STOP Inflaming Your Body: The #1 Enemy to Egg Quality and Conception

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (0:00)
Inflammation is hijacking your fertility.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:04)
Do you think IVF is going to become the standard?

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (0:06)
Absolutely not. I think IVF is an incredible technology, and there's certainly people who would not be able to have children without IVF. The number one thing that I see that patients are not doing or they're putting at the bottom of the totem pole is...

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:20)
I was hoping you were not going to say that.
My patients, they need to have more healthy muscle. Is there something similar in the realm of fertility?

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (0:30)
We've got sleep, stress, muscle, diet and toxins. But sperm rates have dropped almost 50% in 50 years, and they've dropped more rapidly, more recently. But we also see more women being diagnosed with low ovarian reserve. I see more premature menopause than ever before. So it's not solely just, oh, everything impacts the sperm. We're really seeing both men and women being impacted by a change in our environment and our life and what that means for our fertility.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:00)
So you said that the vagina can contract.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (1:03)
Yes. If you're not using it, you're going to notice that you're going to have a higher likelihood of having vaginal strictures. You're going to have atrophy of your vagina.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:12)
You have to explain to us what you mean. Dr. Natalie Crawford, I have to say, number one, your boots are amazing.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (1:26)
Thank you.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:26)
And number two, I have so many fertility questions for you. And you know why?

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (1:30)
Why?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:30)
Because in our practice at Strong Medical, we are seeing more and more young women having fertility problems.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (1:38)
Well, we are seeing an increase in fertility, but thank you so much for having me here, and that we can hold space for this discussion, which is something that there's a lot of stigma behind as well, because many people don't understand their body, their health, their hormones, and they don't want to talk about their fertility. So by breaking down these discussions, and hopefully we can help educate some people so they can understand what they should be doing or advocate for their health better.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:01)
Do you think IVF is going to become the standard?

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (2:04)
Absolutely not. I think IVF is an incredible technology, and there's certainly people who would not be able to have children without IVF. There are some genetic diseases or medical scenarios that we cannot overcome with any other technology, but I do not agree with that narrative that IVF is going to be the way that all humans reproduce in 100 years.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:24)
But are you seeing it? Because I am seeing it more and more with younger patients, and I'm talking about patients, when I say younger, you know, 30s, early 30s.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (2:34)
Yeah, absolutely. We are seeing an increased rate of infertility. So number one, when I first started as a fertility doctor almost 15 years ago, I would say one out of eight couples had infertility, and now that number is one out of six. And in the US, if you're trying to get pregnant for the first time, it's one out of five.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:49)
One out of five couples.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (2:50)
One out of five. So if you sit here and you say, I want to start a family, 20% chance that you're going to have difficulty doing so. And that's a really large number. Yet I'll admit, I do not think the infertility field has caught up with what we should do, meaning this is a very reactive field. It exists within OB-GYN because people had a problem. It's defined by failure, the disease itself, failure to get pregnant after 12 months, meaning right now women have to fail before they can see me, get testing, even find out what's going on in their body. And as infertility rates rise, I really think we have to reframe how we look at fertility, how we think about it as a marker of our hormonal health, our longevity, our risk for future disease, and what that means about the life we're leading, but also what we can do more proactively to have an easier chance getting pregnant when we want to.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:41)
Infertility is defined as the inability to conceive after 12 months.

**Dr. Natalie Crawford** (3:45)
Correct.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:46)
Correct. Are men or women becoming, which one is becoming more infertile?