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Welcome back to the Her Fertility Podcast. I am so grateful that you are here. And today's Dear Jess question is one that I hear all the time. So it says, "Dear Jess, how can I improve my egg quality?" And I actually want to answer this question a little bit differently than you might expect or you might see when you Google search this question.
Because before we talk about improving egg quality, I think we need to talk about something that gets skipped over in the fertility world, which is how do you know you have poor egg quality in the first place? And for most women, the answer is you don't. There isn't a blood test you can take that backs up this and says, you know, "Your egg quality is 42%."
AMH does not measure egg quality. Your antral follicle count does not measure egg quality. Those tests can give us very useful information about your ovarian reserve, and particularly in fertility treatment, how your ovaries may respond to stimulation, but that's different from directly measuring the quality of the eggs themselves.
And I think that distinction really matters. Because somewhere along the way, egg quality has become this phrase that gets thrown around a lot in fertility conversations as though it is a concrete diagnosis. So maybe you've been trying to conceive for a while, or maybe you have a low AMH number. Maybe you're over 35.
Maybe you've had unsuccessful IVF, and suddenly the conversation morphs to, "Maybe it's your egg quality." And then the natural next question is, "How do I fix that?" And that's where I think women can become incredibly vulnerable to the fertility wellness industry. Because now you have a problem that you can't easily measure paired with an enormous desire to do something about it.
And so naturally, you will start searching how to improve egg quality. And then suddenly you have like 12 different supplement companies screaming at you through their marketing, and you might have, you know, $400 worth of supplements in your cart. And you're buying CoQ10 and antioxidants and the powders and the prenatals and whatever supplement that somebody on Instagram told you would change your life.
And before you know it, you're spending like hundreds of dollars month after month to improve something that you can't actually measure. And so I want to slow this entire conversation way down because what do we actually mean by egg quality? So that's where I wanna start with this conversation.
And this is not to add more to your mind. Instead, my goal with this episode is to really take off a lot of the weight that you're holding around egg quality so that you can look at it from a more clear standpoint and then do something about it. So when a fertility practitioner is talking about egg quality, they're usually talking about an egg's ability to successfully fertilize or develop into a healthy embryo and ultimately contribute to a healthy pregnancy.
And so I'm absolutely a believer in healthy egg quality, healthy cell quality really of your entire body. And one important piece to that is chromosomal competence. And we know that age is associated with the changes in the likelihood of chromosomal abnormalities in eggs and embryos.
But there is one thing I want to call out about age specifically. Age gives us information about groups of women. It doesn't inspect the individual eggs sitting inside of your ovaries. So if you are thirty-eight, like me, your birthday doesn't suddenly tell us that these particular eggs are now expired.
They are bad. Throw them out. It does tell us something about probability, so there's a probability that with increased age, there's decreased chromosomal competence.
but that is not the same thing as knowing what is happening inside your body and your eggs at this point in time. Then the question naturally becomes, so can we learn anything about egg quality?
And sometimes we learn more as the fertility process, unfolds. So a lot of times we want to know that answer right away, but we don't currently in this-- as of recording this podcast, have a test to measure egg quality. But we can deduce based off of your body's response and your experience that egg quality might be something that's impacting your fertility process.
For example, if you are doing IVF, then your clinic will be able to observe what happens after your eggs are retrieved. So how many matured? How many fertilized? Did those embryos develop? Did they reach the blastocyst stage?
The embryologist themselves will have observations about your eggs that turned into embryos. there might even be availability for testing. So your embryos might undergo chromosomal testing, and all of that can give your medical team additional pieces of information.
But even then fertility is complicated. So there isn't necessarily one single moment where somebody can point to an egg and explain everything about why, like, that egg or that cycle or that embryo did or didn't work. And when I've asked more on this question and really dug into it, my, you know, basic understanding of this is because an egg is a single cell.
So we can't necessarily do testing on that single cell without destroying it. And so we have to really look at what that single cell does once it becomes an embryo, which then multiplies into more cells, which then has more things we can test. And so if you take that and you take a step back and you assess when someone is telling you you have poor egg quality, one of the most useful questions you can ask is, "Well, what information are we basing that conclusion on?" Not because your doctor's wrong and not because you shouldn't trust your, you know, fertility clinic, but because you deserve to understand the difference between something we know and something we suspect, and then something we're using probability to estimate.
So those are three different things. So when the question comes to me, like, "Dear Jess, how can I improve my egg quality?" Here's my answer, which may be less exciting than the Internet's answer. But there is no protocol that I can give you that guarantees that you're going to fix your eggs. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing to say.
I think it's an honest thing to say. And there are absolutely things you can do to support your overall health while trying to conceive. You can absolutely focus on your nutrition. Are you getting the nutrient-dense foods? Are you eating enough? Are you moving your body? How's your sleep? Are you s- avoiding smoking and all of those toxins that are in the environment that will impact your cells?
Right? All of that research we have is really important. Are you taking the supplements that your qualified healthcare practitioner is recommending for your circumstances? Right? Those are all really reasonable conversations that you should be having as part of your fertility care.
But that's very different from telling someone, you know, "Do these seven things and you'll have better eggs in three months." And I want us to be really careful with that promise. And I guarantee you, you're probably going to be flipping through social media, and you will see someone say that, right? Like, "Do this and you'll have better egg quality in three months."
But infertility already gives women so many opportunities to believe that if they could just do everything perfectly, then they could control the outcome. And I don't want egg quality to become another version of that for you.
And so this is where supplements do come in. I am not anti-supplement. There may be a supplement that your, you know, reproductive endocrinologist or another qualified practitioner recommends based on your medical history, based on your labs, on your treatment plan, and on your available evidence, and that's individualized care that you should absolutely follow.
I absolutely believe egg quality matters, and you are not just another number. So before you spend hundreds of dollars every month, I want you to ask, "Why am I taking this?
What evidence supports me taking this supplement? What evidence supports this supplement for someone in my circumstances? What outcome are we hoping changes when I take this?" Also ask, "Are there any risks I should know about?" And then if you haven't already asked your practitioner this, make sure that this supplement isn't interacting with something else you're taking in a negative way.
And then one more question to ask and write down is, "How will I know whether I should continue taking this supplement?" Because the idea that this could help your egg quality could become an incredibly expensive thing when nobody stops to evaluate what that actually means.
And so here's what I hope that you take away from this episode. If you've been told that you have poor egg quality or you've simply started believing that you do, then I want you to get really curious about where that conclusion came from.
How do we actually know? What are we estimating? What are we assuming? And what information do we still not have? Because then instead of making your next goal, "I have to fix my eggs" you could instead ask, "What are the evidence-informed things that I can responsibly do to support myself and my fertility right now?"
So maybe there are nutritional changes that make sense for you, or maybe your physician does recommend a particular supplement. Maybe there's a medical issue that you have that deserves further investigation. Or maybe there isn't another thing you need to add at all And I think that women really deserve the permission for that to be a possibility too.
Because you could take every supplement, you could eat every fertility food and remove every toxin from your life. You could follow the perfect morning routine and do something that somebody on the internet says will improve your egg quality, and fertility will still contain uncertainty. And it isn't because you've failed, it's because human reproduction is incredibly complex.
It is so much more than just about a supplement. And I wish it wasn't, right? Like, I laugh because I wish it was super straightforward. And if it was, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But there is an, a really important part to, to this egg quality discussion that I want you to hear. because if you are searching about egg quality, there might be a part of you that feels like you're losing yourself through this process in order to prevent that from happening, you have to learn how to separate what you can support, what medicine can measure, and what science can reasonably estimate outside of what it is that none of us can control. Because at the end of the day, if you listened to the last episode, we talked about this too, but at the end of the day, there is an element to fertility that is uncertain.
And so if you're wondering, "How can I improve my egg quality?" I want you to also ask, "Do I actually have evidence that egg quality is a problem for me? And if my practitioner believes it is, then what are they basing that on?" Because then you can make decisions from information rather than fear. and I hope that this gives you permission to take a step back before you're, you know, hitting checkout on that $400 supplement order.
Not because supplements aren't great, but because they might not be what you need. And if you're hearing this and it opened up more questions for you, because sometimes that happens when you start to take a step back rather than pushing forward , then I would love to hear your question. You can submit it at the link in the show notes. There's a question box for Dear Jess. Your question gets submitted anonymously, and I read every single one. I would love for your question to be the next one on the Her Fertility Podcast
📍 Thank you for being here today. If you would like to submit an anonymous question for Dear Jess, please see the show notes for the link. I would love to support you with answering your question. You can find everything at www.herfertility.support. And if today was your first time here, welcome. Come back. There's more where this came from. Until next time, give yourself love. You are doing more than you know.
