What They Didn’t Tell You: From Core to Floor
Your go to podcast for real talk about women’s bodies, pelvic floor health, hormones, pregnancy, sex, and healing all through a mix of science and intuition.
What They Didn’t Tell You: From Core to Floor
Fueling Fertility: Nourishing Hormones Naturally
Struggling to understand how food impacts your fertility and hormones? In this episode, Dr. Millie sits down with Dr. Yardena Bauer to break down the science of fertility nourishment in a way that’s practical, simple, and empowering.
We dive into the key nutrients, foods, and lifestyle habits that can boost egg quality, support hormone health, and prepare your body for conception. From good fats and proteins to why olive oil is a fertility superstar (and what to avoid like trans fats), you’ll learn how everyday choices directly shape your hormone balance.
Dr. Yardena also shares powerful insights on the mind-body connection, helping you check in with yourself, reduce stress, and create the right environment for your body to thrive.
Whether you’re actively trying to conceive or simply want to nourish your hormones for long-term health, this conversation is full of practical takeaways you can start using today.
Links:
Connect with Yardena: @Yardena Instagram
Follow Millie: @milliedpt
Join the Core to Floor community: https://millie-schweky.mykajabi.com/intimacy
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: [00:00:00] Hey sis, and welcome back to the What they didn't tell You from Court of Floor. I'm your girl, Dr. Millie, your favorite pelvic floor physical therapist, and I'm here with Dr. Dana Bauer, a PhD and highly qualified dietician with an impressive academic background and expertise in the fields of psychology, physiology, dietetics, nutrition, neuroscience, and endocrinology.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Her focus is on hormone nutrition, including PCOS, fertility and endometriosis. Yardena, welcome back to the show. Today's episode is about fertility and hormone nourishment. Someone wants to know what are the top nutrients or foods that I should be looking at to boost fertility and egg quality. Oh, lovely.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Okay, so first antioxidants, so like some green leafies, spinach, kale. Also, getting rid of the bad. We wanna get rid of the bad estrogen that we no longer need anymore. So cauliflower, broccoli, omega threes. My favorite anti-inflammatories like salmon,
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: eggs.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Yeah. Also 'cause the good fats, are going to make, they're gonna make hormones.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So we, we need to have [00:01:00] good fats. So, you know, we, we spoke I think a while ago about how, if you don't eat enough, it just was very difficult for your body to produce the, the hormones like the LH and the F ssh. You do need to eat the good fats and if you are on this whole, fat, fat is bad for you, then you're not eating the good fats and that's gonna be a problem.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So let's get into the eating the good fats, salmon, sardines. Fluxes. Tini. I love tini. It's, it's a great food. Okay. Good protein. Good protein. Love eggs, love pro yogurts. Greek yogurts. Get your protein in. Cool.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: And how many cycles do you need to do this for? For it to translate into good egg quality?
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: 'cause I've seen studies say that it could take three cycles.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Well, you've also gotta give your body a chance, so let's give it three cycles. Also, we need to see what else is going on. Why is there infertility? Why, why, you know, what else is going on? It could be something about your, your countings off.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Mm-hmm. You know, people,
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: well, I'm not even talking about infertility. I'm talking, someone's like getting ready to try to conceive. They wanna make sure their egg quality is gonna be good. Okay. So, but you can't
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: start like the day before. No. So, and also, then vitamin D [00:02:00] is really important. Get it from the sun for free 20 minutes in the morning.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Also is gonna be really important for good eggs is, enzyme Q 10 and zinc. How do we get those supplementation? Food? You can get it from food, but, Q 10, you actually need to just take a supplement for zinc you can get from, from pumpkin seeds and, and the lots of seeds also. What a great thing that they found for boosting fertility is actually for cream milk.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Cool. Yeah. Very cool. No, no, no fat milk.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: The fat from the milk is good for your fertility. Yeah. Love that. It's more tasty anyway. Are there any foods or habits that can sabotage someone's fertility without them really realizing it? Uh, yes. So first of
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: all, stress.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Stress is gonna increase cortisol.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Cortisol is gonna increase insulin resistance. And it's, it's not great for anyone though. Telling somebody not to stress is gonna make them stress. Yes. So, I never know what to do about that. You gotta actually be their support. You've gotta actually, like, not stress, you gotta do. Proper proactive things to avoid the stress.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Anything processed because it's gonna have an inflammatory effect. So the sugars and [00:03:00] the white flours can have inflamma inflammatory effect on the body, which is gonna not be good for fertility. And then the worst thing, the worst thing that someone can eat, for egg quality is trans fat.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: What, what, what would an example of trans fat be So trans fat, like margarine. So. We know that we're not gonna eat margarine. That's like one
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: molecule away from being plastic.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Correct. So a trance being bi, it's just a biochemical, talks about the structure of the fat. When we go down, we forget that food.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: They're all chemicals. They're all molecules. And if it's we're talking about fat, we're talking about it's chemical structure. When we say trance and that's anything that we're gonna say is double fried. So what do we double fry? We double fried donuts. We double fried chips. So we are not doing it at home.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: But when you go to those big, you know, yogurt takeouts and those big oil machines, they're recycling the oil. That's probably in my opinion, why a lot of the seed oils has a really, really bad rep is because they're just using the seed oils over and over again. And when you take something that's good, like a sunflower or seed, and then you make sunflower oil and then you overuse it over and over again, it changes the chemical structure.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Of that, that oil.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: So, [00:04:00] but sunflower or seed oil, and it's. Original form is okay. It's okay. Okay, cool.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: So trans fat, you'll have in your donut, we'll have in our french fries that we buy from the, the shops, not from the potatoes we make at home. You'll have the trans fat in the margarine that you eat in your baras or any pair of treats.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Just find out if they're using oil or if they're using margarine. What if they're using seed oil? Seed oil spine. I don't mind that. There was a, it's a great study that was done in Denmark and they, they banned trans fat for the purpose of promoting heart health. So no bakeries were allowed to use any margarine.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: And so they all switched. They switched. And what they found was there was an increase in birth rate. Of course there was so little Danes because there was no more trans fat.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Wow. Isn't that remarkable? That you could just take out the manmade chemicals from your diet and somehow feel better and live better.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: That's great. And by the way, that's one of the main [00:05:00] things that I think that makes the Mediterranean diet so popular in its, its health benefits. It's olive oil based. Olive, so. While I believe that from what I've read about and researched about seed oil, that seed oil in its own right isn't going to do any harm.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: I can't tell you that it's gonna do any good.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Olive oil on the other hand is, is super. It's gonna be
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: good. Olive oil,
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: good olive oil has to be extra virgin, good olive oil. And we don't benore like use it. We must use it in abandon. Don't be
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: what? Sch Nora. I know what that means. Like, don't be stingy with it.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Don't be stingy, okay? Don't be
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: stingy with the olive oil. We must use it. Use it abundantly and enjoy it. And that's one of the, the marking points of that makes the Mediterranean diet so, so successful. And you look at how Mediterranean, they're healthy, they, they're healthy and they are not stingy on the amount of olive oil they use.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: They're not measuring it with a teaspoon. They are like pouring it on and then. All the westerners are like, Ooh, stay away from the, the oil. It's gonna make you [00:06:00] fat. Because we all come from calorie counting backgrounds up each gram of oil is nine calories, so don't have so too many calories. But the olive oil, it's caloric.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Yeah, because it's caloric. So it's, but the way our bodies work is not how calories.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: So interesting. I don't think I'll, I've ever interviewed someone that like had that same outlook on, on calories. So I'm interested to see how the feedback comes in about that one. How do we know if our body doesn't feel.
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: Safe enough to conceive? What are the signs that we could look for?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: First of all, how are you feeling like doing a real mind and body check-in, like an honest one, not what you want the answer to be like, go journal. Go talk to yourself. Like there are lots of ways of, you know, the word venting, it's to exhale, you know?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Vent. Vent how, if you need to, if you need to paint, if you need to talk to someone, we all have different ways of doing it, but like, really have a good chat with yourself and find out how am I, okay. Let's say you like. I'm fine. I'm okay. Then we go onto the next stage. [00:07:00] Let's see, let's, or, or let's say you can't do that, or you don't know how to do that, and you wanna actually, you want data.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: How's your sleep? How's your energy levels? Are you getting sick? Are you, are you working out? See how you doing in your, you're working out too much. Are you working out too much? Yeah. What's your, what's driving you? Where are your motivations coming from? Why do you wanna have a kid. Why do have, and have you discussed it with your, you know, with your partner and why do they want it?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Are you doing it for them? Are you doing it for you? So I think there's a lot of psychology
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Around that, that question. Um, I mean, go do, I mean, go do your work, go do your bloods, make sure you, you don't have anything that you, you know, didn't know was going on. So do your bloods. Make sure you're taking your zinc.
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: I mean, not your zinc. Make sure you're taking your folic acid three months before for neuro tube. Development. So be responsible, but it, it, I think that's a, I think that's more soul quest job. That's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. We're covering all of it today. [00:08:00] Am I allowed to say sleep?
[Dr. Yardena Bauer]: Of course. Of course. Are you sleeping? And if you're not sleeping, why aren't you sleeping?
[Dr. Millie Schweky]: What are you stressed about? Cool. Thank you so much, ADE. I hope everyone gained so much from this episode. Took away some practical takeaways and we'll see you here next time.