Nutrition Podcast. How are you?
I’m wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.
Oh my gosh, thanks for coming on. I’m obsessed with this topic and we have so many potential directions to go, but let’s just kick it off. And I’d like to ask you a little bit about, so you’re a CNS, you’ve got, the world is your oyster, you’re a functional nutritionist. There’s a thousand different niches and specialties within that space. So I’m curious, how did you get into prenatal and fertility nutrition?
Hmm. Yeah, so it was unexpected. I, I did not really anticipate this when, when I did my initial degree in training. So I ended up working as a nutritionist and I ended up having cli, I was working across a couple different practices and I ended up having a, a bunch of clients that were struggling to conceive and also friends who were coming to me and, you know, grabbing me in discreet settings to say like, Hey, I’m struggling. Do you have any suggestions? Like, I know you know, you’re really interested in health and wellness, like, do you have any suggestions for me? And, you know, clients were also coming to me asking the same question questions almost as like a last resort. Like, I’ve done all the things I’ve been struggling to conceive for several years. Do you have anything else to offer me? And at the time, I was just really struck by this because it seemed like an important problem and a solvable problem. Right? I was doing my functional medicine training at the time, and so I was really inspired to go deep. And so I started looking at a lot of the clinical literature for all of the things that could potentially interfere with getting pregnant. And I designed a series of broad tests to start screening tests, essentially to start flagging potential issues with my clients. And what do you know, all of a sudden the test came back with a whole bunch of stuff flagged that their providers had never even looked at.
Hmm.
Oftentimes after, again, as I said, years of struggling to conceive. And once we were able to address these issues largely through diet and lifestyle and supplementation, sometimes medications and procedures and collaboration with their doctor, they got pregnant either naturally or on the next round of assisted reproductive cycles. And I was struck by this. The, the outcomes were staggering and nobody else was looking at this and nobody else was doing this. And so it really occurred to me, why are we waiting until someone is struggling to conceive and they’ve undergone a lot of financial hardship, emotional hardship, physical hardship to screen for very basic things that we could have screened for day one when they decided they wanted to build their family. And so I was really inspired by this, started diving into preconception guidelines, realized we’ve had them for 40 years, but nobody knows about them. And so, you know, I just felt like there was a new opportunity to rewrite this dialogue around getting pregnant and to prepare for pregnancy. Like we prepare for any other major milestone, you know, even a wedding a year in advance with guidance, tools and support.
That’s such a great analogy. I mean, if it, if you feel like you should take a year to plan your wedding, how about a baby? I feel like this is the big cliffhanger and what you said of what are these, what are the themes of these things that you were finding on these tests that were a problem? Was it hormones? Was it nutritional deficiencies? Was it toxins? Like what are we talking about here?
Hmm. All of the above. Right. So I mean, I think the big aha that I had was that fertility is an extension of our overall health. It is not just a below the waste conversation. It is not just about your reproductive organs and it is not just about your hormones. It does involve those things, but it is not only about those things. And if we only look at hormones, which is what most fertility tests on the market do, we’re missing like 70% of the data to find out what’s going on. Right? And so if we take that premise, then we look at, we look at five different categories of the company that, that I founded. So we look at blood status, hormone status, metabolic status, nutrient status, and immune status. And these are all the things that are well validated in the clinical literature. And then certainly by my experience since then, that can cause challenges A, getting pregnant and B, with the health of that pregnancy and baby. So if we take a wider lens, we’re able to identify sometimes yellow flags, sometimes red flags with ability to conceive or the health of a future pregnancy and baby.
Yeah. So good. Yeah, I agree with you on the sex hormone focus. It’s so downstream. So yeah, it’s valid that if sex hormones are imbalance, that that’s probably contributing. But there are, so that that’s, that’s the end result of upstream problems that are related to the things you talked about of like, what about adrenal hormones? What about nutritional deficiencies? What about environmental exposures? What about, like you said, immune, I assume you’re looking at things like autoimmune antibodies and things like that, overall systemic inflammation. I think those are the more upstream things that then disregulate the sex hormones down the line. So it’s just, it’s such, it’s just a mistake to only look at that. Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna amplify what you were saying because I think it’s such an important point for, for everyone listening that yes, even if we get information that your sex hormones are dysregulated as you, as you said, we have no idea why, right? And right. Sex hormones are downstream to thyroid function, function and, and downstream to adrenal function. And so without a picture of what’s going on with your thyroid or your adrenals or you know, even what you said, nutrient deficiencies, we have no idea how to intervene. But once we have that broader set of information, then we can say, oh, well this is the constellation of factors that we think is depressing or elevating your hormone levels, and therefore you can be much more precise in your interventions.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And another thing I like that you kind of alluded to is that just because you use functional nutrition to prepare for pregnancy and to potentially help with infertility doesn’t mean that it’s anti procedure. A lot of women, even with the help of procedures, still struggle to get pregnant. But, so it’s, it’s not that you will never need it or that you shouldn’t ever get it if you need it, but it’s, you’re gonna be more successful with your fertility overall. And if you still need a procedure, you’re more likely to be successful with that. And you didn’t even say this, I don’t know if you would agree, but from the research I’ve seen, there’s a lot of nutrients that impact fetal development in a way that like sure, you know, maybe you would’ve gotten a pregnant either way, but with the, with your overall health and your nutritional status improved at even before you get pregnant, you’re gonna potentially impact the long-term health of the baby as well.
Absolutely. Preconception health is incredibly important for that reason. So I think it’s, it’s two factors. One is the increased probability of getting pregnant in the first place, and then the second is increasing the probability of having a healthy child. And it’s for the reason that you’re mentioning, right? Because if we have nutrient deficiencies going into pregnancy, that is likely to affect fetal development. If we have immune system dysregulation, that could potentially increase miscarriage risk as an example, right? If we have inflammation again, right? That can affect the, the baby’s health as well. So I think when we think about fertility, we think about it as this binary thing, right? Did you get pregnant or did you not get pregnant? Right? But we miss the larger picture. Most people don’t really care about getting pregnant. They care about getting pregnant with a healthy baby. And that’s why I love this preconception period because it is so profound for that is you are improving your health and your reproductive partner’s health in service of not only getting pregnant, but increasing the probability of health for your future child and you know, even generations to come, which I know you Yeah.
You’ve recently been been chatting about. So I think it’s such an incredible, incredible time period to have that level of influence.
That’s one of the main reasons why I think we need to talk more about like epigenetics, because I think it’s really lost. And most people don’t realize that the, your environment and that you’re in the food you eat, the exposures you get, the stress you have really does alter the genetic expression of not only your genes but of your offspring’s genes and that. So it’s not that your genes change, but the, the switchboard of your genes of how they’re turned on and off is heritable to some degree. And people I think have no idea of that.
Hmm. I love this example that you gave of the switchboard. I heard you talk about it before and I think it’s a brilliant analogy because it’s not just one switch, it’s many switches and yeah, we can have switches turned on or turned off and essentially you want switches turned on for healthy expression and you want switches turned off for unhealthy expression, right? I mean, at a, at a very basic level. And yeah, what I don’t think is well understood is that this preconception period is actually what sets the stage epigenetically through egg and sperm. And so, right, we, as you know, the female reproductive partner also has epigenetic impacts in the prenatal period, but the earliest epigenetic impacts actually happen at the point of conception, right? So what you are doing in the 3, 6, 12 months prior to conception, same thing for your reproductive partner, that actually sets the stage for the epigenetic material that is then passed on to your child.
And that sets the lifelong trajectory of health. And so when we think about the concept of generational health, that’s what this is. And this idea of legacy and giving our children a legacy of health. So what we’re doing in this time period is so, so important. And we used to think, okay, well actually it was like, you know, the first thousand days of life, like that’s the most, you know, important. And then we said, okay, actually that’s true, but the prenatal period’s also really important. Yeah. And now we’re moving even earlier and saying, no, actually the preconception period is really important as we think about developmental origins of, of disease.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I, I know there’s no like black and white line of like, okay, the preconception period starts 12 months before you conceive and nothing matters before that and everything matters after. So there’s no clean line. But it sounds like you’re, you’re saying that generally about a year in advance is when people should really start to get into some type of true preparation for conceiving.
That’s usually what I recommend. ’cause it feels like a doable timeframe for people. And if we think about the egg development cycles and sperm development cycles, it aligns with that. So egg maturation is actually about a year, but the last stage is roughly three to four months, and sperm development is about three months. So depending on your starting point, you may actually want several of these egg maturation and sperm development cycles to get to the optimal state in which you say, yes, I’m in the state of health that I would want to pass on to my future child. Right? Yeah. And so for some people that timeframe might be slightly longer, especially if you’re dealing with a chronic health condition. Some people may have a slightly shorter timeframe if you’ve already been taking compensatory action in service of your broader health. But I wouldn’t cut it too short, right? Because again, we wanna get to an optimal time period and it can take time for us to upgrade our nutrition and yeah. For our nutrient stores to be reflected and for, you know, changes in our cell structures to be updated and and so forth,
Right? You wanna be healthy for, say you wanna, you’re like, generally I wanna be healthy for three months before I conceive. It takes months to get healthy as a broad term in terms of catch up of repleting nutrient deficiencies or improving gut health to lower systemic inflammation or whatever the, the thing is, it’s not like you just fix it overnight. There’s months of getting to the point where you start that three month clock of being healthy for three months. Yeah,
Absolutely.
And what are, oh, go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna say, and if you give yourself the grace of time, it reduces a lot of the pressure around conception. Like, you know, conception can be pressure filled if we’re on tight timelines and we’re like, we have to meet this timeline and we have to do it quickly, but there’s something less pressure inducing about preparing than trying. So the more time you can spend in the preparing window, usually the less time you can spend in the trying window. It doesn’t always work that way, but generally speaking, so we can, you know, reduce the temperature in the room in terms of pressure if we give ourselves a little bit more grace around setting expectations for the preparation time period to take a little bit longer.
Yeah, that’s a good point. You, if you say, oh, I don’t wanna spend a year preparing, I just wanna try now, it could take you a year to get pregnant, whereas if you just prepare for a year, you might get pregnant quickly. So Yeah, I know this could, you could probably write a whole book on this. So we, we, we can’t go into full depth on it, but maybe you can gimme some high points of like specific things that, like what is this 12 months? Like, what are we talking about doing here? What do you generally recommend that people do in this 12 month period?
Hmm. Yeah, so I mean I, I, I do talk about a, a checklist in the book, which is kind of like the general things that I would think about as you’re contemplating getting ready to conceive. So I can go through those at a high level and that if people are interested, they can always read more. But I think about it as two big categories you have like the micro and then the macro. So on the micro it would be understanding your personal health baseline. And as someone who’s trained as a functional nutritionist and runs a preconception testing company, I’m biased on this topic, but I really do believe in getting your baseline testing because right now what’s happening in a lot of medicine, but particularly infertility, is all 30 year olds were created equal, all 40 year olds were created equal. And that’s just a blunt instrument and it’s inefficient at best and ineffective at worst.
And you know, I know you just had a conversation about the difference between chronological age and biological age. So, you know, I think that plays in here really importantly. Yeah. So rather than pre following a protocol for an average 30-year-old is much more helpful to understand what’s going on in your unique body with your unique physiology. And you can be much more targeted if you understand that. And so, you know, we’re looking at 70 biomarkers, which is 10 times what a traditional fertility test is looking at. So there’s just so much more inter information to, to understand what’s going on. So I think getting a baseline through testing is one great starting point and then having a preconception visit with your doctor. And many people listening might be like, wait a minute, what’s a preconception visit? There is such a thing as that, yes, there is actually, and what that preconception visit is designed to do is to understand the current state of your health and whether or not there are any risk factors or any modifications that would need to be made to make sure that you are, you know, for example, not taking any medications that aren’t fertility safe or even, you know, that any medications that aren’t pregnancy safe that you don’t have any family health history to be aware of, and any chronic conditions that you have are well managed.
These are all components of a, of a preconception visit that are really important. And oftentimes you really do have to advocate for yourself. A lot of providers don’t do preconception visits or don’t have the time to properly do them. Yeah. So, you know, that’s a, that’s a big one that, that I would encourage people to, to think about as well.
Yeah. So yeah, the medication and supplement thing is huge. I mean, I constantly, I had one yesterday where somebody was, my client shared that she had become pregnant and it was like, okay, well we have to completely look at every supplement that you’re on and there’s several that we need to take you off of. But they, people don’t even always think about that.
Yeah. It’s, what
About specific things about like food and diet attrition? Do you say, okay, you know, now just start eating a clean, healthy diet? Or do you have more like specific targeted things that you say everybody should do? Or is it more that everybody should just individualize their diet based off of their lab results?
Hmm. Well I would say both, right? I think this is the macro category. So I think there’s a series of fertility blockers in our environment and the way I, I talk about this to people is that our bodies were designed to conceive but our modern environment was not right? And so it’s our job to remove the things that are naturally dampening our fertility so that we can restore our bodies to a state that is receptive to conception. And nutrition is a, a huge one where I see people not getting the optimal nutrition that is necessary for reproduction. So the couple of things I would say on nutrition, because you know, this could be a whole masterclass and I know you’ve done a whole bunch on this as well, but I would just start with the principle that generally speaking we’re eating more food like substances and less food.
And because of that, right? Our bodies are getting oftentimes calorie dense food but not nutrient dense food. And when our bodies don’t get appropriate nutrients, they think that they are starving. And if your body thinks it’s starving, it will down regulate reproductive function because it thinks it’s in a famine, right? And if you’re in a famine, that’s probably not an appropriate time to conceive. And so adaptively your body does this as a protection mechanism, it thinks it is protecting you and a potential future child. That being said, we are seeing this more and more and more. The vast majority of reproductive age women are micronutrient deficient. This is true in, you know, a lot of the, the surveys that have been done nationally and it’s being confirmed certainly in the data that we’re seeing over 80% of the time we’re seeing people flagged for basic nutrient deficiencies.
Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s not even controversial like you said, even NHANES is like Yep. Massive insufficiencies. So yes. Yeah.
So a couple of things I would say here are, generally speaking, when I think about guiding people to a fertility friendly diet, it’s generally not a trendy diet. It is often a moderate to higher fat diet in particular because your hormones are made from cholesterol, right? So people don’t really understand that. And so that’s really important to understand a moderate protein and moderate carbohydrate, generally speaking, that is a model that works well for most people. Are there exceptions? Sure. You know, where some people might need to manage their blood sugar more closely and you know, and so forth. However, generally speaking, that’s what I see. And if we start doing a lot more restrictive dieting then that can exacerbate nutrient deficiencies and it can trigger our body again to think that we are in a starvation mode and can down regulate reproductive function.
Yeah, love that. And ’cause with what with fat rise, a lot of the nutrients that women are deficient in, so choline for example, is gonna come from eggs. And so if you help them get past their fear of fat and cholesterol and get them eating more eggs, now you’re getting more choline. Omega-3 fats are critical for fetal development. I don’t even know why te I test almost everybody I work with, I don’t know why I keep doing it ’cause everybody’s low. It’s mostly for their own like buy-in honestly. It’s like so that they, you know, don’t feel like they have to worry, wonder if I’m like crazy or not. I’m like, yep, you were low. You know, even though you eat salmon once a month, turns out I was right. That’s not enough. So you high fat fish is another like high fat food or vitamin DI mean I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I mean it’s extremely high percentage of the US population is too low on vitamin D.
Guess what? That’s a fat soluble vitamin that’s gonna come from high fat foods that women are terrified of like dairy, like terrifying vitamin A so critical for fetal development is another fat soluble vitamin that you cannot get from plants. You can only get from animal sources that are gonna ride with fat. So I’m with you on that. And I think we’ve come a long way from like the low fat diet era of the 1980s, but I think there’s still a lot of sort of like stigma around high fat foods, especially the animal based ones. But they’re actually the most important foods, in my opinion, a prenatal diet like liver for example. Not that everybody has to eat liver or you won’t have a healthy baby, but it’s sure a good idea if you wanna have a baby. And guess what, it’s an animal food. So I think there’s still some stigma to work through that’s even more recent from sort of like the plant-based movement has like kind of underscored that. It’s like, okay, we’re not afraid of fat anymore, we’re just afraid of any animal food. And to me that’s a mistake when it comes to prenatal nutrition. But I don’t know what you think about that.
Yeah, I mean I think you bring up a good point, which is plant-based has come to mean vegan or vegetarian. And I don’t know that anyone who’s studied nutrition would argue with a plant-based diet, meaning a diet that has Right. A lot of plants in it, however. Yep. I also don’t think that if you actually look at, you know, fertility numbers, like the, the, the data very clearly shows that people who are on vegan or vegetarian diets have lower hormone levels than their meat eating counterparts. Period. End of sentence. The data is not unclear about this now. Yeah. What I would say is there’s lots of reasons why people adopt vegan and vegetarian diets. And so if people are happy with their health, if they’re happy with their fertility, so am i. If they’re not, then I would say maybe, yeah, there might be an opportunity to reevaluate introducing some, maybe not even all animal products for this phase of life.
’cause they can be very, very supportive of fertility and liver, as you mentioned, is an incredible one. Not only does it have a, you know, a ton, it has tons and tons of nutrients in it and you can sneak it in in a lot of more subtle ways than, you know, people realize. And you can take it as a supplement as well. But I’ve had, you know, plenty of people who take it and they’re just shocked with how great they feel on it. So everyone gets to decide their own choices around, you know, what they are and are not going to introduce into their bodies. But I do think it’s helpful to just understand what the data is suggesting and why as you’re talking about, right, why a diet that excludes animal products can be problematic. The certain nutrient deficiencies, the digestion and elimination implications so that people can decide for themselves what makes sense,
Right? And, and it doesn’t mean there’s not ethical things that it’s valid if someone has, has religious or ethical like feelings that make them feel like they need to choose a vegan or a vegetarian diet. But what’s a mistake is to, to believe that that’s optimal for, for pregnancy and prenatal nutrition in my opinion and breastfeeding even. But if, if it’s that that person says, yeah, I’m gonna get data, I’m gonna get tested, I’m gonna supplement to fill in gaps, then that’s, that’s certainly a viable route that can be effective. But unfortunately I just see a lot of cases where people aren’t doing that. They’re kind of been convinced by maybe some kind of YouTube algorithm or Instagram real algorithm that this is like the ideal human diet and they’re not doing what you’re talking about, which is like getting data supplementing around deficiencies and optimizing their nutritional status like based off of their individualized lab results. Yeah. Hmm.
I like the way that you explain that because I think that’s an important distinction, right? And I see the same thing with weight, right? Where a lot of times we use weight as a proxy for health and look it, it can be a proxy for health, but it is one data point. And so what I find even more helpful is to run testing to say, okay, is weight impacting you in the way that we think it might be impacting you? Right? And we can look at the things that, that fat tissue, which is not inert tissue, it’s metabolically active tissue, is likely to impact, which is inflammation levels, insulin levels, right? Certainly broader blood sugar dysregulation, hormone levels, right? And you can see all of these other markers and you can understand, oh okay, this is how my body is processing this body fat and I can decide whether or not I would like to change these things or not, rather than just a blanket statement about weight. And so, you know, I think it’s the same thing with diet, right? The more reductionist we are, the harder it is for people to understand the implications and be able to action anything coming out of it. It just feels very dismissive. And so I think that data can be really helpful in, in giving people the underlying physiology so that they have agency over the process themselves.
Absolutely. So tell me a little bit more about your company and how you help people solve that problem. Because I think a lot of times they have tried to get data and if they have fertility challenges, like you said, they’ve gone to doctors gotten labs, they, they’ve, they’ve been told there’s, you know, nothing else to see here. So tell me how you kind of help that person in terms of what you offer.
Yeah, so I mean I, I’d say there’s like two big buckets of people that that come to us. There’s the first bucket of people who are planning to conceive and you know, they just wanna understand what their starting point is so that they know if there are areas to optimize and they can be more directed in their efforts. And then I think the, the second bucket is folks who are struggling to conceive and they’re, they’ve been as you said, kind of dismissed by the traditional medical model and they’re still not getting the answers that they want. And they want to find out if there’s anything that they can be doing to increase their chances on their own. And so, you know, for those folks what I generally find is unexplained infertility is usually not yet explained infertility. And if we go wide enough right, or deep enough, we can usually find at least one thread, if not multiple to pull on does this mean that it’s a panacea?
And that we always know and you know, it’s a perfect picture. No, but the vast majority of the time we can find dysregulations that could be responsible for the challenges. And even if you address those right, the worst thing that could happen is you are healthier and the probability of your child being healthier is even higher to what you were mentioning earlier. Yeah. So, you know, modulating your health around trying to conceive has just such a series of knock-on effects. It’s, you know, kind of a win-win all around. And the other thing I will mention is like, you know, the other kind of buckets of people that we see besides these two main ones are folks that have experienced miscarriage or also coming to us to say, Hey, like, you know, my doctor will not do any testing to see if there might have been something that contributed to this. And sometimes we don’t know, but people are wanting more information to understand if there might be things that they could change to optimize their chances of getting pregnant the next time that they try. So that’s another area that we’re seeing as well.
Okay. And do you, so it sounds like for either of these, any of these categories of people, they all get the same panel or are there different panels?
We’re using the same screening panel. So the idea is that the factors that would affect natural fertility are also the factors that are going to affect assisted, you know, fertility. And so these are all the things in the literature that we’ve seen that can affect ability to get pregnant and the health of that pregnancy. And it’s meant to be a screening test. So again, this doesn’t mean we look at every single factor under the sun that could possibly interfere with fertility, right? However, it’s the broadest pre-pregnancy wellness test on the market. And so we look at more factors than anyone else and it’s the most common factors. And then oftentimes, right, if we see something flagged, like you were mentioning autoimmune conditions. So one of the things that we will run is anti-nuclear antibody, which is a screening test for autoimmune conditions. It is not diagnostic in and of itself, but it could be suggestive of potential autoimmune processes going on in the body. And so if that flags a natural next step would be to do a follow-up testing with your doctor to understand if that is at play right. So depending on the results that come back, there’s, you know, different sets of actions. Sometimes it’s dietary interventions, sometimes it’s lifestyle, sometimes it’s supplementation, sometimes it’s collaboration with your provider.
Got it. Okay. So if somebody gets the panel, it sounds like there’s not a, it’s not like they would work with you all as the practitioner, they would then work with their current practitioners or try to find another practitioner that can help them with whatever the findings are on the test.
So they’ll have a call with one of our pre-pregnancy educators to review the results and contextualize them and start to come up with a game plan. And then after that they can decide, you know, where they want to take it and you know, the constellation of providers that they want to put together to figure out the best plan for them.
That’s amazing. And is it, where can people, what do, do people have to live in a certain area to get the test?
No, it’s often it’s offered across the US.
Okay. So they, they get the kit and then they go find a place to get I would Is it a blood draw?
It is a blood draw, yes. ’cause we’re testing a lot of biomarkers. So it, it, it’s a blood draw. Okay.
So like, you know, we do a ton of these kinds of specialty tests. You just find a phlebotomy place where you can get it in your local area and then you mail it back.
Well the lab takes care of all. There’s no, there’s no kits, there’s no mailing, there’s no logistics on the part of the, the customer. So you would either go into a local lab, you would have your lab drawn, your labs drawn, or you would have a mobile lab tech come to you do the draw and then, you know, from there the lab will take care of everything. Then you’ll receive the results through our app and it will tell you kind of, here’s what’s flagged, here’s the implications. You have a call with one of our pre-pregnancy experts and then, you know, you can decide where you wanna take things from there. But the idea is really just to give you more information than you would otherwise have. A lot of times, as you’ve said, great people are being dismissed or they’re being told not to worry about it and they are worried about it. And so this is a KPI or key performance indicator for your fertility before you even start trying. ’cause you know, right now the only KPI for fertility is I tried and it either worked or it didn’t work. Yeah. But we can use, right, yeah. Other KPIs, which is our health as an indicator of, of probability of success.
So interesting the data that you have access to. Then with all of this, the results that you have, I’m curious, like let’s say if this is an unfair question, just tell me no, but in, in the United States, we’re having a decrease in fertility rates, we’re having a decrease in, we’re having increased infertility, decrease amount of babies born every year per capita. Like per woman, if you could just stand up on a big box and talk to like all everybody in America who’s wanting to have a baby, like based off the themes of things that you’re seeing across the results of your test, what are the things that you just like, wish you could tell everybody, like start doing this or like stop doing that? Like what are the main things that you just keep seeing over and over again that are common?
Yeah, so I mean the first thing that I would say actually is please do not let anyone convince you that age is the only predictor of fertility. Yeah. I think we have a generation of women who have been scared and have been told the only thing that they could have done is have gotten pregnant younger. Too bad. So sad for them. And once they turned, I don’t know, 35, they turned into a pumpkin. Too bad. So sad.
Yeah. And it’s, it’s devastating. It’s devastating. Yeah. It’s dismissive and it’s, it’s also not data driven. So, right. You know, if you’ve been told that and if you’re feeling that there’s nothing that you can do, I just want you to know there’s a message of hope. There are so many things that you can do to optimize your health and therefore your fertility. And we can’t change our chronological age, our Asian years, but we can modify our biological age, which is the vitality of ourselves. I think that’s the first most important thing to understand about fertility. And then, you know, the, the second thing that I would say is the older you are, the more your health matters. Yeah. Preconceive age or use, I should say forgives a lot of ills. And so, you know, we can get away with more things when we’re younger and, and so the older we are in years, the more we have to take compensatory action to offset the effects of things. Right. So I think that’s a another thing. And then I think the last thing that I would just say is that this is not just on your shoulders. Biology does not care about our cultural construct that fertility is a female problem. It is lit, literally a 50 50 biological equation.
So involving your reproductive partner is incredibly important to optimize the full equation. If we only look at 50% of an equation, we’re missing huge pieces of it.
Absolutely. And I mean, sperm counts are in a free fall for everybody that doesn’t already know this. It is, is wild. So tell me about this. Do you, you prob would you recommend then that both partners get the test?
Yes, I do. Most of the time people are testing as couples and so, you know, okay. Re regardless of what your relationship construct looks like as well. Right. This still applies. And so in some cases you may not have access to, for example, the male reproductive partner. And so you, you know, you get to modify this for your unique circumstance. But I just think it’s important for people to understand that if you are in a relationship with a male reproductive partner, their contribution is just as important as yours. And so any changes that you are making, I would also encourage them to be making and you know, as you said, yeah, sperm counts have dropped 60% in the last 40 years, six 0%. It’s a staggering number. Yeah. And testosterone has also dropped quite meaningfully and you know, that has all sorts of implications, but certainly on fertility and, you know, i i, these are far reaching effects. So the more that we can be aware of what’s going on and try to take action without stressing ourselves out completely about it and, you know, feeling totally overwhelmed ’cause it’s, it’s a fine line between those two things, I think the the better off we will, we will be.
Absolutely. Do you, would you say that there’s typically I, and that’s probably unfair ’cause I’ll bet it’s usually that there’s some some things to work on for each partner, but would you say that it’s, it’s slanted one way or the other that it tends to be that there’s more that needs to be done for the male partner or the female partner? Or is it just not really a trend in either direction?
Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, so the, the larger infertility data sets suggest one third female factor, one third male factor, one third combined factor. And I’m looking at our data sets to see whether that bears out as well. But I would guess that it, it’s probably in in line with that. I, it, I mean we, one thing I didn’t mention and you had asked about this is themes that we’re seeing. So the themes that we see on testing generally speaking are elevated inflammation. I mean certainly over half the time we’re seeing elevated inflammatory markers flagged by the lab. We’re not even talking about optimal ranges. We’re seeing wow nutrient deficiencies 80% of the time. And again, this is lab flagged nutrient deficiencies. This is not optimal ranges. We’re seeing blood sugar dysregulation a decent amount of the time, actually, not as much as I would have anticipated, but, but we, we certainly are seeing it and we’re looking at fasting insulin.
So a much earlier indicator of blood sugar dysregulation. Yeah. We see a decent amount of hormonal imbalances, so at least half of people have at least one, if not several hormonal imbalances. So that could include sex hormones, it could include thyroid function, it could include adrenal dysregulation with cortisol. And so, you know, all of these things are contributing to, to challenges. And then we actually are seeing a pretty decent amount of the time females flagging for some sort of autoimmune process. And so we’re taking a look at that to see kind of what the follow up testing looks on that. So the data’s a little bit too early to say, but we see that autoimmune conditions are on the rise and they’re disproportionately present in the female population. So, you know, our data is certainly bearing that out.
Yeah. Oh, so fascinating. It, it seems like the challenge for you after you, I’m sure it’s extreme, all everything’s challenging growing a company, making your accustom test panel, but then the, the challenge should be okay, all addressing, learning these things is only the initial part. That’s usually the easier part. Then what do you do about it? Like how do you find that sweet spot between like not overwhelming them, not making them feel like they have nowhere to go. Like, I learned all this stuff, but I don’t know where to get help. But then on the other hand, you know, you can’t work one-on-one with everybody all over the country. It seems like that would be tricky to solve and like you set them up with some information in the app and then you hope that they find a practitioner, I suppose, that can help them with these more complex problems.
Yeah, I mean we’re working on building out our solutions more as we’re getting more requests from clients to continue on the journey with them. And you know, now we’ve been around long enough that we’re starting to see clients getting pregnant and so they’re looking for support as they move through these different stages. Yeah, it’s it’s such a cool, such a cool thing when your job involves, involves that part of the journey. So yeah. Yes, I think, you know, we’re trying to figure out the best way to support people through these different stages. However, what I would say is I’ve been incredibly impressed with the level of ownership that people have, especially over this time period. I think, you know, when I was working as a nutritionist in general, a lot of times I found that people would struggle to have leverage over themselves, especially if there wasn’t something imminent for, you know, for which they’re, they’re making these changes and you know, a lot of times we get adapted to living in discomfort or, you know, living with these challenges. But when people wanna build their families, they’re highly, highly motivated and oftentimes will do for their children things that they won’t do for themselves. And so, you know, it’s a really interesting time period in which to work because people get these results and they’re just very motivated to take action and figure out what it is that’s going to make a difference to build their future family. So I’m just consistently inspired by our clients and how much ownership they, they take over this process.
I agree with you. That’s, that’s definitely what I’ve seen. And their readiness to change is high. They’re very committed to this goal of, of having a healthy baby and they’re, they’re much more willing to, to to do, put a lot more effort into their lifestyle and their diet than the average maybe person who doesn’t have that, that goal. It’s, it, it, I find that to be very true. It’s, it’s interesting ’cause you could have maybe a middle aged person that’s looking facing their pre-diabetic, you know, right on the toes edge of diabetes. And that to them is actually a certainly more threatening thing to their own wellness than whether or not you have a baby, like in a sense. But I think that as humans, if you’re, if you’re wanting to have a baby, it’s almost like a hard wiring where it just feels so critical and so important and so, so high value that it’s kind of interesting what that says about like the human, like humans. I think that that’s, that will do more. I I think a, a couple that wants to have a baby will do more to do have that healthy baby than that that person that’s facing diabetes and my experience, there’s gonna be exceptions, but I, I disagree with what you’re saying. I’ve seen that and I’ve been there personally. It’s like, you, you really wanna have that baby.
Absolutely. It’s really cool to see.
It’s amazing that yes, it’s amazing that you’re helping people to do this and that you’re, you know, helping people to solve this frustrating problem. Maybe you can share a little bit more about poplin and how people can learn about it and where they should go.
Yeah, absolutely. So Poplin does pre-pregnancy wellness testing, which is what we’ve been talking about. So if you are interested in pre-pregnancy wellness tested, or even something that I shared and you have questions about, feel free to, to reach out, you can go to get poplin G-E-T-P-O-P-L-I n.com. And you know, we’d love to support you wherever you are on your preconception journey. And one thing I didn’t mention, but I think this is important, preconception is relevant, whether this is a first pregnancy or a fifth pregnancy, it’s relevant whether you’re 23 or 43. It’s about, you know, before and between pregnancies and optimizing those periods. So even if you know you’ve had previous pregnancies, it can sometimes be really helpful to ensure that your hormones are regulated again and that your, your nutrient deficiencies potentially from a previous pregnancy have been addressed as you prepare for a subsequent pregnancy.
I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve seen that quite a lot. That someone will have a baby, everything’s fine, and then they’ll have another baby in quick succession and then they’ll struggle quite a lot with maybe postpartum depression with their anxiety. With anxiety is another thing I’ll see quite a lot or with breastfeeding or new health challenge will pop up. I think it’s, it’s not well understood that how much a pre a pregnancy and a breastfeeding period can deplete women. And so it’s just really, like you said, it’s not, just because you’ve had one or two babies doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t thoroughly prepare and in fact it maybe means that it’s even more important to thoroughly prepare for another baby because you, you are not in the same place you were before you had those first babies. That’s I agree with you on that.
Well said.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, so I, I’m excited for people to check out Poplin and it sounds like you guys have a promo that you can share. So is it okay if I tell everybody about that?
Please do.
Okay. So it’s code, if you go to their website, it’s code ENP five zero and you’ll get $50 off of their premium test panels. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Yeah, we’ll, we’ll put that in the show notes as well and of course people can check you out and I think you also, I saw you have an Instagram as well, which is really cool.
I do. And yeah, please, please come find me, ask questions and we can continue the dialogue. And Erin, thank you so much for, for the opportunity to share and the thoughtful questions and the incredible work that, that you’re doing. It’s very aligned to, to, you know, to how we think about things as well. And so I think we need more individuals just, you know, supporting people, supporting families, and in these Yeah. Really transformational time periods.
Absolutely. I mean, we, we’re an insurance based practice and you’ll get the list of conditions that insurance thinks that they should be covering a dietician for, and you’ll rarely see prenatal nutrition listed the, it’s, it’s, I think that’s just a reflection of the fact that this is not well done by the conventional medical community. Like you said, they, a practitioner might not even know how to do a preconception visit or if they did it, they might not know what to say. And there’s just very little, like, I, I don’t, I, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a patient say, oh yeah, I went to my primary care and they told me I should prepare a year in advance. So it’s, there needs to be more support in this space. So it’s, it’s a great thing you’re doing and I’m so honored to have the chance to spread the word about you guys.
Oh, thank you. I’m honored to be here with you.
Same. All right, well everybody check out Poplin and check out their tests. I’m gonna be like a weird lady, like, like definitely done having babies, but I wanna get your panel so I’m gonna stalk you and all jokes aside, thanks Alexandria. It pleasure to meet you.
Thank you.
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