Natural Fertility with Kirsten Karchmer: Rational Wellness Podcast 431

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Kirsten Karchmer discusses Improving Fertility Naturally with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

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Kirsten Karchmer is a globally recognized fertility expert, acupunturist, and the CEO and founder of Conceivable. The website is Conceivable.com. Kirsten has spent decades helping women improve their reproductive health, both through her clinical work and through innovative digital solutions. Conceivable uses technology and personalized, science-based programs to optimize fertility by addressing the underlying root causes that impact conception. 

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

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Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz:  Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com.  Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.

Alright, welcome to the Rational Wellness Podcast. Today our guest is Kirsten Karchmer. I don’t know if I pronounced that properly. 

Kirsten: That was perfect.

Dr. Weitz: Okay, good. A globally recognized fertility expert, acupuncturist, and CEO and founder of Conceivable, Kirsten has spent decades helping women improve their reproductive health.  Both through her clinical work and through innovative digital solutions, conceivable uses technology. Personalized science-based programs to optimize [00:01:00] fertility by addressing the underlying root causes that impact conception. Today we will be talking about how women and couples can naturally enhance their fertility, the lifestyle and health factors that matter most, and how to support reproductive health in a holistic way.  Kirsten, thank you so much for joining us.

Kirsten: Thanks for having me. And that was such an amazing introduction. I was like, oh, I wish I had a copy of that. So, great. So thank you for that.

Dr. Weitz: Can you share your journey into the field of fertility and what led you to where you are now?

Kirsten: Absolutely. So, I was a competitive gymnast my whole life.  I spent most of my childhood in a very hot Texas gym. 

Dr. Weitz: So was my daughter from age 4 to 18.

Kirsten: Same with me. And then I got diagnosed with MS.

Dr. Weitz: Oh wow.

Kirsten: And and I ended up going to an acupuncturist who that day really changed my whole life because I didn’t want to go to the acupuncturist.  One of my friends, I was, even though I was still sick, I couldn’t walk without a cane. I had gotten a job in Korea and and I just was nervous. I didn’t know how safe Korea is, and I thought, well, I’m kind of disabled. I use a cane and I don’t want to be a victim there of any kind of crime. So I’m going to start doing the Korean Special Forces training, which is a, it should just be called the Korean Pushup Training, because literally you just do thousands of pushups a day.  But what I liked about it is they used a lot of weapons, including canes, and so I thought, well, I can maybe weaponize my disability a little bit. Anyways, long story long, I go against my will to go see this acupuncture. I’m like, acupuncturist, crap. That’s like psychics. I’m not going to that. It’s not gonna do anything.  And this very kind older Chinese gentleman was my acupuncturist, who ultimately became one of my professors. And he was like, look, after he felt my pulses and interviewed me, he’s like, look, when you were born, your body was very robust. Your constitution was very robust, and your disease was very nascent.  Then you trained and trained and trained and trained and trained. You trained until you threw up almost every single day, right? Trained without air conditioning, dehydration. He goes, in the time when your body was really developing, you were using so many resources. He goes, on the outside, you look perfectly healthy, like you look as healthy as a person can get.  So strong, so lean, you know? But on the insides, all of the systems are so depleted that now the MS has a chance to start bossing you around essentially. And he said, my job is to repair the Constitution such that the MS goes into remission. And of course I was like, whatever, that’s never gonna happen.  And then it did.  I didn’t really have any symptoms for about 30 years.

Dr. Weitz: Wow.

Kirsten: It was really when I went through menopause that I just had to start over a little bit. Like a lot of new things came up that I didn’t. I’d kind of learned how to work with everything and menopause just brought a whole new level of complexity.  Kind of five years in, now I’m sort of finally normalizing. But

Dr. Weitz: Did you go on hormones?

Kirsten:  No. I’m very sensitive because I’m very sensitive. Like everything tends to, like, unless it’s just a microdose, it tends to make things worse. And so, and I have to kind of go very small, like test one tiny thing, another tiny thing.  I’m about, I think I’m going to now though I, because I’m more stable. I’m not, I’m less scared to have a flare up right now because I’m not in, you know, worse state. Right. Anyway, so I got really interested in that way of thinking about the constitution and. As I started getting better and better each every quarter, I said less.

Dr. Weitz:  Well, forget about the constitution now. No, just kidding.

Kirsten: No. Right. And so then I decided I wanted to go to acupuncture school. And in acupuncture school what I realized is that in Chinese medicine, every single symptom tells us something, and especially combinations. Like I get an eye twitch at three o’clock in the afternoon, only in the third week of my cycle, and it, you know, only lasts 30 seconds.  All of that tells us something. Diagnostic and with the mens women’s menstrual cycle from day one until her period is over, [00:05:00] there is so much robust diagnostic information there. So much so that I didn’t wanna see men anymore because I’m like, they don’t have periods. I’m like I’m operating blind here.  And I. Opened the first women’s health clinic in Texas, and then I opened three more clinics and was the first board certified reproductive acupuncturist in North America. I treated 10,000 women. And then a study came out that less than 3% of couples could afford fertility treatments. And you know, in these type of clinics, the care is expensive because it’s very high touch.  You know, we’re not in there for five minutes, we’re spending an hour. Right. And I thought, but I’m part of that problem. And I wanna try to solve for that because family’s really important to me. And I thought, wow, if 97% of the people wanna have babies, don’t have access to the resources they need, and that in many countries, one IVF is the cost of a whole year salary,

Dr. Weitz: right?

Kirsten: I was like, that’s worth work, worth doing. And there’s a saying in Chinese medicine that I really love. The good doctor treats a patient. The great doctor [00:06:00] treats society, but the master will actually make herself obsolete. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Kirsten: And I can rest finally.

Dr. Weitz: Okay, good. So how does your approach to fertility, which I am understanding to be a functional medicine slash acupuncture approach differ from conventional medical approaches?

Kirsten: I think at the high level, like a Western medical approach is really to look for the presence or absence of a disease state. Something that is so bad that it’s a diagnosable cause of infertility, and honestly, there’s not that many, right? We have block tubes, no sperm, you know, eggs are getting too old.  There’s very few. Direct causes of infertility. What we’re missing is there’s at least 50 subclinical factors that any like alternative clinician can sort out for themselves, like cycle length, cycle volume, color of blood, consistency, all these other factors. [00:07:00] Exercising to exhaustion, like using CrossFit at least four times per week, decreases women’s likelihood of conception by more than 70%.  So the way we approach it is we interview the patient, either in person or you know, using technology, and then figure out all the subclinical factors. We map them to Chinese medicine things. So we call it energy, but we’re really assessing the qi. We call it blood. We’re assessing the blood, you know, stress.  We’re looking at like stagnation. Hormones, obviously these are like this the side effects from hormonal disruption. And then we can use that to actually predict the likelihood of natural conception. We have a patent on our predictive tool that collects that data and then can analyze it, score it, and predict the likelihood of natural conception.

And then we teach the users why is this important? How does it relate to them? And then we begin the process of, in an iterative way, repairing those, using everything that she has. Diet, lifestyle. Supplements, mindset, work, breath work, movement. Not necessarily. I don’t like exercise because [00:08:00] we interviewed 16,000 women last year, and the first question of for us always is, on a one to 10 without caffeine or exercise for two days, what’s your energy like?  And 8% had energy, eight out of 10, everybody else was below and 50% said their energy was five or below. This is 16,000 women. This isn’t a small sample. And and if you can’t make and conserve and restore energy every single day, everything else you do will not work. And this is not something that we use supplements for.   I think most of this comes from lifestyle. So we have to analyze how the person’s living and then start building strategies for them to help repair that.

Dr. Weitz: But when it comes to exercise. Too much exercise, obviously can be a negative, but no exercise I would think is also a negative and is going to lead to less energy as well.

Kirsten: True. But what we want to remember is that if your energy is a five out of 10 and you go and work out for an hour, you don’t have enough energy [00:09:00] to get through the day. So when you start lifting or doing whatever kind of workout that you’re doing, you’ll get, you are going,

Dr. Weitz: but you’ll get endorphins and you’ll get adrenaline and you’ll, 

Kirsten: Yes, but you tap into the adrenals,

Dr. Weitz: but you also tap into your testosterone and your growth hormone levels

Kirsten: a hundred percent. But Ben, what? What we recommend,

Dr. Weitz: or you stimulate those, right?

Kirsten: So how do we do that without going into flight or fright, right? How do we not tap the adrenals, which are already blown out for most people?  Remember that like when a person goes in a flight or fright that you know your physician, you start dumping adrenaline, but then the side is dumping cortisol, and cortisol is made from the same stuff we make. Progesterone from, so the higher the cortisol, the lower the progesterone. So we want to stay out of stressful situations, especially induced ones from exercise.  So we advise people to start while their energy is low. Start with a 10 minute walk after every meal. Start with 10 pushups on your kitchen counter three times a day throughout the day instead of 30 pushups at once and watching your heart rate variability and seeing like what is, you know, your heart rate really is going to drop from exercise, but you should be fully restored the next day.  We are building a face, some face scan technology that will actually scan your face and immediately tell you what your HRV is so that people can actually be using it. The app is more of a biomarker, like to be measuring certain biomarkers in addition to their perceived symptoms.

Dr. Weitz: Also, this is going to measure their heart rate by scanning their face.

Kirsten: It can measure heart rate body composition, blood pressure, HRV VO O2 max and a few other stress metrics really, because it can break down. It’ll be, it’ll, it’s not finished yet, but it’ll be able to break down just from a space scan from the HRV. You get HRV from coherence, which is how connected is brain, heart, and lungs.  But you also get it from the the ratio between is this person right now, what [00:11:00] percentage are they in flight or fight versus rest and relax. And what you’ll see is that. Most people who are stressed and have low resilience, low heart rate variability, they’ll have high, they’ll be on flight or fright a lot of the day.  Even when they do things like get a massage or get an acupuncture treatment, those, they’re so not resilient that it takes a lot more to pull ’em out of flight or fright. Even a night of sleep won’t necessarily pull them out and we have to interrupt that.

Dr. Weitz: Alright. So no exercise,

Kirsten: Not no exercise, not strenuous exercise.  As you start, like for us, as you start the process of what we do, the energy starts to come up and as the person goes from a four energy to a five energy, they start adding a little bit more movement. They start making sure that they’re staying out of flight and fright. They get to eight out of 10, they can do anything they want typically.  They’re resilient when they’re, when it’s with but you have to measure it based on no exercise or caffeine for two days, because if they’re exercising, they’ll have adrenaline in their system [00:12:00] and they will, they’ll be like, my energy’s really good as of right now.

Dr. Weitz:  You offer a ring that kind of looks like an oura ring that measures HRV and some other things, right?

Kirsten: Yes. In fact, it’s the mo, it’s the first non-invasive glucose monitor. That’s what’s sexy and the most interesting thing about it. Oh, really?

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So it uses light. People been talking about that for a long time and have never, we never seen anything on the market yet.

Kirsten: Yes. So it’s, it can’t be used. So it’s, it can’t be FDA approved. It’s not a device for a diabetic. You shouldn’t be, this is not what you would use. This is really for biohacking.

Dr. Weitz: Okay?

Kirsten: Of those 16,000 people that we interviewed, eight, so we had 8% had energy that was above eight out of 10, eight. Very lucky number, but we only had eight people who knew their blood sugar status, high, low or normal.  They’re like, I just don’t have any idea. That was the answer to the question, and because. Blood sugar is incredibly important for fertility. The higher your blood sugar, basically, the lower your fertility [00:13:00] is less obvi like. Less stable ovulation. It affects egg quality, affects sperm, affects uterine lining, so we need to know about it.  At least in our technology it, it can see that the person’s heart rate, I mean a blood sugar is high and then we do custom menu of planning. So then it’s like, oh, this person’s blood sugar’s too high. We need to have more protein, fiber and fat. And then we can have a hypothesis. Is this gonna make a difference?  She tracks what she’s eating and not, and then goes back, oh, okay, we’re starting to get the blood sugar under control.

Dr. Weitz: So your device can measure blood sugar. It’s not FDA approved yet, but are we, how far away from seeing FDA approved products on the market for measuring blood sugar from light?

Kirsten: Like a ring. We’re far from it because it isn’t that accurate.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Kirsten: It’s not like, again, if you were to get FDA cleared, we have to have, you’d be call it a medical device, which would make it appropriate for a diabetic. And we just can’t get that level of granularity where you would say, oh, it’s, you know, 99.4 0.7 it’s [00:14:00] really high, low or normal.  And we wanna just be really careful to say like, this is not again, to be used. As a medical device to monitor blood sugar, but as a tool to see like where are these subclinical, like I would call blood sugar issues to be another subclinical factor. Right? Right. People don’t know about it. This is an easy thing if you’re using the ring.  Our ring is half of it expensive, it correctly tracks temperature, which the aura doesn’t. And the biggest difference is I think that there’s good data that show that tracking actually does not change the outcomes. There’s no data that shows that tracking anything changes outcomes in any way materially.

And and it’s because it just gives you information. Like you got 10,000 steps, you might go, okay, tomorrow I’m gonna get 10,010. But evidently people don’t do that too much. And what we wanna, what we think is more valuable is to help people to understand, to analyze that data, not in an individual, not how many steps you got, but the whole picture.  So you can use the analyze tool to. Hit that button. And then the software looks at every single [00:15:00] piece of data the user has shared from what came from the wearable, what came from the face scan, what came from her consultation, what came from, what she tracked, what she’s eating, how she’s thinking, how her, the, you know, what she’s telling her therapist about her stress levels.

Not that the actual information, but just it gauges like her level of stress. Then gives her an analysis. So, oh, okay. It looks like your energy is still a five outta 10, but when I look at your sleep, you’re still only getting five hours of sleep. So let’s dig in there, because we don’t fix that. We can’t fix the energy thing.  So is it that you can’t fall asleep, stay asleep, wake up, rested, and then she might say, I can’t fall asleep. Then the tool will say, well, tell me about your caffeine intake. Do you drink caffeine? Yes. How many cups of coffee? Four cups of coffee. Okay. Now the AI is going, okay, well, when do you have those coffee?  I have two in the morning and I have two at four o’clock in the afternoon. Okay. There’s our sleep problem. At least that’s the first hypothesis. Okay. What happens if we take the, you know, the coffee in the afternoon away? Can she sleep? If not, we gotta go to the next one and the next one. And the next one.

Dr. Weitz: Alright, so sleep is important. How much [00:16:00] sleep is optimal

Kirsten: the data show for optimal performance in any way, especially with athletic performance? Nine hours.

Dr. Weitz: How about for fertility?

Kirsten: I call, there’s no data on what’s optimal, but I’ll say I have everyone that I’m working with privately not using our tool work to get, see if they can get to nine hours of sleep.  And basically we just start with going to bed 15 minutes earlier and 15 minutes. And I was like, you, we’ve, we have this myth that being tired is, means you’re lazy. That if you need to sleep, that you’re lazy. But most people, I don’t work with a lot of men. I do work with some, but most women are really tired.  So you start giving them permission to go to bed at eight o’clock every night and they can sleep. I have so many women who are like, oh my gosh, I’m sleeping 10 hours a night. And I was like, don’t worry, this won’t last forever. As everything starts to heal you, suddenly you’ll start waking up 30 minutes earlier and then an hour earlier, or you can go to bed 30 minutes later or 30 minute, you know?  And what you’ll get to is somewhere between eight and nine hours. [00:17:00]

Dr. Weitz: So, right now I’m 67 years old and I don’t think there’s been a single day on this earth when I’ve slept nine hours, but the most common sleep recommendations are seven to eight hours. So nine is not what you typically hear.

Kirsten: So I think that I want to speak to that because I think it’s just like saying like, well, what most people say is a normal period is 28 to 45 days. But if you have a 45 day cycle, that means you’re ovulating on 31, which means the egg is already started to be absorbed, right? So we have these generalizations about healthcare, about like what’s right and what’s perfect.  But if we actually look at the real data, like what is. Optimal, not just I don’t know what they base those seven to eight hours on. I think that lots of people can function on seven to eight hours. But what you’ll see is that most people, if you can, if you get the heart rate variability above a hundred, and you get them sleeping eight-ish, nine hours, [00:18:00] the constitution starts to get restored very quickly.  Getting to that can take a month or two.

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Dr. Weitz: I’ve really been enjoying this discussion, but I just want to take a few minutes to tell you about a product that I’m very excited about. Imagine a device that can help you manage stress, improve your sleep, and boost your focus. All without any effort on your part.  The Apollo wearable is designed to just to do just that, created by neuroscientists and physicians. This innovative device uses gentle vibrations to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, helping you feel calmer, more focused, and better rested. Among the compelling reasons to use the Apollo wearable are that users experience a 40% reduction in stress and anxiety.  Patients feel that they can sleep. Their sleep improves up to additional 30 minutes of sleep per night. It helps you to boost your focus and concentration and it’s scientifically backed. And the best part is you can get all these benefits with a special $40 discount by using the promo code whites.  W-E-I-T-Z, my last name at checkout to enjoy these savings. So go to Apollo Neuro and use the promo code Weitz today. And now back to our discussion.

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Dr. Weitz:  What about nutrition? What’s what are some of the important dietary factors that are going to improve fertility?

Kirsten: So. Start with the Mediterranean diet.  Like you’re not going to go wrong with a Mediterranean diet, like especially if you’re choosing like ultra clean animal products. 

Dr. Weitz:  So what is the Mediterranean diet to you?

Kirsten: To me it’s like vegetable based with still like about 15 to 20% clean grass fed animal products and plenty of healthy fat. And then any permutation.  But that isn’t what we recommend because I don’t think there’s a, that, that’s basically what the medical literature suggests is using the Mediterranean diet. But what we use is a combination of sort of Mediterranean diet, the heart diet, and Chinese medicine, food therapy, because. Everything that we do is personalized.  That’s how you can get ridiculous research, which isn functional medicine, this is what we’re doing, right? We’re really paying attention to the exact problems. We’re not saying like, this is the MS diet. We’re like, well, what is the diet that’s right for your problem? Like, why is your MS so active?

Let’s use food to target those problems. The same thing. So you know, we have to identify what the subclinical factors are. One person might only have one day of bleeding. If she only has one day of bleeding, she doesn’t have enough lining to get or stay pregnant. It just be almost impossible and it’s gonna be very hard to stay pregnant because there [00:21:00] literally, what she’s showing us from that one day of bleeding is there just aren’t enough resources to make enough blood, but physiologically we need to double the blood volume to make a placenta to nourish the baby.  And so we wanna address that. And so that person obviously is gonna get. A lot of iron, easy to digest iron rich foods, a lot of B vitamins, a lot of you know, healthy fats. All these things to enrich and build the blood. But say somebody has fibroids and they have hemorrhagic bleeding, stark blood full of clots, well that diet is actually not appropriate for those people.

They don’t need to make more blood. They don’t wanna congest the blood and cause more clotting. Actually wanna use foods that can kind of thin the blood a little bit more. Hydrating foods. More invigorating foods, more warming foods and things like that. So what it mostly comes down to is really figuring out what are the biggest problems that this person has.  Like if the person has gut issues, we know that the lining of the intestine the small intestine doubles in pregnancy to [00:22:00] account for increased nutrient disease, nutrient needs. However, what they found was that women who had preexisting gut issues, they didn’t have that doubling. Which means they’re having compromised access to nutrients for that developing baby.  So for me, if they have a gut issue, obviously easy to digest, we’re gonna give ’em digestive enzymes, we’re gonna give ’em colostrum more, almost all cooked foods, more warming foods, that kind of stuff.

Dr. Weitz: As part of your workup, are you doing a complete iron panel and a micronutrient analysis?

Kirsten: None of it.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Kirsten: So, so,

Dr. Weitz: So you really have no idea if they need iron or not?

Kirsten: So what we know if they, yeah we don’t know if they need iron and we’re not adding iron like, you know, we’re using nutritional iron and nutrition. But what we know is that if they have one day of bleeding, there is a very high correlation to anemia. Very high correlation. So you can correlate days of menstrual bleeding to blood, ferritin, to hematocrit loosely not, you know, you’re not gonna say [00:23:00] one to one relationship, but because the mission of the work that we’re doing is to make this care, which is usually very extensive, almost free.  So easy to use, extremely affordable. So as soon as we start adding a lot of functional blood test into it and needing someone to interpret those, we start getting a lot more expensive. And what we’re able to pull from is, like Chinese medicine evolved from 3,500 years ago, at least. Observational data.  And you know, using the system that we use, we increase the likelihood women would get pregnant by 150 to 260% in four months with no human interaction.

Dr. Weitz: It’s hard to get pregnant without human interaction.

Kirsten: Well, with me or anybody on my team. Okay. That’s true. That’s true. That was actually well played.  That’s very funny. I like you.

Dr. Weitz: Okay, so, we touched a little bit on sleep and exercise and a little bit about nutrition. I know that [00:24:00] you offer some supplements that are available. How do you decide which supplements to use and which you think are most beneficial for which patients?

Kirsten: So exact same thing from that assessment that we use, whether in person or with our tool we are looking for the subclinical factors that are prominent.  Again, there are no supplements that are good for fertility. Everybody is different. Every single infertility and miscarriage patient will have a unique presentation, and you wanna use supplements that target their unique underlying issues. Like if the person doesn’t have cervical discharge, this is a real problem.  But if they don’t have cervical discharge, the first thing is like. Are you drinking enough water? Because if you’re dehydrated, you won’t have cerv. There’s not a problem. The problem is dehydration. Right? But if they’re hydrated, then we might use things like arginine or vi super high quality vitamin E.  If they have scanty bleeding. We’re using iron B vitamins. If you know, all we’re just, we’re. We’re suggesting not prescribing, we’re suggesting based on what, you know, if we know they’re 40 [00:25:00] years old, we know they have an egg quality issue. So we’re using antioxidants and things like that. And we built a tool that basically, you know, through that interview process, can then figure out what supplements are right and put it into individual packs for them to.

Dr. Weitz:  What are your favorite antioxidants?

Kirsten: Super simple. Like, NAC, omega, a EC. Those are the primary ones that we use. We, you know, sometimes use, those are gonna be your main ones. We’re not fancy. This is not a fancy system at all. It’s really about what’s available and you know, even sometimes we use, like for blood sugar, we might use Inositol or Berberine, but Berberine, you know, inositol is like a penny and Berberine’s really expensive.  So if we’re trying and we can get pretty similar results. So, you know, how do we get the most bang for the buck for having the customer spending the least amount of money? While still delivering incredibly high quality stuff.

Dr. Weitz: Okay. What about managing stress?

Kirsten: So, you know, I do a live show every day [00:26:00] on TikTok, and the most common thing that people say is, how do you cope with the stress, anxiety, and grief related to infertility?

Dr. Weitz: I got one. Get off of TikTok.

Kirsten: True, but on my life, people say that being on the live makes them very happy because okay, you just talk about, it’s actually not that hard. Like when they see, it’s hard when you’re infertile because no one will tell you anything. They’re like, I don’t know, unexplained infertility. Maybe you’re too old.  Maybe it’s your guy. But there’s not a lot of data for at least 40% of the people. And so when I start explaining like, oh, well, you know, your energy’s a two. You got one day of bleeding, your period comes every 70 days. Of course you’re not getting pregnant yet. We actually have some work to do. We have to, you know, figure out what’s causing those things and start to repair them, and then your natural fertility will be improved.

Dr. Weitz: I know your treatment is focused on women, but it’s my understanding that when it comes to fertility problems, men are at least half the problems.

Kirsten: True. And we are building for men solutions for men. [00:27:00] Yeah. It’s interesting. A study was released five years ago. Paul Turk is the author and he’s a urologist in Holly.  In LA they found that poor semen parameters are basically like the menstrual cycle. Women’s menstrual cycles a great predictor and. Like window into her overall health. And a semen analysis does the same thing. Men who had abnormal semen parameters had significant increased risk for prostate cancer, more severe prostate cancer, diabetes and heart disease.  So the good news is that all of that is lifestyle related. Which means lifestyle can fix it. Unless there’s a structural problem, like a spermatic seal or a varie, obviously those have to be surgically intervened. But the, for the most part. In about 90 to 120 days, men can make radical improvements in their semen analysis if they’re willing to make changes, and sometimes that’s exercising less.

Dr. Weitz: Okay. What role does epigenetics play?

Kirsten: Everything. All of this is epigenetics. We know [00:28:00] from the twin studies, you know, they have many epigenetic studies where they took identical twins, female twins, with the BRCA gene, that’s the breast cancer gene. Then they were like, why is it that one, these are I genetically identical women who grew up in the same house.  How is it that one gets breast cancer and one doesn’t? And they tied it all back to epigenetic epigenetics, which is epi. Basically epigenetics is looking at the impact of diet, lifestyle, and behavioral health on health outcomes. And those studies they’re looking at the effects of diet and lifestyle on breast cancer, you know, presentation outcomes.  But, you know, we know that. We have women who have poor egg quality issues. Well, you can’t change the eggs, right? The eggs were born, women are, you can change the sperm ’cause men are making new sperm every 180 days. But women are born with their eggs. But those eggs mature over 90 days before they’re ready for fertilization.

And that follicular recruitment period, they’re exposed to us. Do if we smoke, if we drink alcohol, if we’re really stressed, if our diet’s not good, if we’re overheated [00:29:00] or we’re too, if our temper temperatures are poorly regulated and that really affects egg quality. So if we look at epigenetics, you know what they were able to demonstrate in a lot of those studies that actually changing diet, lifestyle, and behavioral health can impact the turning on and turning off pathological phenotypes and genotypes meaning genes.  So, it’s really where all of our work is everything that will affect. The improvement of the genetic presentation is gonna be beneficial to the woman optimizing her fertility, but also her ability to stay pregnant and have a healthy baby, which is really the only number we look at.

Dr. Weitz: I’m pretty sure your answer to this questions could be no, but do you look at, do you look at genetics to see what the propensities are?

Kirsten: No, we don’t, because again, it’s just not, it’s not in our scope. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t know how to do be a chiropractor. I could probably like, I mean, I took one like tween out class and I think we had to adjust a neck, which is so scary with no training, you know? But it’s just not in my lane.  And I think that w. People do [00:30:00] the best. When I’m always, I trained a lot of acupuncturists, I always say, stay in your lane. You’re not a chiropractor, you’re not a naturopath, you’re an acupuncturist. And it can take a hundred lifetimes to learn Chinese medicine like really well. And I think when we try to get into the places where that are not our areas of domain expertise and plus genetic testing, I just had a ton of it, you know, $25,000.  So, if their insurance isn’t paying for it, we just have then another financial barrier that I don’t even think makes that big of a difference. We’re like, what we’re, the work that we’re doing is more first line of defense. I always tell people like, if you’ve been working with us one way or the other for nine months to a year, and your conceivable score is above 70 and you’re still not getting pregnant, and we have good sperm, this is where we start looking at genetics at reproductive immunology.  Not with us though. We refer out to the clinicians who that’s their domain expertise.

Dr. Weitz: Alright,

Kirsten: and that’s such a small percentage, right?

Dr. Weitz: For women who are older, what are some [00:31:00] of the more effective strategies for fertility?

Kirsten: Well, what was interesting is in the pilot that we did with the software that we built I was telling my team like, if it’s 50% as good as me, we should build it.  But what we found was that, you know, I had mentioned before that we increase the likelihood of women getting pregnant by 150 up to 260%. The women who got the 260% were age 38 to 44, they had the highest improvement in natural fertility. And so that was very shocking to me because I, you would think it would be the opposite, but I suspect it’s the, because as women get older, they just get more and more responsibility.

They might have a child or two children already, and they’re taking care of their house, they’re taking their career, they’re trying to get fit and be on Instagram and all this stuff, and they just get more and more worn out, caring for everybody else. You start putting all the spotlight on their health and really measuring everything so that they can see, like, if you don’t invest a little bit in yourself, we are not going to make progress.  And then when they do it, they can make profound changes.

Dr. Weitz: Alright.

Kirsten: Because. And you know, just, I feel like I didn’t answer that question for your listeners well enough. If they’re like, well that was not useful. I think as we are, what we wanna think about is. Blood volume because we see the volume of blood starts to decrease. So paying attention, like do you have four days of bleeding, soaking a tampon or a pad about every four hours, that’s consistent with like the most likely successful implantation lining.

And if not, like what are the problems and start working on that. Also, you know, we have clear problems with egg quality. Typically, this is because of blood flow to the ovaries. As the ovaries age, they actually start to atrophy and look like a little wilty plant. And the pituitary gland has to shout louder and louder.

Release an egg. Release an egg. The ovaries start to release a vegf. Which is a enzyme that’s secreted by the heart and cardiac arrest trying to draw blood to it, right? So re’s like, please just give us some water. So things [00:33:00] like breath work is incredibly valuable for driving blood to the pelvis. And I like a guy on YouTube who’s free breathe with Sandy.

I wish he would do some breath work for us. Sandy, if you ever hear this for. Some classes for us, but he’s really good. And then this is where acupuncture can be very valuable because when you’re putting needles, like anywhere, you stick a needle, you’re improving blood flow. So if you’re just getting needles right on top of the ovaries, every time you are actually artificially driving blood to the ovaries.  But you need to make enough blood so that we’re not, you know, only just driving it to the ovaries.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Kirsten: Anti-inflammatories, antioxidants, diet is huge and stress management in doing less. So many women who are getting close to 40, you know, and I ask them, tell me about their day. They’re like, well, I get up at five o’clock in the morning and then I go to the gym and then I come home and I make breakfast for my family.  And then I do a load of lunch, and then I go to work and then I pick up my kids and then I go to the grocery store and then I make dinner, and then I go to bed. And I was like, whoa, where’s your fun in there? Like, where’s your life [00:34:00] in there? You know? There’s no time. For restoration, for reflection, for like downregulation.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I get it. That’s modern life.

Kirsten: But we’re seeing that modern life in our fertility rates. Right. Which are for both men and consistently declining.

Dr. Weitz: Right. Good. So where do you see fertility care heading in the next 10 years?

Kirsten: It’s a little bit scary. Even though I am a big proponent of ai you know, we will have the ability to sort of have designer babies, not with me, but you know, to use genetic testing of the embryos to select a lot many different things.  And I think that a lot of people want that, although I don’t think it’s good for our species. In women’s health. I have a colleague who just is got a FDA approval for a new tool that uses AI to to look at a mammogram and they’re able to identify breast cancer five years earlier.  Five years.  I mean, it’s at that stage [00:35:00] is even earlier than institute. Right. So we’ll be able to save a lot of lives there for me if I do my job right and I. Teach, like for me, like I’m building software to do all of this, right? Because I’m on a mission to make it more affordable. And we are not only just building for fertility, our roadmap for this year is to build interventions for from before girls get their first period all the way through postpartum.  So what we’re actually building as a operating system for women’s health. And so in 10 years I hope that conceivable is the operating system for women’s health, just like. You know, Mac Os and AWS, that it’s the system that both analyzes, intervenes, assesses, but then the user is providing a lot of data and then we can use AI to learn from that data and continue to get more insights about how do we help people better.

Dr. Weitz: If you could leave our listeners with one key takeaway about improving [00:36:00] fertility naturally, what would it be?

Kirsten: The most important thing is to know, can I do two?

Dr. Weitz: Sure. Yeah. Do three. 

Kirsten: So the first one is to know that at least 80% of fertility issues can be fixed by you.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Kirsten: The not jump into IUI or IVF, like, it you, there are many places where you can start to identify what are these underlying issues, right?  And then start to work on them.

Dr. Weitz: Well what about women who go to a OB who says, your age so and so, so you know, your chances of getting pregnant are very low.

Kirsten: What would tell them to download the Conceivable app and do the assessment and get their conceivable score? Because we validated in a clinical trial, it’s very predictive of a woman’s likelihood of natural conception.  And then see what the problems are that it identifies. And then see like, can I work on these? Like, oh, my energy is a two outta 10, but I only sleep two hours. Okay, well I’m gonna take three months to try to work on a few of those things. I just think that like what’s happening is we’re encouraging women to jump [00:37:00] into assisted reproductive technologies like IUI and IVF, which I have no aversion to.  Like, I’m like they will help a lot of people that we will not be able to help who will actually need it. But what we’re not educating women about is that those interventions do almost nothing to help you to stay pregnant. They may, like IUI is very low, 10% increased likelihood of getting pregnant.  10% for $2,200. Like you wouldn’t go to Vegas if you had a 10% chance of winning and slap down 2000 bucks, right? There’s no way you’d do it, and especially if you got a really bad hangover from it. Same with IVF, like. We need women to be ready to be successful for these interventions so that we can, one, get the success rates up.

We can make it more affordable and accessible for more people, and we’re helping women to get pregnant when they’re their best selves. We know that the moment of conception for both the man and the women is the most predicted. Her health and his health at the moment of conception is one of the biggest predictors of the health of the offspring.  So. [00:38:00] We get, we decide we wanna have a baby and then we get super anxious about like, I gotta get pregnant, I gotta get pregnant, I gotta get pregnant. But what we stop thinking about is like, how can I prepare to have a healthy child And taking the focus off just getting pregnant and thinking about just the bigger picture.  You’ll have a easier time getting pregnant. You’ll have a healthier pregnancy. You’ll enjoy your pregnancy more, which it’s maybe the only time you’re ever pregnant in your life. And hopefully he healthier labor and delivery and baby.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. How can listeners and viewers find out about your programs?

Kirsten: The best way is just to head over to conceivable.com. Tiktoks about to go away. I’m very active on TikTok, but it’s about to go away, so, your best bet is just to head over there. If you email us through anything on the website, you can just say, get this to Kirsten, and happy to chat. Chat. What’s so

Dr. Weitz: sure TikTok is going away.

Kirsten: Well, they’ve already announced the date in which it’s going to wait, like, I think it’s like March 16th and Mark Zuckerberg is going to launch a US version of TikTok called M two Meta [00:39:00] two, which I hate. I just don’t think it’s good to have a monopoly right. On social media. I don’t think it’s healthy for the country.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, what you’re saying Zuckerberg’s gonna buy the TikTok or he is gonna buy the, it’s

Kirsten: Zuckerberg and somebody else. And I’m just drawing a blank on who else put a bunch of money in, not Amazon. I wanna say it’s like a consulting firm like Accenture, but it’s not that, and came together because it’s

Dr. Weitz: probably Donald Trump Jr.

Kirsten: Probably. I mean, it’s not good, right? Because what they’re doing by having the, and then the, so that was supposed to launch on September 5th. It did not launch. I don’t know why, but and I think we have like till March something, until they’re gonna turn off TikTok for sure this time, because they don’t want us, you know, basically.  The new TikTok, you’ll, you won’t have access to any content outside of the us like China, you know, and North Korea.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Kirsten: But I have a very active community, like half a million followers on TikTok. So. 

Dr. Weitz:  Well, we have to limit things now that we’re in a kingship.

Kirsten: Well, it’s kind of, it’s kind of interesting because, you know, Trump had promised to make IVF free for everybody.

Dr. Weitz: And I, as soon

Kirsten: as I saw that and I was like, oh yeah, sure. As soon as they see the bill for that. Oh sure.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh sure. That was gonna happen. Yeah.

Kirsten: Then he, they came up like, no, we changed our mind.  We’re gonna do only restorative reproductive medicine. And then I was like, oh shit. That’s kind of what I do actually already. 

Dr. Weitz: You’re not gonna get any kind of medicine, so they do need your app, Kristen. They’re not gonna be able to afford anything else.

Kirsten: Exactly.

Dr. Weitz: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Kirsten.

Kirsten: It’s been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcast or Spotify and give us a five star readings and review.  As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for functional medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition and want to prevent chronic problems and want to promote longevity. Please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports chiropractic and nutrition office at 310-395-3111 and we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine and I will talk to everybody next week.