25: The Link Between Diet & Fertility with Dr. Kali MacIsaac, ND

By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition and either yourself or others. Console your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, to show the listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lauren Brown. I'm a doctor at Traditional Chinese Medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I'm on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It's time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose. We have back on our Conscious Fertility Podcast, my colleague Dr. Kaley MacKyzek. She is the clinical director of naturopathic medicine at Accubile's Wellness Center. If you haven't listened to her previous podcast, you talked a lot about functional medicine testing, doing a deeper dive, leaving no stone unturned when it comes to your fertility workup. And today we are going to talk about the fertility diet. Now, Kaley, I want to just let everybody know a little bit about our professional relationship here and our fertility diet because we do have the second edition of the Accubile's Fertility Diet available on our website, the Accubile's website. And I wrote the first one, I don't know, she's 20, 10-ish around then I published it a long time ago. And you had agreed that the theory was pretty good. You liked it, right? Yeah. And then you tried some of the recipes I suggested and you asked me if I have ever tasted these recipes I suggested. And you said they're not fit to be eaten, right? And yeah, some of them are gross. Yeah. So I, being a great delegator, I go, well, can you make them better? And you're like, yeah. And so with those principles, you found great recipes that are there to optimize your fertility and they taste good. And then you decided just to help with the whole rewrite of the fertility diet and sense in the end of 2021. Was it? 2020. It was like deep pandemic. That's when we wrote it. Okay. So December 20, 2020, we published the second edition. Now, the big question we get, Kaley, is that it's confusing for our patients are like, you know, e-curbs, doni carbs, can you eat meat, can you eat meat? How is it that there's so many diets out there that say they're beneficial and yet they look like on the surface, they contradict each other. So I thought you could tell us how to eat our way to a fertile you. And more importantly, kind of like, can the real fertility diet please stand up? So can you kind of walk us through the fertility diet and why they look like they're conflicting and yet they're, their advice is conflicting, but yet they're all saying they're optimizing fertility. Definitely. I think anyone who has Googled what should I eat to help with my fertility has had this experience where you will find 10 different opinions from 10 different fairly recutable sources. There are some doctors who will tell you to go vegan for your fertility and there are some docs who would promote paleo or the Mediterranean diet. There are lots of different styles or dietary patterns that actually can be beneficial for things like egg quality, sperm quality, lowering inflammation in the body, all of these different sort of various aspects of like optimizing your fertility. There's lots of different ways of going about doing it. And when we tried to put together what we were going to put out into the world as our acubelance fertility diet, Lauren, I know you did this, you did a little bit of a deep dive into these different sort of food systems and tried to figure out what is it about each of these different styles of eating that can promote fertility and how do we make that kind of our own. And really what it comes down to is that these different sort of dietary patterns, Mediterranean paleo, vegan keto for some people have four sort of similar aims or four similar benefits. And that's why we think that they can promote fertility for different people. When we really boil each of those diets down, the four main things that they are trying to do is firstly, lower inflammation, second, lower oxidative damage or the type of cellular stress that happens when there's too many oxidative stress species in the cellular environment. The third one is regulate and stabilize your blood sugar. And the fourth one is to provide really sort of nutrient dense or adequate nutrition to your cells, which is of course important when you're trying to build a baby. So I think that that's why a number of these different dietary patterns are promoted is because they all kind of do these four things and these four things are at the core of why these diets can be helpful to promoting fertility. So that's a good litmus test when you look at any diet. Is it lowering inflammation? Is it regulating the blood sugar? Is it reducing that oxidative stress since it provided nutrition? And when I did this deep dive years ago, what I found they have in common was that they all said no processed food, no refined flour, no added sugar, sugar, eat lots of veggies, right? Some said carbs, some said don't eat carbs, some said you can have animal protein, some said you did not. And what they all had in common is what they said to avoid. So that's the real key is that processed refined flour, fast food diet. If you so if you eat more of a whole foods plant based diet, it doesn't have to be vegan because our diet does have animal protein in it, then that can lower the inflammation, reduce oxidative stress, regulate blood sugar, and it's nutrient dense, which is going to be great for on a cellular level so good for the sperm and egg quality. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about then why do we care about inflammation? Why do we care about blood sugar? Why do we care about oxidative stress? How is this damaging to our fertility and how can diet rectify this? Yeah. So one of the ways that I often explain this to people is what we say all the time at acu balance is that when we are trying to make a baby, what we really want to do is we want to nourish your soil before we plant the seed. Sort of this idea that when you have an environment that is conducive to healthy baby making it's more likely that it's going to happen. And inflammation, oxidative stress, dysregulated blood sugar, these are all things that can throw your body's soil or what we call your cellular environment or your terrain out of balance. Inflammation is concerning because it's this sort of inappropriate immune system response that can lead to damage to some membranes. For example, can throw a wrench in healthy optimal hormone balance and function. It accelerates biological aging, which is not something we want to do in the context of fertility. So it's one of these ways that the cellular environment can be out of balance and your soil can become off track. We don't create the best quality egg cells for ourselves. We don't have the best quality urine environment when that soil is out of balance. So when you're saying soil just like this metaphor, nourish the soil before you plant the seed. And so the soil being the cell you your environment and the story like they give is like if you look at a plant that doesn't look nourished, it looks like it's time to maybe put it put it into the recycling bin. Sometimes if you add more water to it, add fertilizer or change it how much sun it's getting, this plant can regain its figure and give off roots and flowers. So we didn't do anything to the roots. We didn't do a donor root transplant on the plant. The plant always had the potential but the environment in which the roots were in which the plant ran was suboptimal. And so it couldn't reach its potential. And this is the analogy we're using when it comes to egg and sperm cell. The cellular environment if it's suboptimal and then the egg and sperm can reach their peak for chili potential. And so the soil can become out of environments. So can you talk a little bit about things that put the cellular environment, the soil out of out of balance and then why is diet so important? Yeah, there are so many different things that can create imbalance in that cellular environment. So I'll sort of list off a handful of things that I'm always trying to get a handle on. For my patients, like when we're doing an intake together and I'm asking about bowel movements and sleep and joint pain, I'm trying to discern if I think any of these things are at play for the person sitting in front of me. So things like hormonal imbalances. So having a relative estrogen dominance or a picture where you don't think you're making enough progesterone could be a reason why the environment, the soil gets shifted out of balance. Inflammation is one that we just talked about in any possible infections because they also can take up space for the immune system, they can result in dysbiosis in the microbiome, acidity versus alkalinity. So the pH of the cellular environment plays a role in the quality of the cells that we manufacture. Excessive toxicity can throw the soil out of balance or blood flow could be an issue, digestive trouble because when there's anything going on that it does attract, not only could the microbiome be affected, which we know influences things like implantation and healthy pregnancy, but also your ability to actually assimilate and absorb the foods and the supplements that you're putting in your system could also be hindered by a digestive issue, oxidative stress, nutritional deficiencies is a huge one, whether that's from not consuming the right nutrients that your body needs for the building blocks of healthy life or not being able to assimilate and absorb because there's something standing in the way your body's ability to do that. And then lastly this sort of like potential for an immune system can serve where there might be a little bit of an autoimmune nature. That also could be a reason that that soil is at a balance. And it's interesting because in our approach for our optimized fertility, we'll look to cool them from inflammation. And so diets are a big part of that. And then we can use new IV therapy, we can use supplements, acupuncture, laser therapy, Chinese herbs. We look to increase blood flow to the reproductive system. So that's like watering the plant. So again, exercise, stress reduction, femoral massage. We also use acupuncture and laser therapy for that. Balance hormones, you've shared often how our diet can cause our hormones to get out of balance. And can you give an example of that? And I'm always thinking of like the cortisol or blood sugar levels and thyroid hormones because they all relate to somehow, we're connected, right? So our sex hormones as well. Can you give us a little taste? No pun intended. Could we're talking about diet, but a little taste about how things can affect our hormonal balance through diet or stress or lifestyle? Definitely. So in naturopathic medicine, which is what I practice and same in Chinese medicine, we really understand the interconnectedness of each of the systems in our body, which is why we have these like very long intakes with patients. And even though we're talking about their fertility, we're also asking about their bowel movements and their sleep habits. Because these lifestyle factors, diet, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, and resting, you know, formation of community, these lifestyle factors are actually pillars on top of which the rest of the therapies that we use work. So as a really important pillar, if diet is not on track, there's really nothing that we can do to compete with that. So we, I always say to patients, I can't out supplement a poor diet. We can't out acupuncture a poor diet, diet, sleep, stress reduction, exercise. Those things need to be in place in order for all the rest of our therapies to work. So yeah, we do have all these really cool sophisticated therapies, but diet plays a huge role in whether or not this terrain is out of balance or whether it's really in balance. And I think there are a million examples of this, but one of the ways that I like to think about diet and hormone balance is that, for example, if we are eating a really strongly inflammatory diet, it can do things like change ovulatory capacity. So for example, women who consume diets that are higher in trans fats, which are quite inflammatory, are at a much higher risk of having an ovulation related fertility disorder, meaning they don't have a really regular ovulatory pattern. Of course, that makes it harder for you to fall pregnant just because you don't know when you're ovulating. But the main impact of that to our hormonal system is that if you're not ovulating regularly, you are not producing appreciable amounts of progesterone. Obviously, progesterone's a critical hormone for pregnancy, but it also is critically important to balance out the amount of estrogen that you make in the first half of your cycle. So if you're going for long periods of time with this unopposed estrogen in your system, that can wreak havoc and create issues in and of itself. That can lead to things like the formation of fibroids. It could also lead to dyslibrally heavy periods. It could be exacerbating for things like endometriosis. So there's so many different manifestations of what that could eventually look like. And it can be shifted by a simple change in a dietary habit. And when you were talking about kind of that foundation, like we can out supplement or how to acupuncture poor diet, poor lifestyle, it reminded me of your colleague, Carifid's Gerald's, you want to share about her book, Yunger You. And how now there's research showing how this stuff can change your biological age on a cellular level. Yeah, absolutely. So another key concept that we talk about with our fertility patients is that there is truly a difference between one's chronological age or the number of births that you had and your biological age. Your biological age is the age at which your cells are behaving. And that can either be equal with your chronological age or in many cases, it's older than your chronological age. So maybe your chronologically 42, but biological your body's behaving like a 50 year old. What's really important in the context of fertility just before we get into carist study is that we know for sure that one's biological age is more predictive of their fertility success than their chronological age. So if you take two 42 year old women, one 42 year old woman who's biologically 42 might conceive really easily versus the other 42 year old woman who is acting biologically 50, it might be a lot harder for her to conceive. So dietary therapy is hugely important in helping to regulate what that biological age is. And so what Carifid's Gerald did in this really groundbreaking study was she put to the test just lifestyle medicine changes, a big component of which was a dietary adjustment. And she showed a massive reduction in biological age over the course of an eight week study. So she took a group of people, her interventions were diet, some lifestyle, some prescriptive exercise, over an eight week period, and they found an over three year reduction in biological age over this eight week period with really simple lifestyle adjustments. So that study really just speaking to the fact that diet, although we often discount it because it seems like too simple, it seems too easy. It's considered one of the free therapies because you're going to eat anyways. All we're doing is really changing what you're choosing to put in your system. It is hugely powerful for reversing biological age and for promoting fertility. So what were some of the things that she noted that got reversed in just eight weeks? So and as you said, diet was a big part of it. Just so everybody knows that diet is very similar to the acupuncturized fertility diet and anti-inflammatory blood sugar regulating diet, relaxation, cuddling, you know, meditation, good sleep, movement, making sure that gut bugs the microbiome were healthy. So that was a big part of it. So diet was key. Can you share? Because I was just amazed. I remember when we talked about this a while ago, all the things that they saw reversed in just eight weeks and how many years did it take off their biological age? I think it was over three years. It was over three years. So what they did was pretty steady. They tested a whole bunch of biological markers on these patients, like things like cholesterol panels and triglycerides. And those they did see significant shifts in. So triglycerides is a fat that circuits around in our systems. It can be quite atherogenic. So it can be predictive for heart disease. For example, they saw a significant drop in triglyceride levels after just eight weeks. They also saw a significant drop in total cholesterol and LDL or classically considered bad cholesterol levels. They saw weight loss and critically they saw weight loss in those who needed to lose weight. This is something that we often see with our acupuncturized fertility diet approach as well is it seems to be weight normalizing. So our patients who are underweight need to gain weight often will with this type of nutritionally dense dietary approach. And those patients who are like sent the overweight or in the obese category will often lose weight on a dietary plan like this. So it kind of brings everyone to ward the middle or toward the norm. And I want to just share it because some people go, what I don't want to gain weight. It's a regulator and normalizer. And so those that are can't gain weight they're underweight, which is not good for fertility. They may have diarrhea. They're not absorbing through some of the treatments. The treatments we're doing, including diet that God heals the absorption heals. And that's why they're able to now gain weight. They do need to want to gain weight. And then the women who have been having difficulty losing weight, especially because of that inflammation on a cellular level, when we do that God healing and use this diet and diet for us is not about calorie counting. It's about information for the body. They just shed the pounds easily. The weight just came off. So hence it's a normalizer. You don't have to count calories. Your body would just find that nice stable healthy place. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah, subjectively in the study, they saw things like imperventergy and mood. The patients saw resolution of skin issues like exema, for example, acne, less joint pain, fewer headaches. So their quality of life also improved on this program. And that's something really cool that we often see in our clinical practices too. Like for many of our patients, the goal is baby. So like yes, that's where we're on track to get to. But along the way, we often find improvements in things like joint pain and sliver, shabown movements and skin conditions because when we generally lower inflammation and improve oxidative stress and stabilize blood sugar, we also have impacts on those other systems too. So can we talk about some of the diets that are pretty dogmatic, like no meat or no carbs? We're not that way. So can you kind of explain your thoughts around protein, for example, and differentiate between plant and animal protein? Can we start there and then we'll look at some of the other key things that some people may have questions around? So there are certainly some dietary approaches out there, like the carnivore diet or the keto diet that are very strict where they cut out whole macronutrient categories of foods. My opinion on those diets is that they're not going to work for everybody. They will work for a handful of people and they will work for people who are often very outspoken about their experiences and we'll try to push keto or veganism on the rest of the world because it works so well for them. But in general, when we're talking about general population who are trying to get pregnant, we really don't want to put you on a super restrictive diet that's going to cut out an entire macronutrient category of foods. Our macronutrients being proteins and fats and carbohydrates. So our acupuncture-related diet because it is speaking to sort of everyone who's trying to make a baby, we don't eliminate any one of those three macronutrient categories. Now, within those categories, we are, we do get more specific about what types of proteins we like to promote to help to promote fertility and what types of carbohydrates we like to promote. So you ask about protein, the acubus fertility diet combines both protein from sort of both ends of the spectrum. So we actually like a diet that contains some animal-based protein, so meat-based protein, and also some vegetarian-based meals. The reason why is that we have a little bit of limited data that supports diets that are higher in plant protein being supportive of fertility, but also from a nutrient density perspective, we really can't beat animal protein for the amount of iron bioavailable. Zinc, co-leam, and a whole bunch of other nutrients, these omega-3 fatty acids, for example, you really can't beat the amounts that you will get in an animal-based protein. So we actually have a dietary strategy that combines some meals the week that are animal-protein, dense, and then other meals the week that are plant-protein dense. Our big sort of caveat with the animal protein is that if you're going to choose to eat animal protein, what we're really concerned about is the quality of the animal protein. Because for example, if you look at the fat content of a conventionally-raised steak and the fat content of a grass-fed sort of rearranged organic piece of steak, you actually get differences in the amount of omega-3 anti-inflammatory fats in both. So you'll find higher concentrations of inflammatory omega-6s in the conventional meat and higher amounts of actual omega-3 anti-inflammatory fats. So what the information that's speaking to your body that comes from that food actually changes the quality of that food that you consume. And this is interesting because just like you are what you eat, so what we're eating is going to affect our cells, the animals what they're being fed is going to affect the quality of their cells. So you just shared that the omega fatty acids are not the same, even though they're both cows, the steak, depending whether it was grass-fed or not, will be different. And they've noted that the co-Q10, a lot of people in the fertility will know how important co-Q10 is when it comes to your fertility. But even on a cellular level, those that are grain-fed or not free-range have lower co-ins. I'm Q10 compared to those that are grass-fed and free-range. Exactly right. So when it comes to protein, it is a really essential and important macronutrient that stabilizes our blood sugar. It amino acids, which is what we get from protein, are literally the building blocks of life. Like you require more protein and the end stages of pregnancy than you do at any other time during your life, maybe with the caveat of breastfeeding. But in either case, like this whole reproductive time of our lives, we require a ton of protein to do that. So protein is really important, but the quality matters and the source can matter, but we actually prefer a combination of both. And then the organic idea of it not being purposely fed antibiotics or hormones for the growth part of it. So again, we're looking at the animals being raised in a kind way without being pumped with hormones or antibiotics for the purpose of increasing the size and the money they get paid when they sell the animal. Yeah, I mean, we want to avoid that also because if you are consuming a meat product that is chocolate full of antibiotics, you can only imagine that that's going to have at least a minimal impact on your own microbiome when you ingest that food. So what is going to grow in your healthy intestinal microbiome, which in natural medicine, we consider the gut microbiome as being sort of like ground zero for all of the microbial bounds in the body. And if something's often the gut, it will have downstream effects on the vaginal microbiome and the uterine microbiome or the testicular microbiome for male patient. So that is really an important consideration too. So when it comes to protein, plant-based protein, absolutely, you can have animal protein, quality matters, and then quantity. We do tend to overdo our animal protein. So you don't need, when you're going to start eating grass fed, free range, organic animal protein, it's expensive. So you're going to be forced to eat it less, which is perfect because we don't need as much as we have in our diet here in the West. What about carbs, carbohydrates? Yes, another very controversial category of macronutrients. And you're going to hear all kinds of things when it comes to your fertility and carbohydrates. What I will say is that from a clinical perspective, on the average patient case, I don't love to fully eliminate carbohydrates because there are essential nutrients in there. And I do find that specific types of carbohydrates do have a very helpful role to play in creating good hormonal balance and good sort of neurological regulation or helping to like calm the nervous system down when we consume these sort of gentle or slower types of carbohydrates. So what does that even really mean? I would basically say that when I talk about carbohydrates, we can divide it into sort of two categories. We have one category which would be considered fast carbs or often referred to as chaos carbs, and that's how we refer to it in our fertility diet booklet. And these are carbohydrates that are made that are things like processed sugar, breads or pastas. So foods that have been made have refined flowers. That is one category of carbohydrate that one could consume. And it's the one category that we try to tell people to avoid on the fertility diet. And I'll tell you why in a sec, second category of carbohydrates would be like the power carbs or the slow and gentle carbohydrates. These are carbohydrates from things like fruits and vegetables, starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes or squashes or beets or whole grains that you've cooked yourself from scratch like brown rice, millet, quinoa, etc. The difference is when we consume chaos carbs. So those fast refined carbohydrates, we digest and absorb them differently, then we do the slower digesting power carbs. And what that does is it changes the glucose and insulin response to those foods and then changes the hormonal response as well. So a really good example of this is actually one of my favorite most studies, which was they took genetically identical mice and divided into two groups. And they were fed equal calorie amounts of rice. But one group was fed rice in a whole grain rice form. So just like cooked rice. And the other group was fed rice same calorie amount, same color density, but in a flower form. So it had been ground into a flower basically. And the rice that ate, they're the mice that ate, the rice that was ground into a flower gained weight, became diabetic, developed metabolic syndrome, and the mice that ate rice and its whole grain form did not. And then they actually swapped groups and the overweight mice lost weight and the normal weight mice gained weight and got metabolic syndrome. So what happens is it changes when we digest where we digest and absorb the calories in the intestinal tract, changes the release of like hunger and satiation hormones and the glucose and insulin response as well, which can lead to weight gain if it's dysregulated, but can also lose to weight normalization when it is in balance. So focus on those slow power carbohydrates, whole fruits, whole vegetables, starchic carbs, grains you've cooked yourself as opposed to the process refined category. And again, that shows you that food is information. So how the form it comes in makes it makes a difference. And so you can have two widgets of food, both the same amount of calories, but it's the information one is a fat and one is a carb, it'll have different effects on the body. So we can't just look at how many calories something has. We have to see what it's made up of how it's been processed because that will affect how it's going to get used in the body. As you said, start to affect our hormones like our blood sugar hormones. I have another question for you. So this is asked Dr. Keely Diet questions today. It's really, I'm seeing books on this on intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting. There's a lot of stuff about intermittent fasting. Look, I was born in the 60s. We just called it skipping breakfast. You're the younger generation born in the 80s and later, they get these fancy terms. So intermittent fasting, the pros and cons. And can you share how we're using it in our practice as well? Absolutely. I love that. Our generation is the one to like coin a medical term around skipping breakfast. Yes. So intermittent fasting is sort of like an umbrella term. It refers to a few different styles of basically dietary restriction. So you can intermittent fast in a way where you like eat for five days of the week and then you don't eat for two days of the week, for example. But I think what most people think of when we talk about intermittent fasting is actually time restricted feeding, which is the practice of only eating for like a certain window of hours during the daytime and really trying to extend the period of time between when you stop eating at nighttime and when you start eating the next day. So that sort of habit of time restricted feeding is a useful therapeutic and a handful of scenarios. So for example, men who need to lose weight often respond very well to a time restricted feeding type of pattern. So do often paramedic, or menopausal women in some instances. It kind of depends on what's happening harmonically. But what I would say is in the context of fertility. What I often like to remind my patients is that when you're trying to conceive, one of the things that I'm trying to do with your diet is send your body a specific set of signals, right? Food is information. And one of those signals is that there is adequate nutrition available in the environment to make a baby, to basically to grow new life. And a really extended fast overnight kind of sends the body the opposite message. So if we are going for 16 or 20 hours of the day not eating food, that's kind of telling our hormonal system that food is very scarce and it's only available at certain times of the day. And that may not promote really healthy, obligatory function and really help with fertility. What I would say is that generally speaking a 12-hour period of time between when you stop eating at night time and when you start eating the next day, that's a generally considered like hormone-okay way too fast, right? That also allows for the microbiome to have some good fasted time to reset itself overnight. It also allows your liver to process all the glycogen that's present. So from a weight maintenance perspective, 12 hours I think is reasonable. But pushing much beyond sort of 14 hours fasted overnight for people who are trying to get pregnant specifically is not my favorite thing in the world unless there's like really something specific going on that we're trying to shift. And this is helping you set it a little bit with blood sugar regulation as well, which is important for your reproductive health. Yeah, yeah. If you do a 12-hour fasted overnight, part of what's happening is you're giving your liver adequate time to use up its stored glucose, which is called a glycogen. And if we don't do that, so if we don't give at least 12 hours to clear out the liver, then what happens is we can end up having to store excessive glucose during the daytime as extra adipose tissue in the body, whether that's visceral or subcutaneous fat. So we want to give the body the opportunity to clear that out so that we have more capacity for the glucose and insulin the next day. And I'll let our listeners know that if you join our newsletter on acu balance, one of the emails that we send out is blood sugar hacks to balance your hormones and boost your fertility. So we have a little email that will send out if you join the newsletter. And there's several hacks. But why is it important, Kaylee, from the blood sugar lake? And I'm thinking of like our women that have been diagnosed with PCOS. So why is blood sugar such an issue? Because it's one of the common things as Kaylee said at the beginning, why there's all these different diets, but that some look like the conflict, but they all seem to work. Why? Because they all can help regulate blood sugar. So why is that so significant with our insulin levels and some of our sex hormones? One sort of like foundational thing to understand is that insulin gets released in response to glucose ingestion. So when we eat food, our pancreas pumps out insulin and insulin is a hormone. Insulin acts kind of like a bust or like a shuttle. And what it does is it grabs on to glucose, takes the glucose to the cells, knocks on the door of the cells and allows the glucose in. Glucose from our foods is fuel for our cells. So it is allowing for our cellular metabolism to take place. It allows cells to do the thing that they need to do. It allows our brains to work properly. It also allows our ovaries to work properly. The problem with glucose and insulin, that commonly arises with people is that we can get on what's called like a blood sugar roller coaster, where we are having real high highs and real low lows with our blood sugar values and the sort of like unpredictable nature of our blood glucose. When that happens frequently and over months to years, eventually what happens is we can become what's called insulin resistant. And that's a scenario where insulin still gets released in response to glucose. It takes the hand of glucose, takes it to the cells, knocks on the door and then the cells say like no, I've had enough of you insulin. There's been way too much around. I'm going to become resistant and not take that glucose in. So in that type of scenario, not only are you sort of underfuel, you can't underfuel cells, but you also then have to store that glucose somewhere. So we end up storing it as adequate tissue in our bodies. A dysregulated insulin state is a also strongly inflammatory state. So it's not a place that we want to be in if we can avoid it. In PCOS specifically, PCOS is like a spectrum disorder, but very often there are aspects of insulin resistance that sort of play a role in the hormone imbalance state of PCOS. And the more dysregulated the insulin system is, we tend to see a higher angiogenic picture, for example, which can hinder egg quality for those patients. But then there's also this sort of like inflammatory nature of dysregulated insulin that we see too. So again, the importance of regulating the blood sugar and again that on our newsletter, we'll send out 10 hacks on how to regulate your blood sugar to balance your hormones and boost your fertility. I'm apologizing for my voice. It's a little low. I was at the time of recording. I was away. And it wasn't because I would scream in and have in a great time. Unfortunately, I got viral air and joy. It has lost my voice. And I'm recovered physically, but my voice vocal chords are not 100% back. So I am well. Just my voice has not recovered. In our some of the coaching programs at Kaley and I offer online and what she does one and one in the clinic is the questions about can I have coffee, what about alcohol? These come up a lot. I thought one more important topic that I wanted to share with our listeners is one the one around fat because fat's gotten a bad rap, you know, for a while we were on the no fat diet, eating no fat. And we've seen how this has become detrimental to cell health and reproduction. Can you clarify that? Because there's been a lot of misinformation, which I know has been corrected in a lot of the journals and a lot of the research. But it doesn't seem like it's rich. It's reached the public critical mass yet about that. So you can talk about saturated fats, trans fats, good fats, bad fats, when it comes to fertility. So look, fats are again, like carbohydrates like protein is really, really foundational to have the right type of fats in our diets in order to peak our fertility. So for example, we make all of our sex hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, all of the precursors to steroid sex hormones are fats. So we absolutely need to have them in our systems in order to foster healthy fertility. We also use fats to make strong cell membranes. So when you are a growing a baby and they are making, you know, millions of new cells, you need to have fats present in order for them to be able to do that. But just like every other food that we've been talking about, fats as fuel are also information and the type of fats that we choose can either create a really hospitable, beautiful soil for fertility or can create imbalance in the soil. So a couple of quick examples are like trans fats that we talked about at the very top of the show can absolutely interfere with your fertility. So they can interfere with the ovulatory function, for example. They also interfere with your body's absorption of really healthy fats. So we don't want to be incorporating fats from poor quality animal protein, from processed foods, from fried foods too often because that's where we get things like trans fats. When it comes to the good fats, there are good saturated fats, there are good unsaturated fats that can play a role in hormone balance and ultimately healthy fertility. In general, in general, we're talking about the quality and how processed the fat is. So in general, we love fats that come from nuts and seeds and avocados and high quality like wild fish or grass fed meat. We don't love chemically processed or hydrogenated sort of chemically interfered with oils. So things like canola oil, sunflower oil, margarine, these things contain either trans fats or they contain damaged oils that can actually have an inflammatory reaction when we consume them in our bodies. Thanks for that. And I'm saying that on behalf of our listeners, the active balance fertility diet, again, when you if you go to our site, you can get a free copy of that where we have lots of recipes. The original version, which the second edition still has the influence, was based on the Harvard nurses study where they looked at over 18,000 women follow over eight years. And that was published back in 2008 where they showed a slow carb, which you just talked about whole food, mostly plant based. It wasn't a vegetarian diet had a sixfold increase in fertility in IN reproductive health, not in infertility, but in reproductive health, optimizing your fertility. And just to sum it up here. So why is it, you know, will the real frail fertility diet stand out? Why, what do I have to look for? So really if you want to simplify it, no processed food, no refined flowers, no added sugar, yes, to lots of veggies. You kind of like half the plate of vegetables, right? That's my goal. Yeah. 50%. So lots of veggies focus on eating lots of veggies, using good fats, healthy proteins, vegetarian and plant, plant based and animal protein. But again, remembering the quality of protein, since your plate is half veggies doesn't give you a lot of room for the meat, right? So it's small portions and stay hydrated. I think hydration with good water is underrated. We really need to be hydrated, right? Absolutely. It's like really commonly when I ask you about how much water they're drinking. A good litmus test for that is like what's the, how deeply yellow is your urine? Outside of you taking a B vitamin, and your very first P of the morning, your urine should always be like really quite lightly yellow. That would be a sign of good hydration. See it as. And when you eat this way, so again, you can download the diet and we have the principles there, so explain why with all these recipes that now taste good. Thank you, Dr. Keely McKyzek. Then they lower inflammation. They help lower oxidative damage. They help regulate blood sugar and provide adequate nutrition to cells. All that helps you reach your peak for telepotential. Absolutely. That's the goal. When we talk about universe activity, you touched on it, but you're diet and you're guiding your microbiome. Your diet can impact implantation, correct? Absolutely. Mechanism affecting the microbiome. Because the gut microbiome is ground zero, if there's something, if we're not eating enough fiber to promote healthy bacteria in the gut, there's a possibility that we could also be creating dysbiosis in the uterus. We have decent literature at this point that dysbiosis in the uterus can lead to implantation failure. I think another important thing just to wrap up and end on is that I think often we tend to hyperfocus on diet as a therapy that's going to help to create a healthy baby. Also remember that dietary therapies, we know that what parents are eating prior to conception, not only influences whether or not they're going to fall pregnant. Also influences the future health outcomes of their baby. So whether or not that baby is going to go on to develop things like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. We actually now have three generation data whereby what a woman eats in pregnancy is going to influence the health of her baby and her grand babies in the future as well. So working on your diet, of course, is going to help with that short term goal of like you making a baby today. But we also want to think about it as this lifestyle shift because when you eat this way, you are also having this multi-generational impact on the future health of your entire family. And I think that's really beautiful and can't be overlooked. All right. I want to thank you Dr. Kaylee MacKyzenk and again, she's the clinical director of acubalance wellness center. Kaylee, how can they find you? What's your Instagram handle? Did I say that the right way? Am I showing now that I'm the wrong age? You did say it right. Yeah, I'm Instagram handle. I'm at Dr. Kaylee MacKyzenk. We'll type that in the show notes because I love because I don't know how to spell my name. It's DR Kaylee MacKyzenk on Instagram. Perfect. And then obviously at the acubalance website acubalance.ca, you can get a copy of the fertility diet and sign up for the newsletter. If you want us to send you emails about what about coffee is a good or not alcohol, the 10 hacks for 10 blood sugar hacks and more, you can get that from the acubalance website. And that's where you can find Dr. Kaylee MacKyzenk as well. Thank you guys for listening to the Conscious Fertility podcast. And Kaylee, thank you again for joining us for another talk on diet. Reminding everybody that there's an excellent talk on fertility testing where Kaylee talks about the conventional or the general fertility workup. And then she talks about the naturopathic or functional medicine testing to do a deeper dive to leave no stone unturned. And that's one of the earlier podcasts that you can listen to as well. Thanks so much for that was really fun. If you're looking for support to grow your family, contact acubalance wellness center. At acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility acupuncture and naturopathic medicine. Download the acubalance fertility diet and Dr. Brown's video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to acubalance.ca. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram @lornbrownofficial. Or you can visit my website at acubalance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.