Infertility Crisis: The Shocking 2050 Prediction | Dr. Rahi Victory DSH #1279

thing was way below what I feel it should be. People were not being educated.
They were not

being given options. And even when they did treatments, they weren't being given explanations for what was wrong.
So there was this just overwhelming hunger from patients just to get human care, right? Like one-on-one, tell me what's wrong. Tell me why I didn't do well.
all right, guys, Dr. Rahi Victory here today.
We're going to talk infertility, a growing crisis. Thanks for coming on, man.
Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Based off the stats you just shared with me, we really need to talk about this now. For sure.
Yeah. Infertility is rapidly growing.
Yeah. So by 2050, you said 50% of countries won't be able to meet up with?

Their replacement rate for the population.

Yeah, that's correct.

And by 2100, they estimate 97% if we're on the same trajectory.

So it's a very growing concern and it's going to have a real social, environmental health impact, economic impact, really like a massive tidal wave of a problem. This is going to impact us, our kids, our grandkids.

For sure.

Scary stuff.

Yeah.

And it seems like it's just a lot of contributing factors, not just one thing, right?

Yeah, there are many.

I mean, there's age, there's the environment, there's all the exposures.

You know, there's other problems with diseases that are growing, endometriosis. Men's health is rapidly declining.
We have a huge decrease in sperm performance. So all these things are contributing together and it's really becoming a problem.
How much does the men's health impact the health of the baby? Huge, huge. So the quality of the sperm can impact everything from the health of the baby to miscarriage rates.
There's a test we do called sperm DNA fragmentation testing. That test measures the amount of damage to the DNA in the sperm.
And for the guys that have a high amount of damage, it's up to a 12 fold increase. So 1,200% increase in the risk of having a miscarriage.
Holy crap. Yeah, placentas, things like preeclampsia, the health of the baby later on, all of those are very significantly impacted by men's health.
A great example that I use on a lot of my patients is if they're smoking, we need to get them to quit smoking, and it's hard for a lot of guys. So one thing I'll frequently tell them is your baby has a higher chance of having heart disease and cancer, even if it's only the dad that is smoking.
Wow. That's scary.
Yeah. Because you're imprinting that stuff into the epigenetics of the sperm DNA.
Yeah. This is all new to me because when I was growing up, I always thought it was the woman's health that mattered.
never knew it was both 50 50 so it's 50 50 oh yeah wow that's crazy because i know a few women that have had kids with different uh fathers sure and some of them have hard had much harder pregnancies yeah exactly so you'll find some women that sail through one pregnancy and have no problem and then they'll have another pregnancy with a different partner and they're complicated.

And it's like a night and day difference.

Yeah.

So it has to be on the male at that point.

A lot of it will be.

I mean, every pregnancy is different,

but a lot of it will fall back on the health of the male

and their habits and what they're doing.

There was a really good post,

I don't remember who it was from,

on social media recently where this guy was talking about

if women have to go through nine months of taking care of their bodies and their health and attending to their well-being because they're pregnant, why shouldn't guys get their sperm optimized? And I got millions of views and I was like, yeah, this guy hit it right on the head, right? We need to actually send that message out to the guys to make sure they're as healthy as possible when we're going ahead to produce a baby.

What are some ways to optimize for males?

So automatically, no smoking, no drinking, no drug use.

And that includes vaping, marijuana, all that stuff.

So vaping shows up in the sperm?

Oh, it's all terrible for sperm.

Damn.

It's a train wreck.

Alcohol is a cellular toxin,

increases the number of abnormal sperm by 83%. So all of those things are huge negatives.
Smoking is terrible, slows down the sperm, reduces the number that are there, the number that are normal. Vaping does the same thing, and marijuana has side effects as well.
So that's the first one. Second one, you got to have sex a lot.
So it's every day or every other day nonstop.

Holy crap.

Right, which is sometimes a challenge.

I mean, some people's schedules don't allow it or they kind of get sick of each other after.

Yeah, every day.

It's like sex is great and all that.

Every day.

Every day is a lot, right?

So we need the guys to ejaculate frequently.

Vitamins do make a difference

that's being shown over and over again.

So I don't promote one brand over another because I don't believe in that. But I think taking vitamins and watching your overall wellbeing, your diet, your exercise, stuff like that's really important.
And then lastly, cold therapy. So avoiding cell phone exposure.
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That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com slash dsh. F*** it, that's terrible because of the EMF.
Making sure that you're not going in a hot tub, jacuzzi, sauna, not turning on your car seat heater. You guys don't have that problem in Vegas, but we do where I come from.
And then just keeping the testicles cold. So a lot of times we'll tell guys to buy a bag of frozen peas and just sit on them for 20 minutes a day.
The colder your testicles are, the better they work. And why does that help the sperm? So heat is negative for testicular function.
It just screws up the enzymes and the processing. So the cooler the testes is, the better it is at producing the sperm.
Wow. Excuse me.
No, I actually love the sauna. So I'm going to have to take some time off when I want kids.
When you want kids, yeah. Or get yourself tested now just to make sure ahead of time you're not doing damage.
Wow. So you've seen chronic sauna and hot tub use lead to damage? I can't say that I've seen chronic use.
I mean, in the research, it's there for sure, but I haven't seen it because where we are in Canada, people aren't chronically in a sauna or a hot tub, but there's no question that the science is like unequivocal. Heat is bad and cold is good.
Yeah. I mean, sperm whales live in the Arctic, right? Those guys are producing tons of sperm.
There's a reason for that. I never even connected a dot on that one.
Yeah. So cold plunging might be actually good for those.
It's amazing. Wow.
Yeah. I've always hated it, but if it helps have kids, I mean.
It can be very beneficial. Yeah.
For your overall wellbeing and for sperm performance, for sure. Yeah.
It's a little bit short because most people are in there for like a minute or two. But if you're sitting on frozen peas, that's a lot easier to tolerate.
That's why we tell guys to do that. There's actually underwear you can buy on Amazon that has like a pocket for an ice pack on either side.
Wow. So for guys that work in like really hot jobs where they're in a suit or they're in a tank or something like that, and they can't control the heat, we actually tell them to use those to keep their testes cool.
Interesting. Have you seen the studies on the polyester underwear? I have not.
So polyester, I guess there's like microplastics in there or something. So that's getting in people's balls.
Sure. Yeah.
They're doing a lot of tests on balls and there's a lot of plastic in them basically. For sure.
I mean, I know that the work on tea bags and that tea bags contain billions of plastic particles. So you do have to be careful with some of those plastic confused tea bags because those can do the damage.
I stopped drinking those actually when I saw that. Yeah.
And I love tea. Yeah.
But that's concerning. Yeah.
Oh yeah. You don't want plastic.
Even plastic water bottles. Like I try to drink out of glass these days.
Yeah. I noticed you guys are using the glass bottle.
I mean, who knows what the damage is, but I'd rather just be as proactive as possible. Oh, for sure.
You know? Yeah. You mentioned vitamins earlier, whether specific ones or just make sure you're good everywhere.
There are, I mean, um, things like coenzyme Q10, that's a big one. Zinc, magnesium, uh, vitamin D, uh, E, C, those are all really helpful.
Um, folic acid or folate. That's really brilliant as well.
So there are some basics that you want in there, but overall what you want to do is reduce the oxidative damage and most of the vitamins are good at that. We get people that come in and they're on like 20 different vitamins.
That's actually harmful. So you can actually do what's called reductive damage by being on too many vitamins.
And there's a device that can measure the amount of oxidative or reductive stress in the semen. So we have that.
And for guys that are on like a million different vitamins, we'll often recommend, why don't you let us test you out first? Because if it is really high, you got to tell them you might want to come off of some of those vitamins because you're doing too much. You got to tell it to a...
Yeah, sorry. You got to let the body kind of do what it needs to do on its own.
Yeah. You got to tell that to Brian Johnson, man.
Yeah, for sure. Who's on like what, 50 or 100? Oh yeah.
It's not good for you when you're on that, man. Yeah, that's a lot.
But his results say otherwise, which is crazy. Well, I mean, I think it depends on what you're looking at as well, right? So if you're in an environment where you're overexposed to toxic medications or substances or your environment, you may need more.
If you're just trying to stay healthy, great. If you are trying to produce a baby, you can overdo it.
That's good to know. The low testosterone stuff, you see that being a big factor in all this infertility issue? It definitely can be.
So we are seeing a decline in testosterone globally, and that's probably a big reason that the sperm quality is declining. So with that, we are looking at how to correct that, obviously.
I think a lot of that is environmental and exposures, but there is no question that correcting that's going to make a big, big difference. Right now, we don't have great ways to correct it other than telling them to be more healthy, health conscious, follow the right diet, lose weight, stay in shape, exercise, that kind of thing.
There are medications we use for it, but obviously we don't want to hit everybody with meds as the solution because that's- The TRT, yeah. Yeah.
Well, you can't take testosterone. Oh, you can't? No.
So if your testosterone is low and you have sperm production problems or you're trying to produce a baby, it's basically male birth control. It'll stop you from making sperm.
Really? Yeah, because your brain stops sending the signal to your testicles to produce sperm and then you stop making sperm. So your testosterone

normalizes, but you're totally in. Wow.
So you're shooting blanks. Totally blank.
Holy crap. Yeah.
Yeah. Blanks are scary, man.
You know? Yeah, they are. Yeah.
Have you seen the rate of miscarriages go up too? It has. I mean, it's pretty steady in terms of being related to age.
So a woman's age and a little bit the man's age has the biggest role in the risk of miscarriage because 80% of miscarriages are caused by genetic abnormalities in the embryo. So we see that with an increasing age in the woman.
But there's no question that, again, there's environmental stuff, there's low vitamins, there's DNA damage. Again, with the guy's sperm quality tanking

globally, we definitely are seeing more miscarriages because they're a big factor in that. I've also heard the rate of C-sections is going up.
Is that true? It is a little bit. It depends on which countries you're looking.
I think US, I was looking at. It is.
So the US is unfortunately plagued by the whole, we're going to get sued thing. Right.

So doctors are not always necessarily making their decision based on, you know, what's best in that circumstance. Oftentimes they're a little bit afraid of what the outcome could be.
So they have to follow that part of it as well. And I get that.
I mean, if you're constantly worried about being sued, it's safer to just do a C-section when you're even harboring a little bit of risk. Other countries like Canada is pretty steady.
It's around 20, 25% nationally. Damn.
Yeah. That's pretty high though, I feel like.
That's pretty standard. Oh, is it? Yeah, that's pretty standard across the board.
I mean, other countries like South America, the Middle East, it's like 80, 90%. Doorsite? Yeah.

Why is it so high there?

So I'm born in Iran.

Yeah.

I've lived in Canada my whole life, but I was born there.

And I get a lot of Persian patients because I'm Iranian.

I speak the language.

And you talk to them and they walk through the door.

And the first thing they say is, I want a cesarean.

And that's because everybody in Iran is told to do a cesarean session.

Like as soon as you walk in the door, they're telling you. Is that a safety thing or what's the reason behind that? Money.
Oh, they get paid more? Yeah. That's fucked up.
Which is why our numbers in Canada aren't that bad. Okay.
Yeah. The difference for me between doing a vaginal delivery and a cesarean, it's like 60 bucks.
Oh, really? So you don't care? Oh, yeah. Not at all.
But I've seen stuff where it's like the baby absorbs more nutrients if they're born naturally. Have you seen that through the birth canal? Yes.
So babies will absorb more bacteria. Yeah.
Which helps colonize them, which protects them from infections and having respiratory difficulties and stuff like that when they're born. So it is safer for the baby always to be born vaginally, no question.
And we encourage that in our patients. I mean, generally speaking, unless there's a really good indication, we'll tell our patients not to have an elective cesarean section.
So you're encouraging patients generally to try and deliver vaginally. Having the baby by cesarean is great when you need to.

And there are indications, obviously, where you don't have a choice.

But otherwise, you want to really try and focus the patient on having as natural a delivery as possible. Yeah, I'm with you on that.
What's the shot they make you get to when you're giving birth? The pain one? Oh, the epidural? Yeah. Have you looked into that? Yeah, epidurals are great in many ways.
It does slow down your labor, which can be a problem for some people. Average is about an hour and a half though, so it's not a huge issue.
It does make it more difficult to push. And because of that, sometimes we have to do what we call more operative vaginal deliveries, where we're using the vacuum or the forceps to pull the baby out.
That's fine if you're good at doing it. That's not fine if you're not doing it.
So it's a lost art in the US, like almost nobody does forceps. I remember years ago when I was doing fellowship training in the US, they had a baby that was facing the wrong direction.
And I'm very comfortable with forceps because we trained on them a lot in Canada. So I went in there and I assessed and I went out and talked to the guy that was above me and I said, we need to turn this baby.
Can I turn it? And he said, do you know what you're doing? And I said, yeah, I know what I'm doing. And he said, okay.
So I went in there, easiest thing ever, gently turned the baby around with the forceps, even taught the resident how to do it. Wow.
Helped pull the baby out, not a scratch, no tear. No way.
No injury, nothing. Perfect, right? So I came out of the room and the attending was standing there and he said, everything go well? I said, yeah.
He said, don't ever do that again. No one's done it in 10 years.
No way. Yeah.
Like they just don't do it out here. It's too risky.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Like you said, these hospitals are scared of getting sued out here. Right.
Is that in Canada too or no? It's starting. It's not as bad as it is out here, but there's definitely litigation for sure.
Damn. Yeah, I wonder if there's some middle ground because I get it from the parental side and the business side from the hospital.
You know, I get both perspectives. Yeah, for sure.
You got to make sure that you're doing the right thing for the baby and the mom.

That's the combo that comes first.

Yeah.

The rest of us, honestly, we don't matter as much.

I mean, obviously you want to make sure

you're taking care of the physician

in the hospital and so on,

but you're not the priority.

The patient's the priority.

Yeah.

Have you seen a rise in IVF too?

Oh, huge.

Huge.

It's like nonstop. That seems to be the future, like genetically modifying your kids, right? Well, in terms of genetic modification, that's something that has been very, very, very rare right now.
They have the capability to do it. It's called CRISPR-Cas9.
So you can genetically modify embryos. As far as I know, it's only being done once.
It was done by a guy in China who tried to modify a set of twins that were being born with HIV. So he somehow changed the gene for the HIV.
Last I heard, those babies were not doing well. And it's like wildly illegal everywhere else.
So nobody's trying that stuff. Oh, I didn't know that.
Okay. Not yet.
Okay. We can select out genes.
So let's say a guy shows up with his partner, they each have cystic fibrosis. They don't want to have a baby that actually has the disease cystic fibrosis.
So even if they're just carriers, we can look for that gene in an embryo before we even put it in. So we just don't use those embryos.
Oh, got it. So we're not modifying genes, but we're selecting embryos that don't have a specific disease.
So people will do it for like the breast cancer gene or cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, stuff like that. That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah.
I've heard IVF is on the rise. I didn't know how much it was, but with all the infertility, it would make sense that people are going that route, right? Yeah.
I mean, right now, a large number of the patients that have infertility will either turn to IVF or unfortunately, in many cases, they're being nudged or pushed towards IVF by clinics because it's a moneymaker. And so sometimes you'll have a whole list of options, but they'll say you should really do IVF when in reality, you actually have a number of options that you could choose from.
Yeah. I did want to talk about the clinics.
A lot of them are getting taken over by private equity, right? They are. Yeah.
VCPE, it's huge in the infertility space. Infertility space has the capacity to make an enormous revenue.
One company in the U.S. during the pandemic sold for just under a billion dollars.
Damn. 984 million.
That's a lot of IVF treatments they gave out. That's a lot.
IVF, right. So the problem is that when you turn it into a kind of money-making machine, you got to ask the question, is the patient still coming first, right? So if they are, great.
But if they're not, if you're having to drive volume into one specific treatment, you got to wonder if that's what's best for the patients or if that's what's best for the company, right? So I'm not a huge fan of that. I think medicine should stay medicine.
I have no problem with someone making an honest dollar at whatever they're doing, but I have a problem when your goal is let's make money and not let's help people. You're kind of seeing that issue in the peptide space now too.
Yeah. And the testosterone treatment space.
Right. I mean, it's bad.
People are just prescribing TRT. You could do it on the phone now.
Yeah. Like you just say you have low testosterone and get a prescription.
Get a prescription. Isn't that wild? Yeah.
Yeah. And, And those guys are going to show up in fertile and then they're wondering why.
And, you know, like guys like bodybuilders, only 20% of them will regain testicular function after they stop. Oh.
So they get all jacked up and they're huge and they're on all these roids. But then when they want to have a baby, they're coming to me and I'm like, dude, I can't do anything for you.
So you've seen cases where you can't even fix their issues. Yeah.
Damn. That's sad as a man.
And then they need IVF or sometimes they need donor sperm because the sperm is so bad. You can't recover it.
Holy crap. Yeah.
Dude, that's sad as a man. Cause you want to give life, you know, you want to be, leave a legacy.
Yeah. You want to pass on your genes.
Right. And having kids is awesome.
I mean, I got three and I adore each and every one of them. So yeah, I mean, it's hugely important, but people are being led astray, all the misinformation out there, right? Well, it's sad that a lot of them don't even know that this is a side effect.
Right. They're just taking it to look better, look healthier, and they don't know they might be giving up the future to have kids.
Yeah. And I think some of that falls on the shoulders of the pharma.
I think some of that falls on the shoulders of the doctors, right? We get presented with options for treatment, but unless you ask, what are the side effects of this? If you don't know, are you going to pass that knowledge on to your patients? So, you know, it behooves us as physicians to be knowledgeable. Sometimes we are, sometimes they're not.
There'll always be human error in any space. Yeah.
Yeah. Are you seeing any side effects from birth control on fertility? Not generally speaking.
So it depends on the birth control. If you're on just the pill, there's no evidence that it in any way compromises fertility.
In fact, in some ways, for certain groups of women, like those with endometriosis, they can actually do better because it'll keep the endo kind of quiet. If you're on something like Depo-Provera, which is an injectable progesterone, which lasts like three months per shot, that stuff can stay in you for anywhere from 12 to 18 months.
Holy crap. So in those situations, you can compromise your fertility because you got to wait a really long time before you're restoring your normal function yeah yeah is it pretty common in canada birth control oh yeah common everywhere these days oh yeah i didn't know if that was like a u.s thing or no it's huge everywhere i think like almost 50 of a woman in the u.s yeah i forget what the numbers i read were i think it was saying like hundreds of millions of women per year across North America.
That's insane to me. It's a lot.
It's a lot of women. I just wonder like what the side effects of birth control are, you know? Well, there are serious side effects that you need to be careful of.
So the main one is the risk of having a blood clot in your legs. Pieces of those can break off and go to your lung.
That can be fatal. And a small percentage of the population actually carries genes that predispose them already to that happening.
So when you have the two of them together, you can really cause some damage. There can be things like headaches.
A small percentage of women that get migraines can actually have a stroke. And if you're smoking and you're older and you're on birth control, that's contraindicated because it's actually a risk for heart attack.
Wow. So once you're over 35, if you're a smoker, your birth control pill days are done.
You can't do it. How much misinformation are you seeing about fertility on social media? Oh God.
You probably get sent videos all the time. Yeah.
People send me stuff all the time. The amount of misinformation out there is enormous.

So there was just a recent study, I don't know if you saw it, where they said 70% of medical sort of propaganda, I shouldn't say propaganda, posts, had misinformation in them.

On social media, 70%.

And a large number of those were from influencers or people driving the narrative that were actually selling some kind of product, right? So I recently had a post out there about vaccination during pregnancy. Somehow it got sidelined into vitamin K, which is necessary for babies at birth.
And that's because babies are vitamin K deficient and they can't clot properly. So then I got everybody coming out saying, no, you don't need it.
And I was like, well, no, actually the babies need it. Like they're going to have a stroke.
And everybody's coming out with all their own ideas saying, no, it's harmful. And there's not one shred of evidence that it's harmful.
So we get that on both sides. Sometimes people come out and say something's good and there's no evidence that it's good.
And they'll come out and say, it's horrible. It's causing this, that, and the other thing.
And it isn't. There was another post I saw, we just made a clip about it the other day from a gentleman, I think he was in the UK, who said that he was a holistic practitioner.
And he said that if you take magnesium

and vitamin C as a woman,

you'll have nine times less tearing

when you deliver a baby.

So I thought, hey, that sounds amazing

because I still deliver babies.

So I thought I should look this up.

So I looked it up.

There's not a shred of evidence anywhere

to show that that's true at all.

Never being studied, never being looked at,

nothing anywhere. So a lot of this stuff, people are just kind of making it up on the fly.
And when you say it really convincingly, people buy it. They got a really confident delivery to some of these guys.
Yeah. Yeah, medical misinformation is actually dangerous too because it impacts your life.
It does. So they need to figure out some sort of penalty system or something.
Well, especially when you're talking fertility, like we're not just talking about, you know, am I going to grow some extra muscle? Is my hair going to be better or my fingernails better or whatever? Like it's people trying to have babies. It's the rest of their life.
It's their future. And when you're messing with that or the health of the baby, like that, that's serious.
There should be some kind of censure for it, but I can't even convince these people, despite the fact that vitamin K has been used for 60 years and probably billions of uses, people are still saying, no, it's bad for you. I'm like, there's not one single study in existence that says vitamin K is bad for the baby, but they're all convinced.
Wow. And you can't convince them otherwise.
Is that the vaccine the babies get when they're born? No, it's not a vaccine. It's just a vitamin.
Oh God. Yeah.
Cause I know when the babies are born, they're giving them some vaccines, right? Yeah. There's definitely a lot of vaccines being given more all the time.
Um, so I think that needs to be looked at. There's a lot of concern with it.
I mean, the medical guidelines say they're safe. There's enough worry about it socially that it's actually causing people to distrust the doctors.
So I actually wish that the science would re-look at it just so that we can say definitively for patients, it's safe or it's unsafe so that patients would start trusting us again. I agree.
Because right now they're just saying you're on the take. I'm like, I don't get paid for vitamin K or for doing vaccines, right? We just don't.
It's not part of what we do, at least not in Canada, but no one believes you there. There's so much distrust that people don't want to even, you know, listen or talk about it.
They just say, nope, what I'm saying is right. Cause I heard it on a, you know, on a social media post, that's the wrong place to get your info for something something critical like a baby's chance of having a bleed.
A lot of distrust with doctors now. I will say it feels like you're just a cog in the machine whenever you go to the doctor's office.
You have five minutes and then they're like, oh, get up. Right.
That's a huge problem, especially when it's financially driven. They've got people looking at how much time it takes from the minute you walk through the door till the minute you decide to do IVF.

So in a fertility clinic space,

like they're actually measuring that.

Are you serious?

Oh yeah, as long metric or how the physician performs.

There was one company that got written up in Bloomberg

where they had grown very rapidly

and they were talking about releasing physicians

that were not doing enough IVF, right?

Because they were trying to sell to a bigger venture capital. And so again, like it just harkens back to the fact that we need doctors to be doctors and not business people necessarily.
You know, it's great if you're making a dollar doing something honest, I'm all for that. But as soon as your priorities change, that becomes a huge.
Yeah. And I feel for these doctors because they became doctors to help people.
Yeah. And then they get thrown into these large companies where they don't have a say.
If they speak up, they get fired. That's right.
That's right. Exactly.
Or if you don't perform the way they want you to, you get fired. Yeah.
And that's your whole life on the line, right? You spent 20 years, all the debt. So I totally get it from the doctor point of view.
I got friends in med school right now.

They were stretched out their minds spending 300K.

Oh, it's crazy.

Yeah.

So if they speak up and get fired,

they just wasted basically their whole life.

Their whole life.

And once you get fired once,

I feel like it's really hard to get another job.

It's a black mark for sure.

Yeah.

You're going to have to start all over again

and you might have to go private

and that takes millions.

Like that's what I had to do when I started because in Canada, we don't have the models you have here in the U.S. where you get hired by other companies.
Oh really? Yeah. And I mean, I had to go to the bank and borrow the money and work my tail off.
Damn. So you had to start your own practice right out of college? Yeah.
Right out of finishing residency. Wow.
Yeah. That's crazy.
Cause you were already in debt. So you had to get into even more debt.
For sure. Damn.
Yeah. It's really tough for the kids coming out now.
And, and I think the big companies know that, right? Cause they can take advantage of that. They can leverage that.
You're 300,000 or 400,000 in the hole coming out. Yeah.
I'm going to give you a signing bonus. I'm going to give you a fixed income.
Come work for me. Here's all you got to do.
And people look at that and they're like, this is my ticket out of my dilemma. Yeah, they're like, finally, some money.
Right. By the time they're there, they're like 30 years old.
It's crazy. And more.
Yeah. I was 36 when I started.
What? Yeah. So how long were you in school for? Oh God, you don't want to know.
So five years of undergrad Cause I took a year off to do research. Yeah.
Four years of medical school, five years of residency, three years of fellowship. Oh my God.
17 years. Yeah.
17 years. What is fellowship? I haven't heard of that one.
That's when you sub-specialize. So I became an obstetrician gynecologist first, my years of training in Canada.
It's four here in the States. And then you go and you do a three-year subspecialty, which was my reproductive endocrinology and infertility.
Wow. That is nuts.
So you gave 17 years of education. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, they get questioned on social media all the time.
People saying, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, okay, that's what you need to believe.
Then that's what you need to believe. But like, I actually spent 17 years doing it, living it, breathing it, studying it, researching.
Yeah. Well, there's a huge holistic movement on social media.
There is. These moms go hard for it.
Right. And actually I believe in holistic approaches.
So we have a number of clinics and we have a naturopath in each one. We tend to connect with someone that'll do traditional Chinese medicine.
I tell people to take vitamins. I tell them to avoid the toxic exposures.
We're trying to get them to get away from the bad stuff. I like more natural approaches.
So when I'm talking to my fertility patients, I'll say you can do this, this, and this. One of them is always the natural approach, right? Yeah, that's cool.
You present options rather than here's what you're going to do. Right.
If you don't like it, I don't care. Yeah, we don't work that way, at least not in my clinic.
I want people to be educated first, which I think is really critical because they come in frequently not knowing all the information, right? So we need to test them, then educate them about what's going on. And then once we've educated them, you can say, look, you've got four different options.
How can I support you now? Right. It's not for me to decide for them.
It's for them to make a decision that's right for them. And then I'll support them through that decision.
I love that. Yeah.
How many clinics you got right now? Four. Nice.
I plan on growing. We're moving to the UK and Ireland next.
Really? Yeah. So we are trying to grow.
I think the message really resonates. I just came back from a conference in Ireland this weekend, the future fertility show, and I'm not an emotional person, but it was actually kind of gut-wrenching to be there because the care I felt people were getting was way below what I feel it should be.
People were not being educated. They were not being given options.
And even when they did treatments, they weren't being given explanations for what was wrong. So there is this just overwhelming hunger from patients just to get human care, right? Like one-on-one, tell me what's wrong.
Tell me why I didn't do well. This is my whole life.
And they're investing thousands of euros into these processes. They're not even getting answers.
Dang. So I think we could do a better job with the model we have.
Thanks for that, man. I'm half Irish.
I've been to Ireland. Yeah.
I've been to Ireland. It's beautiful there.
Oh, it's gorgeous. People are...
One of the prettiest places I've been. Yeah.
And the people are so nice there. They are.
Yeah. Shout out to Ireland.
Yeah, I got UK citizenship too. Oh, cool.
I still got to get out there. Yeah.
Was it raining the whole time you were there? Oh, you know what? We lucked out. The weather was awesome.
Wow. They're cool, but no rain at all.
It was really nice. Nice.
Yeah. Yeah.
We were in Dublin. It was great.
A couple of years back, I was in Belfast. I always bad weather.
Sure. When I went, it rained every day.
Did it? Yeah. What part did you go to? I went near the coast, so that's probably why.
But yeah, I remember there was a village of like 100 people. Yeah.
And they had five bars there. Yeah.
And all of them were packed. It was nuts.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Part of the culture, right? Yeah. They love drinking.
Oh, that's probably why they have infertility issues. It is.
Yeah. You get to closing time and every pub in Europe is all right.
Packed. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's just part of the culture. I didn't realize drinking impacted it that heavily.
My dad was an alcoholic. Oh gosh, I'm sorry.
Yeah. Wow.
So I didn't know it impacted the sperm that much. Huge.
Huge negative impact on sperm. On your overall health, alcohol is a class one carcinogen.
It causes cancer. Are you serious? Yeah.
So the World Health Organization has lots of data on that, on the number of cancers. They said 11 different types that they believe, seven for sure, four more that they're pretty convinced, amongst them breast cancers.
So you get women that, you know, will have a glass of wine with dinner thinking it's good. It isn't.
Wow. Yeah.
It's a, you know, one glass of wine per week is about a 10% increase in your risk of breast cancer. I've seen Huberman talk about this.
Yeah. I pretty much don't drink anymore.
Yeah. I used to love it, but it's not worth the side effects.
What about caffeine? Does that impact? It does. So it's interesting with caffeine.
It's a too much or too little kind of thing. So if you're having up to three cups of like small cups of coffee or whatever caffeinated beverage per day, it's actually beneficial for men because it speeds up the sperm.
But if you go over that, it starts to impact the blood flow delivery. So you'll actually get less sperm produced.
Got it. For women, one cup a day.
And over that, it starts to increase risks of miscarriage. The data is sort of not a hundred percent on that, but there was a big, I think, back in the Lancet years ago that said too much caffeine and you might increase your risks of miscarriage.
Got it. Any data on the healthiest age to have kids like for women? Yeah.
So that's really interesting data, actually. So if you look at the curve for genetics, when they're really young, it's high.
And then as you get to about 22, 23, it starts to decrease and it's pretty flat until you're around 28, 29. And then it starts to increase and then it's just like a reverse scale.
It's like massively increasing with age. Interesting.
So your best sweet spot is sort of like 21 to 30. It's probably still fine up to 35.
After that, it does start getting more difficult. Yeah.
Good to know. Not impossible, but.
Yeah. My fiance is 26.
So we're trying to plan around that because I know there's increased chances for like disease and stuff, right? As the woman gets older. Right.
Yeah. Much higher chances.
So yeah, I mean, she's still young. You're young too.
too. So that's not a major issue right now.
You just, we had a lot of people who are delaying because of their career or they're worried about finances or in this economy, you know, God knows what's going on. Right.
So those people are worried. And so they're hesitant and because of the hesitation, they're delaying.
And then they show up at 38, 39, they've been trying for a year or two. It's not not working and now i test them and either the guy's got weak sperm or the lady's got weak ovaries and weak sperm we can kind of work around weak ovaries is really tough really yeah because they're so damaged or they're damaged and for ivf or fertility it's a numbers game right the more eggs you make the better we do so it's really tough at just say, Hey, you've got three or four eggs, just jump into IVF because they're only going to make one or two embryos and they have a very high chance those embryos won't be genetically normal.
So then you got to get them to do it again and then again. And so those people are need to know ahead of time, like you're going to need to do this three or four times.
Otherwise they jump in and then it doesn't work and they're crushed. And they give up, right? Right.
And a lot of them will give up saying, you know, why didn't it work? And then they're, they're really damaged or traumatized. Because they have to pay too, even if it doesn't work.
So yeah, it carries a lot of emotional trauma. There's good research on this that shows that even when they're successful, they're still carrying trauma the whole way through the pregnancy and even when the baby's born.
Really? Yeah, because they've worked so hard. They've invested so much into it.
By the time they get to the, hey, here's my baby, they've carried all this trauma baggage with them the whole way and it marks them. Whoa.
Yeah. That's not talked about enough.
No, not at all. Yeah, because that trauma can rub off, right? Oh, for sure.
It affects how you interact with your baby, with your partner, your relationship, everything, right? How you function at work. You got to carry that around potentially for life.
So we, we make sure with all our clinics, we have very robust psychological support mechanisms in place because a lot of places ignore that. And when they do, like your patients suffer.
Have you seen the optimal diet for, for having kids? Like, is it vegetarian? Is it carnivore? Like it's definitely not carnivore. Um, so the best diet is the Mediterranean diet.
They've done research on this. So a lot of fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, um, low red meat, um, fish, whole grains, a little bit of dairy, that kind of thing.
Really? So not the carnivore? No. Wow.
Not for fertility. Okay.
Yeah. Because I just had a carnivore on the podcast.
He was saying it was better than vegetarian, but I didn't know. Not for fertility.
I mean, again, it depends on what health metric you're looking for, right? But for fertility, we know that the Mediterranean diet is best. That's been proven in a bunch of different epidemiological studies where they've examined that.
That makes sense. Mediterranean food is really good.
Yeah, it is. Love me some good olive oil.
Well, doctor, it's been awesome. Where can people find your clinics and keep up to date with you, man? Just go to www.drvictory.com and then we're on social media.

So rahivictory.md and we have a YouTube channel, which is Dr. Victory.
So yeah,

amazing. Any of the socials, you'll find us there.
Yeah. We'll link it below guys.
No

misinformation on your channel. So I hope so.
We're going to always present the truth.

All right. Check them out guys.
And I'll see you next time.