This week, on A Different Perspective, Dr. Flynn addresses a news article covering the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ announcement that they have created a birth control pill for men that doesn’t affect testosterone. He also goes into the effects this drug has on vitamin A and the potential side effects of taking it. Lastly, he gives diet and supplement ideas to help men increase their vitamin A status and promote fertility.
Overview of Events
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Dr. Flynn starts by talking about the training event The Wellness Way corporate staff and clinicians are currently at in Orlando, Florida, and upcoming events across the United States. He also mentions the “How to Build the Immune System” webinar that he recently held via Zoom and how you can access the replay online.
Today’s Topic: A Birth Control Pill for Men?
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The topic today is pretty disturbing when you come at it from a different perspective. It has to do with a news article titled, “A birth control pill for men is finally within reach.” Yes, this is a real article. When Dr. Flynn saw this article, his head went down, and he thought, “Oh, really… we have to talk about this again?” They consider this “science.” They consider this to be a good thing.
They claim to get good clinical results, but what is your clinical outcome?
The Current State of Fertility
Before reading through the article, Doc pulls up a page from the CDC on Reproductive Health and Infertility FAQs. The sad part is that people think it’s easy to get pregnant, but that’s not true. A massive number of people have a hard time getting pregnant. When you look at the age groups, they talk about basically 20 percent of the people from the ages of 15 to 49 have trouble conceiving. Now think about this, between the ages of 29 and 40, one in three couples have a hard time having children.
It’s very common today for people to wait until they’re in their 30s to have their first child. How has that happened? It has a lot to do with women putting school and careers first and then getting married and starting a family later on when they’re in their 30s.
Now, over 34 percent of people between the ages of 29 and 40 have a hard time conceiving. That’s one out of three couples. That’s worrisome.
We’re letting people get older before having children while their health is deteriorating at a much greater rate, sperm levels are changing and egg quality is going down, and the number of women that are even fertile in the first place dropping. So now couples are in their 30s and they have difficulty having children.
And now scientists are talking about needing a birth control pill for men…
The Pill for Men
So, let’s go back to that news article:
A male birth control pill may be in sight.
A team of researchers based at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities made a stunning announcement on Wednesday at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Medicinal chemist and study leader Gunda I. Georg said in a press conference on Wednesday that “the efficacy [of the drug] was about 99 percent” in tests with mice. That puts this contraceptive for men on par with similar drugs for women, which were first approved by the FDA in 1960.
So, the 1960s were when they really started manipulating women’s hormones and that’s why we’ve had so many devasting things happen when it comes to women’s health.
This is why birth control pills are endocrine disruptors. You cannot endocrine-disrupt the body and make it normal. You cannot endocrine-disrupt the body and make it healthy.
Here’s what happened: They had to change their approach when it came to men. When it comes to women, they manipulate their hormones. With men, they couldn’t do that. Let’s find out what they did:
Researchers targeted a form of vitamin A, not testosterone
Prior attempts at creating a birth control drug for men have targeted the male sex hormone testosterone, but those efforts were stymied by side effects like depression and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
Big surprise. If you look at birth control when it comes to women, you’ll find cardiovascular disease is a very common side effect. That’s because anabolic hormones (needed for creating a baby) are growth hormones. The heart needs continuous growth. That’s why birth control or any hormone problems can lead to heart disease.
They also mention depression and psychiatric diseases. So, they had to stop, because if you mess with a guy’s testosterone, it affects depression and it also affects cardiovascular disease. Big surprise.
When men suffer from depression and other psychiatric diseases, they don’t realize that their testosterone just starting to drop. If they were taking care of it, they wouldn’t be in that depression or cardiovascular state.
So instead of looking at testosterone, the researchers behind this new study tried something else. “It has been known for a very long time that depriving male mice of vitamin A [causes them to] become infertile,” Georg says.
That was the clue that led the researchers to the compound YCT529.
But finding that compound was no easy task, since the body uses vitamin A in its different forms for all kinds of essential tasks, like building white blood cells and reconstructing bone.
It does a lot more than that. Why would they list only those two things? The reason they did that, you’re going to find out. Go back to some of our earlier “A Different Perspective” episodes where Doc talks about vitamin A.
Do you know what vitamin A is extremely essential for? The eyes.
A Side Effect: Vitamin A Deficiency
You’re going to have major vision problems. Do you know what one of the major signs of vitamin A deficiency is? It’s problems with night vision. You’ll have difficulty seeing contrasts between signs and other objects at night. The eyes are dependent on vitamin A, and we don’t get enough of it.
People will say, “Yeah, Doc, I eat carrots all the time.” But carrots do not contain vitamin A. Carrots contain beta carotene, which is a “PRO-vitamin.” What does that mean? It means that your body must convert that beta carotene into vitamin A, which it mostly does in the liver. It enzymatically converts it to retinol. Retinol is the major form of the fat-soluble vitamin, vitamin A.
Vitamin A is relatively easy to get in your diet, so you might ask, “Why are there so many vitamin A deficiencies?” Well, when you eat vitamin A-rich foods you need the gallbladder and different things to work properly. However, most people are not eating good forms of vitamin A. They are eating more beta carotene. The good sources might gross a lot of people out… and we’ll talk about that.
Now back to the article…
Previous research led the researchers to focus on a specific form of vitamin A that’s essential to the growth and development of cells and embryos, called retinoic acid.
It turns out humans have three types of retinoic acid receptors (RARs). Researchers had already found a compound that blocks all three,
So, what they do, just like they do with other things like viruses. They try to affect the receptor so the virus can’t get into the cell. In the same way, they use medications to block essential vitamins from getting into your system.
All Cells Will Be Affected!
Do you honestly think the only cells that would be affected would be the sperm? No, they’re going to affect cells throughout the body, which is how you get all these side effects, including within the eyes.
It turns out humans have three types of retinoic acid receptors (RARs). Researchers had already found a compound that blocks all three, but Georg and her team wanted to figure out if they could narrow their focus (and limit the risk of side effects) by targeting only the receptors that are actually responsible for fertility.
Genetically modified mice, computer simulations, and luminescent cells.
The researchers did that through “knockout” studies that use genetically modified mice with typical genetic profiles — except for having a specific gene turned off. They bred mice with each of the three forms of receptor — RAR-α, RAR-β, and RAR-γ — knocked out and discovered that individuals without RAR-α were infertile.
They said “infertile.” When you look at what you’d have to do to your body to lead to infertility, that’s scary. They keep talking about how amazing this new drug is.
An old-fashioned mating study confirmed their results
The researchers finished this phase of their research with a mating study. “Male mice were given the drug every day, and they were together with female mice,” Georg says.
The researchers’ job was a lot less complicated at this phase of the research: All they needed to measure was the number of babies born. At first, there was no change, “but after we gave this drug for several weeks, the pregnancies went down,” Georg says. “The efficacy was about 99 percent.”
This kind of research then allows them to proceed to human trials.
The basic thinking was, “We gave them this drug, there were fewer babies… (that’s the only way we really knew whether it worked) … so therefore we can now move into human trials.”
All they cared about was the result, which was fewer babies. They are now moving into human trials and they’re going to push this through by the end of this year, 2022.
Wow… that’s a scary situation.
The Swiss Watch Principle Applies
The problem comes in when you don’t look at the body from the Swiss Watch Principle. Any time you try to manipulate any part of the body to accomplish one result, it’s going to affect the rest of the body, whether that’s a vitamin, a hormone, or some other compound.
They look at one thing and show a positive benefit but ignore effects on other organs. They downplay side effects and make it seem like it’s common and normal to have them. It’s really sad that they’re doing this to people. If you look at what happens when you create a vitamin A deficiency, you’ll see that it affects the whole body.
Vitamin A Deficiency Affects Everything
Here are some things that can happen when you have a vitamin A deficiency:
- Dry skin
- Dry eyes
- Night blindness
- Infertility
- Delayed growth
- Infections in the throat and chest.
Doc shows a list of vitamin A deficiency diseases and conditions, which include effects on the skin, eyes, fertility, growth, and immune system. It affects many systems in the body.
If you look at some of the major things it does, it not only affects fertility, but a deficiency also delays your growth. Your body regenerates every day, including your skin cells, eye cells, and other cells.
The Gallbladder Infertility Connection in Men
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Dr. Flynn has a lot of men that come in and have infertility and they have low sperm count. Well, you’re probably deficient in vitamin A.
When guys have a significant issue with their gallbladder or have it removed it lowers their sperm quality. You need bile from your gallbladder, which is the storage unit, to digest and absorb vitamin A.
Without a gallbladder, the fat-soluble vitamins become reduced. Therefore, the vitamin A, even if they eat it, becomes very reduced in absorption because of the amount of bile that comes through, because you lack a gallbladder.
Guys will come in with a testosterone level of 600 but have low sperm quality. That can be because they have very low vitamin A.
Dr. Flynn recommends guys get their sperm quality measured. It’s easy to do – you just send it in. You can see the morbidity and morphology, which can relate to infertility.
If you want to have incredible sperm and a higher chance of fertility, you need vitamin A.
How to Get Vitamin A to Promote Male Fertility
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Dr. Flynn doesn’t recommend supplementing it; he recommends eating it.
He shares a slide of some of the top sources of vitamin A, which includes beef liver at the top with a 713% daily value per serving. It also includes lamb liver, liver sausage, cod liver oil, king mackerel, salmon, bluefin tuna, goose liver pâte, butter, cheeses, hard-boiled egg, trout, and more.
Notice that these are all animal-based products. You cannot get any vitamin A from vegetables. You can get the pro-vitamins (like beta carotene) but then you depend on your body to convert them to vitamin A.
Dr. Flynn tries to eat an organ meat every day unless he’s fasting. Those are liver, kidney, and heart.
If you don’t want to eat organ meats, you can take them in the form of glandular supplements. The Wellness Way male glandular includes things like grass-fed beef testicles, prostate, heart, and liver.
Dr. Flynn prefers eating these rather than taking them as supplements. He just ordered some more bull testicles and will be eating them raw on the show!
Glandulars, Melatonin, and Fertility
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The Wellness Way Female Glandular includes grass-fed beef liver and ovaries. It’s a wonderful way to give a woman what she needs including vitamin A and other constituents from the ovary itself.
What’s interesting is that there is a certain hormone that has abundant receptors on the ovaries, follicles, and uterus that is incredible for female fertility. Do you know what it is? Melatonin. The ovary itself has a significant amount of melatonin in it. Why? It’s needed for fertility.
That’s why sleep and infrared light is so important. That’s why sunlight is so important.
Now, you might say, “Wait a second… Melatonin is known as the hormone of darkness.” No, that’s the melatonin that comes from the pineal gland. But when it comes to your mitochondria, which is where most of your melatonin is produced, it’s stimulated by infrared. The number one source of infrared? The sun.
That’s why vitamin D gets some criticism because some studies have shown that vitamin D isn’t as effective as they thought. But here’s the reason: if melatonin is low in your body and then you take vitamin D, it doesn’t work as well.
The best source of vitamin D is still the sun. It’s because you get vitamin D and melatonin together. That’s why spending a lot of time out in the sun makes you feel so tired. Infrared is important for producing mitochondrial melatonin because it stimulates it.
As you can see, it’s important to add glandulars to the diet.
Summary
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The idea of a male birth control pill is that they want to manipulate your vitamin A. But the sad thing is that it affects so many areas of your body that have nothing to do with fertility. It even has to do with growth and development. That’s why fat-soluble vitamins are essential. You need to eat them. Now they want to give you a medication that blocks the vitamin A from getting into the cell.
Do you really think it’s only going to affect the cells they want it to? No, it’s going to affect all your cells. No medication allows you to target only one area. Take chemotherapy, for example. They give people chemotherapy, and it kills all these cells. You’re hoping it kills enough cancer cells, but it also kills a lot of your cells that are doing just great.
So, when they give you that medication… even if they give it to you rectally… it’s going to negatively affect other parts of your body as it circulates and grabs on to those receptors. And let’s say those receptors are in your eyes…
You might have a better erection and be less fertile, but you won’t be able to see it because your eyes are going to go bad! There are always those side effects.
It might sound a little funny, but Dr. Flynn is concerned about all the eye problems that they are going to create from this. It’s time for A Different Perspective.
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