Are Everyday Chemicals Disrupting Your Menstrual Cycle? (Episode 634)

Full Transcript: Episode 634

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 634.

In today’s episode, we are diving into the topic of endocrine disrupting chemicals. This subject is always very uncomfortable because when you actually dive into the research and start to think about all the different ways that we are impacted by chemical exposure and all of the different products that we use every single day that could have an effect on our menstrual cycle and our hormones, it really can feel overwhelming.

I know that the toxins conversation or the endocrine disrupting chemicals conversation is always one that is disruptive. It just feels like a very big thing. And it really depends on where you’re at in terms of detoxifying your own routine.

As a woman, if you use any products, whether it’s lotion or toothpaste or cleaning products or any type of cosmetics, we are basically surrounded. We’re surrounded by a variety of toxins, essentially like a toxic soup. And one of the things that I always share with our practitioners and that I’ve always shared with clients is that from my perspective, the goal isn’t to be 100% clean.

If you try to make that your goal, it’s probably going to drive you literally nuts. You’re probably going to end up very, very stressed out. Because even if you were to really clean out all of your products in your home, your beauty products, cosmetics, and even your cleaning products, then you would still have to walk outside and breathe air. And there’s a whole other level of toxicity that we are exposed to just from the atmosphere and the polluting companies and all of those things.

I think that when I’m working with our practitioners, when I’m working with clients, I just don’t think that it makes sense to focus on the goal to be 100% clean. But the goal should always be improvement. Just looking at your routine, looking at your products, looking at the overall situation and thinking, okay, what can I swap out for a more natural option?

Maybe I start looking at the ingredients. We have a lot of tools now. There are apps where you can actually look at certain brands and certain products and it will tell you what is in them. And we also have AI tools. You can snap a picture of the ingredient list now and stick it into your favorite AI and then get more of a readout that way.

There’s a lot of different tools that we have available to us. But I think the happy middle is just to look at improvement, one chemical at a time. That’s a little bit of a preamble. We’re not really going to be getting into all of that conversation about the practical aspect of reducing.

Today, we’re actually going to be looking at a recent paper that specifically examined the impact of these endocrine disrupting chemicals on human fertility and on not only conception, but on birth rates, and basically how it can impact our ability to conceive and carry a child to term.

The paper that I’m looking at today is a review paper, and it’s actually pulling a wide variety of different studies that were published looking at these issues and bringing that data together and examining it. This paper looked at all of the major endocrine disrupting chemical classes.

As a side note, there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of chemicals, so it’s not possible for any paper to study all of them. But they’re looking at the major classes of chemicals, including bisphenols, phthalates, parabens, triclosan, PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, just a wide variety of chemicals. This is giving us an interesting peek into how this does impact fertility.

Hopefully the preamble is helpful because it’s a good reminder that there are things that we can do to reduce our exposure. And that’s really where it starts. If you’re wanting a more detailed look at the practical steps to not only reduce your exposure but also to start to help your body further detoxify and release some of these toxins, certainly have a read through the toxins chapter of Real Food for Fertility. You can find details on that at realfoodforfertility.com, and you can also get the first chapter for free.

I want to share some of the key points that really stood out to me from this paper.

The first one — I can’t say it’s really surprising at the end of the day, but it did kind of stand out to me because I was like, really, we’re still here? The first point from this paper is that female fertility is still fairly understudied. There was more data available for male fertility than female fertility, which is so ironic because as women, because we’re the ones who carry the children, often a lot of the attention is on us, but on the research front, that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Substantially fewer studies have been conducted on female fertility than male fertility across nearly every single endocrine disrupting chemical class. That definitely stood out to me. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have data. Even though there’s less research on female fertility, the research that we have does indicate that there is significant harm associated with endocrine disrupting chemical exposure.

From a practical standpoint, it does in a way make sense. It doesn’t excuse it, but it does make sense because it’s far easier to study sperm than it is to study eggs and follicles. A man can simply provide a semen sample that they can study, whereas with women, we can’t provide an egg sample. I’ve said that many times, even with respect to sperm quality and egg quality — it’s a lot easier to get a sperm test than to get a true representation of the ovarian reserve.

When we look at the studies that they do have, the researchers consistently find negative associations for a variety of chemicals, including BPA, and including pesticides and a variety of other types of pesticides. This is really highlighting the need for additional research on female fertility and the effect of these chemicals. We are the ones who are carrying the babies to term, so it is not only important for our own health and our fertility, our capacity to conceive and carry a child, but also the implications for the babies that we’re carrying.

It is well known that when women are pregnant, often we dump, for lack of a better word, our toxins into the baby. There are serious implications for heavy toxicity in women of reproductive age who are planning to conceive. This is certainly a sign that we should have more research in this area, and hopefully more attention will be devoted to studying female fertility and the impact that these chemicals have on that.

The second thing that really stood out to me in this paper was that there was quite a robust link between endocrine disrupting chemical exposure and the menstrual cycle. These chemicals have been shown to directly alter menstrual cycle characteristics. This is something that we can track. It’s not always so easy and straightforward to say that this chemical did exactly this thing, but if you did have certain levels of chemical exposure and you were working towards detoxification and reducing your exposure, that’s one way that you might start to see the impact.

PCBs are associated with an up to three-day increase in menstrual cycle length in exposed women. PCBs are polychlorinated biphenyls — industry chemicals that have been banned for the most part but are still persistent and still showing up when they are doing these tests. This exposure was associated with a very specific change in the menstrual cycle. On average, these chemicals are increasing the cycle length, which would potentially mean that they’re interfering to some degree with ovulation and delaying ovulation.

DDT and DDE, if that sounds familiar, is definitely the infamous chemical that was banned many years ago. DDE is essentially a derivative of that. Either way, this is a pesticide class, and this type of exposure is associated with changes in cycle length and decreased estrogen and progesterone concentrations.

There’s a variety of other chemicals associated with specific exposure outcomes. Some chemicals are associated specifically with delayed menarche. PFAS exposure in young women, for example, is associated with delayed menarche and increased frequency of irregular periods. PFAS is a name for a chemical class considered to be the “forever chemicals” — very persistent pollutants. There are even studies showing that certain phthalate metabolites are associated with shorter luteal phases in women trying to conceive.

There’s a wide variety of research showing that certain endocrine disrupting chemicals have been shown specifically to disrupt menstrual cycle characteristics in the literature.

One thing to remember with chemical exposure is that if you are a practitioner working with women, it’s not to say that you can look at the cycle and make a direct correlation with a specific chemical. That’s not the point. But when you are seeing certain patterns on the cycle and you are having these conversations and doing detailed intakes and determining that your clients may be having significant chemical exposure — or you determine that they may be living in a certain area or nearby certain farming practices where they have elevated exposure — it is helpful to know that this could be associated with some of the menstrual cycle issues you’re seeing.

Finding ways to reduce exposure and also to support the body’s detoxification pathways could actually improve some of the issues we’re seeing in the menstrual cycle.

Another point that really stood out to me was that the researchers determined that BPA affects every stage of female reproduction, from the development of the follicle to implantation and even to pregnancy loss. Higher serum BPA concentrations are consistently reported in infertile compared to fertile women.

Whenever they separate out populations of fertile women — typically women who have conceived within a certain period of time — versus infertile women, defined as women who have not conceived in a certain period, most commonly one to two years, it’s really interesting to see what they find. One of the things that’s very common is that women in the infertile populations were found to have higher concentrations of BPA.

BPA is also associated with decreasing estrogen levels, reduced oocyte yield and quality, impaired blastocyst formation, increased implantation failure, and higher miscarriage rates. When we’re looking at studies examining the different stages of pregnancy — from follicular development and implantation and all these different aspects — we are seeing this link with increased BPA exposure.

That said, the researchers also point out that BPA is detected in the urine of up to 95% of the people in any given study. It’s not that some women are exposed and others aren’t — we likely are all exposed to some extent, but the women in these categories have the highest concentrations. One study of 700 Chinese women found that urinary BPA was associated with a 13% reduction in fecundability, meaning conceiving and bringing the baby to term.

These are certainly terrifying stats. Whenever I get into the toxin research, it really feels scary and overwhelming. Even a simple practice like storing food in glass containers, reducing the amount of plastic in our homes — this leads me to something else the study talked about, which is that switching from BPA plastic to BPA-free plastic is definitely not the solution. That was quite clear. When you’re looking at BPA-free plastic, they’re simply using a different chemical that isn’t called BPA so they can say it’s BPA-free. That doesn’t mean this new version of the same plastic is going to be any better.

It is useful to think about ways to reduce exposure, and one key thing is to reduce how much plastic you use, especially with regard to food storage. Don’t think, “I’ll just go buy the BPA-free plastic and I’m going to be fine.” It doesn’t work like that. Thousands of new chemicals are introduced into our world every year, and even some of these newer chemicals that might be free of this or that — maybe it just hasn’t been long enough for us to study the new chemical to see what new form of ridiculousness it’s going to do to our fertility.

It can very quickly become overwhelming when we start to look at these topics. But I think it’s important just to keep it very practical, and again, for the goal to be reduction, not perfection. It’s a lot easier to have success if the goal is simply to reduce exposure in general.

Often when you’re tracking your cycle, or if you’re a practitioner working with clients, by simply reducing exposure, you actually start to see improvements. Some women will find that if they really focus on reducing their chemical exposure — cleaning up their beauty routine and cosmetic use and the types of cleaning supplies they use, even looking to reduce foods with pesticides on them, not necessarily eating only organic but really looking at the clean fifteen and the dirty dozen and getting certain things organic — many women will find their period quality improves, their pain is less, maybe some PMS symptoms are minimized.

I wouldn’t say you’re going to always see an immediate drastic result, because it takes time. I think a reasonable timeframe, depending on where you’re starting from — if this is all new to you and you haven’t really focused on reducing your chemical exposure, your beauty products, your cleaning supplies — I would say six months to a year is reasonable to really get into it. If that sounds extreme, then you probably haven’t gone as far into it, because it’s not just swapping plastic for glass containers. It’s looking at exposure in all different ways — how your water is filtered, whether your carpets are off-gassing, what kind of mattress you buy, what kind of pots and pans you’re using.

It can feel overwhelming when you start to really dive into all of the different places where we can be exposed to these chemicals. But give yourself a period of time, swap out one product at a time. Six to twelve months is a perfectly reasonable timeframe to start implementing these things.

From a practitioner standpoint, this might not necessarily be on your client’s radar. They might be concerned with other aspects of improving health and general habits, not necessarily hyper-focused on reducing toxicity. But if you work with fertility clients, while they might not be thinking “I need to reduce my own exposure,” as soon as she gets pregnant and starts getting into that nesting phase and thinking about products for her baby, all of a sudden she’s going to jump to natural, unscented, toxin-free products.

It is useful to reframe that and say, well, you’re the one carrying the baby — if you don’t want the baby exposed to this, then maybe you need to not be exposed to this either. There are different ways to gently nudge your clients in the right direction if they haven’t started thinking about these things for themselves.

One last point that stood out to me — and I’ve already touched on it — is that when comparing different populations, the subfertile populations, whether female or male, in that subfertile category where it’s taking longer to conceive, or classed as infertile because they haven’t conceived in twelve months, these individuals consistently carry higher loads of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Whether measuring blood levels or sampling in other ways, they are always showing consistently higher loads.

Higher exposure, higher concentrations, and at the end of the day, this could lead to higher exposures. There are some studies showing that if you continually use different beauty products exposing you to a variety of chemicals, parabens, and phthalates, and you stop using them, your exposure to these chemicals will significantly drop. That’s always a really positive thing to remember — if you just stop exposing yourself to this stuff, the exposure can significantly drop in a very short time. There’s hope.

This study really points out that there is a very clear link. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, but we can see this consistent pattern that subfertile individuals are carrying higher loads of these endocrine disrupting chemicals.

Today I was focusing more on female fertility than male fertility and the impact of these chemicals on the menstrual cycle. But as I mentioned, there are even more studies on male fertility than female fertility, and a lot of studies show that exposure to chemicals and pesticides has a negative impact on sperm. This applies to both populations.

Ultimately, the conclusion the researchers are coming to based on this information is that it makes a lot of sense for couples who are planning to conceive, or in the midst of trying, to really start cleaning up their lifestyle factors and reducing their chemical exposure. It makes sense to start paying attention to the products you’re putting on your skin, the products you’re using on your body, the way you’re doing cleaning.

What’s great is that when I first started in this field and was first working with clients, there was a really limited number of products and companies that made clean products. I always used to complain that I wanted to use these clean products, but sometimes you would buy products twenty years ago that were so-called clean and environmentally friendly, and they wouldn’t work — natural, so you weren’t getting exposed to chemicals, but your toilet isn’t clean. It was irritating.

Now we don’t really have that issue. There are many companies making products that are natural, free from these chemicals, and effective. It’s a lot less difficult to find products that work. My opinion is that because there’s more competition in the marketplace, a lot of these products aren’t as expensive comparatively as they used to be. There used to be an issue where you’d buy natural products, but they were way more expensive than regular products. I feel like the competition in the marketplace has brought that down.

With that said, we have new issues, because now we have all these companies making so-called natural products, and there’s not really a lot of policing on the term “natural.” You do have to do your research. There are plenty of companies now greenwashing their products, making it so they have all this wonderful marketing that says they’re so natural, but they still contain chemicals, still contain fragrance. Even in the health food stores or natural food stores — I’m in Canada, there are different stores in Canada and the States and different places in the world — there’s all these natural, organic store things popping up everywhere. Often you go to those stores assuming all the products are going to meet a certain standard, and that’s not the case. You can still go into those stores, buy these so-called natural products, come home, and they still have tons of fragrance and chemicals.

We do have new challenges, but I would say it’s easier to find natural products that work, natural beauty products. There’s a lot more companies offering this. There are even discussions around the plastic in our clothes and looking for organic clothing to minimize exposure. There’s certainly a lot of options that we have now that we didn’t have before.

My biggest takeaway from this — this isn’t necessarily new information, and this is shocking to exactly nobody. There was no world where before you listened to this podcast, you thought that chemical exposure was good for fertility, good for pregnancy, good for fetal development. We know it’s not. But when we look at the research and see how it can specifically affect the menstrual cycle, how it can specifically disrupt hormone production, how it can reduce the chance of conception, how heavy exposure and higher blood levels are associated with subfertility, we actually get more of the meat of the conversation — it’s not just, “oh, it’s not good for me,” but “this could have a very specific negative impact on my fertility. It could take longer for me to conceive.” And we haven’t even gone into the potential negative impacts that chemical exposure could have on the baby as it grows and develops inside the body.

Bottom line, it’s a really good idea to start reducing exposure. It’s a really good idea to learn more about these chemicals and to find ways to firstly reduce, and secondly, work to really support our body’s detoxification pathways so that we can get rid of some of the chemicals our body might be hanging on to, especially as we move into those reproductive years.

If you can think of somebody who would benefit from hearing today’s episode, I would encourage you to share it. If you’re listening to this in your favorite podcast player, there is a link in there. You can always head over to fertilityfriday.com as well and find this episode and share it. You can also head over to our show notes page to find the paper we are talking about today and any related information — we put it all in there so you don’t have to worry about writing it down when you’re on the go.

With that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, weekend, whenever you’re tuning into the show. As always, until next time, be well and happy charting.