Join Dr. Carrie Bedient from the Fertility Center of Las Vegas, Dr. Susan Hudson from Texas Fertility Center, and Dr. Abby Eblen from Nashville Fertility Center for another fascinating episode of Fertility Docs Uncensored. This week, we’re joined by Leslie Kenny, a researcher who is part of the Oxford Longevity Project and Oxford Healthspan. She shares her groundbreaking research on spermidine—a natural compound made from L-Arginine and found in foods like mushrooms, peas, beans, and legumes. Leslie explains how spermidine promotes autophagy (cell renewal), improves mitochondrial health, reduces inflammation, and lowers oxidative stress, all of which are important for egg and sperm quality. She also highlights the role of gut health in producing spermidine and how fasting can boost natural levels. Leslie discusses how spermidine enhances sperm function, including its role in the acrosomal reaction, and notes it’s even present in breast milk. Oxford Healthspan has developed a supplement called Primeadine that may benefit both men and women undergoing fertility treatments. She recommends at least 1 mg of spermidine daily, with studies showing improvements after just 30 days of use.This podcast was sponsored by Reproductive Science Center of the Bay Area. Use code FERTILITYDOCS on the Primeadine website for an extra discount!

Episode Transcript:

Susan Hudson (00:01)

You’re listening to the Fertility Docs Uncensored podcast, featuring insight on all things fertility from some of the top rated doctors around America. Whether you’re struggling to conceive or just planning for your future family, we’re here to guide you every step of the way.

Carrie Bedient MD (00:22)

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Fertility Docs Uncensored. I am one of your co-hosts, Dr. Carrie Bedient from the Fertility Center of Las Vegas. And I am with my audacious, bodacious, crazy, delightful, exceptional co-host, Dr. Susan Hudson from Texas Fertility Center.

Susan Hudson MD (00:41)

Hello.

Carrie Bedient MD (00:42)

and Dr. Abby Eblen from Nashville Fertility Center. And today we are joined by Leslie Kenny, who is a patient advocate and fertility patient, but is also the co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, which is a not-for-profit, and then the founder of Oxford HealthSpan. And so we are going to talk with her about some of the supplements and really a

Abby Eblen MD (00:45)

Hi everybody.

Carrie Bedient MD (01:05)

different approach supplement wise than what we have ever talked about before on this podcast. But We are very happy to have you with us today, Leslie. And you were telling us, We were asking about oh, what random factoid should we talk about you and you hands down came up with the immediate most unique thing we have ever heard. And so we are delighted to have you with us today. And how are you?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (01:30)

I’m very well, thank you very much and lovely to meet with you saying a shout out from Oxford, England here.

Carrie Bedient MD (01:37)

⁓ You don’t have an English accent at all. How does that come to be? I was really looking forward to reveling in accent. But how did that come to be?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (01:47)

I’m originally from Orange County, California. But found myself in this wonderful Disneyland for academics known as Oxford.

Carrie Bedient MD (01:55)

So you were telling us about how ⁓ previously you were given a designation that none of us were expecting from an academic. Tell us what that designation is, who gave it to you, how that came to be, because we want to know all the details.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (02:11)

So in 2000, I was called the high priestess of sex in China by both the International Herald Tribune and by Italy’s leading daily newspaper, Corriere delle Sera. And it was because of work I had done in China at the time, which was all around sex education. And I was working with the Chinese government to really get

not just safe sex education out to people because nobody’s interested in safe sex, but good sex education information. And this was sidebar content to an online matchmaking company that I had at the time. So was one of the first in Asia to have an online matchmaking company, probably number one or two into China. And the government didn’t want me to operate there. They said, this is going to…

promote promiscuity and we don’t want this. And I said, well, let’s try and make this a win-win for everyone. You have about 300 million young people moving from the countryside to the cities. And previously, your family planning association had a woman, sort of grandmother figure on every single street that would check every woman’s menstrual cycle to make sure they were not pregnant if they’d already had one child.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (03:32)

So they had 81 million volunteers across China who checked all women’s menstrual cycles. Yes, to make sure they’d not miss them. But when this huge demographic shift happened, along with the modernization of the country, they had no way of controlling what was happening with this group of 300 million young people. And I said, what I do know is that they are all going to internet cafes and they’re relying on their mobile phones

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (04:00)

to get jobs. And so if we can reach them where they are, we have the opportunity to provide them with some really useful information. But you have to make the useful information appealing. It can’t be like your grandmother saying this is how you should do it. So it’s got to be fun.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (04:19)

and I can help you do this. I worked with a bunch of sexologists to help create the content. We did this content also in India and worked with fertility doctors there. So yeah, that’s how that came about.

Abby Eblen MD (04:32)

I’m guessing you’re, you must be fluent in Chinese or you wouldn’t have been able to maneuver through their culture.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (04:39)

So my mom is from Taiwan and I grew up in the United States and I can speak very basic Chinese. My Chinese was a lot better then. At the time they were hungry for this information and the only…

Abby Eblen MD (04:42)

Okay, but you grew up in the United States, so right?

That is so amazing.

I just wouldn’t think China would be hungry for sex education for some reason. don’t know why.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (05:00)

Well, back then as a country, they eradicated all STDs, which is quite a feat when you think about a country of a billion people. And this information was covert. And one of the ways young people were learning about it, there were studies done on this in Hong Kong and by sexologists from other countries who come to observe.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (05:27)

The young people were getting their information from animal husbandry books. Mistakes can be made.

Abby Eblen MD (05:36)

Yes. My husband grew up on a farm in Iowa and most of what he learned about sex was from growing up on the farm in Iowa. So it’s not that poor and even in the United States.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (05:46)

So he had a primer in it. Well, we wanted to demystify it even more. So anyway, that’s the unusual thing about me.

Carrie Bedient MD (05:56)

So I have one last question pertaining to that. Is there a line on your CV that says, high priestess of sex?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (06:02)

Do you know? There isn’t. There isn’t. I have a clinical associate degree in sexology and I don’t put it on my CV because people get the wrong impression right away, especially if you’re a woman. And so I actually don’t have it there. But since you asked the question, I thought I’d give a truthful answer.

Susan Hudson MD (06:25)

That’s brilliant.

Abby Eblen MD (06:27)

I don’t think there’s a comparable degree to sexology. That sounds like an academic degree. Is what you’re saying, sexology? But I don’t know that there’s one in this country that’s sexology.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (06:35)

Well, it was from an institute in San Francisco called the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, it was started by a Methodist minister in the 1960s because of the sexual revolution that was happening then. You had priests and vicars and men of the cloth who suddenly were faced with parishioners who said, My wife is burning her bra and she doesn’t want to come to bed. So what can I do? And of course, if you’re a priest, this is difficult to talk about because you’ve no experience of this. But if you’re a man of the cloth and they weren’t almost all men of the cloth, men, not women, they didn’t know how to broach this topic and how to do it in a constructive way. So this institute was actually started by religious leaders as a way to help heal their communities, keep marriages together. Yeah, so. ⁓

Carrie Bedient MD (07:41)

Before I fall into the trap of wanting to talk about this the entire rest of the episode, do we have a question of the week before we launch into our ⁓ technical discussion with Leslie?

Susan Hudson MD (07:53)

Yes. Okay. So here is our question of the week. Hi, doctors. Great podcast. Thanks for doing it. Thank you so much for listening. I have a question for you about unexpected poor responders and dominant follicles. I’ve recently turned 41 years old. My wife and I are using donor sperm and went straight to IVF given my age. At my initial appointment, my AMH was 3.0 and AFC was 15. My doctor told me I was lucky.

I recently attempted my first egg retrieval cycle, which my doctor suggested I cancel seven days in. At baseline cycle day three, I had an AFC of 10, but only six follicles ended up growing. Worse, I had a dominant follicle that was huge right from the first monitoring appointment, I think 16 millimeters after five days with everything else under 10 millimeters. I primed with estrogen before this cycle. My doctor told me she was perplexed.

Thoughts on dominant follicles.

Abby Eblen MD (08:47)

It can happen. It can happen whether you’re 41 or 31 or 21. It’s a little more likely to happen when you’re in your late 30s, early 40s, but sometimes even the microscopic follicles are just a little bit of a head in terms of size. And it sounds like when she started out, hers was already a little bit bigger than the other ones. I think if that were to happen again, they would cancel your cycle again and try something different. But that follicle start out ahead of the others.

One school of thought now, and this has changed over time, is that if we see a dominant follicle, maybe if we just see one, but we see a whole pack of other eggs, which you may very well have, sometimes we’ll just let you go ahead and ovulate that follicle, keep stimulating you, let that follicle just go by the wayside, and really cater to the group of follicles. So if you had another group of follicles coming along, then it would be just as reasonable to keep going, ignore the dominant follicle, and hopefully those other smaller ones would come along.

Sometimes it happens, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I think with your egg count being really good, I still think you have a really good chance of doing well with your next cycle.

Susan Hudson MD (09:46)

An important thing to also understand is I’m concerned because your physician appears completely surprised at this. You’re 41. 41 year olds do not play by the same rule book as a 31 year old. Your ovaries just don’t play by the same rule book. That’s the reason we watch you more carefully and we know that more unusual things can happen.

I would say a dominant follicle in somebody who’s older is something that I would, it’s not what I’m aiming for, but I’m not completely surprised when it happens. And really making sure that you fully understand that yes, your ovarian reserve testing appears reassuring, but age trumps everything. And that’s an important thing to understand.

Even if you do end up getting 10, 15 eggs to develop, we’re probably not expecting 10 or 15 embryos down the road. We’re probably expecting one or two chromosomally normal embryos.

Carrie Bedient MD (10:47)

Consider a stronger priming. ⁓ Estrogen priming cycles can be great, but you’ve had this happen once, so let’s bump it up. Let’s add an agonist or antagonist, depending on what makes more sense, and do something that’s a little bit stronger, do a luteal start where you were less worried about that dominant follicle emerging without anybody’s permission. And so there are definitely protocols that can help adapt to this and make this less of an issue.

Can happen to absolutely anybody. And part of the reason why we’d rather cancel is that generally it makes more sense financially, medically to cancel and then restart than it does to go all the way through. And I think you guys made the right decision. It’s just how are you gonna change it next time and what are you gonna adapt and do?

Susan Hudson (11:29)

Exciting news from Fertility Docs Uncensored! Our long-awaited book, The IVF Blueprint, is now available. on Amazon. Go now to pre-order your copy to learn everything you need to know about IVF, egg freezing, and embryo transfer. Did you know that you can cram decades of experience, science, and heartfelt advice into a book, and then the whole thing hinges on what happens in week one? Yep, week one is basically the prom queen election of publishing. So if you’ve ever thought, “Huh, I should check out The IVF Blueprint by the Fertility Docs Uncensored crew.” Now is your moment to shine. Buying it early tells bookstores, “Hey, stock this.” It tells publishers people care about this. And most importantly, it helps get real information into the hands of people staring down fertility treatments with more questions than answers. The book’s called The IVF Blueprint. It’s for folks considering IVF, already in the thick of it, or just trying to figure out what the heck their doctor is talking about. Help us help more people and maybe confuse a few algorithms while you’re at it.

Carrie Bedient MD (12:33)

All right, moving on to more technical discussions with Leslie.

One of the things that you have really come about and developed is a form of spermidine supplementation and it’s called Primeadine. I pronouncing that correctly?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (12:47)

That’s the brand name of it, yes. Only because I knew my mom would never be able to say the word spermidine without either giggling or feeling terrible embarrassment.

Carrie Bedient MD (12:58)

You are such a good daughter. I am very impressed because I might consider leaving it’s spermidine just to torture family members. It’s probably good that my mother doesn’t listen to this podcast terribly often. So spermidine is something that we don’t hear about. We’re very used to talking about CoQ10 and melatonin and myoinositol and all these other ones, but tell us about spermidine. What is it and why is it important?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (13:19)

All right, spermidine is something that we all produce in our tissues, in our gut biome, and we get it in our food daily from plants. And it’s so important to the survival of our species that it is in high quantities in semen, hence where the word spermidine comes from. And it’s actually anti-inflammatory. Making sperm is a high reactive oxygen species event.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (13:45)

And the anti-inflammatory action of spermidine is present at the time of production of sperm to tamp down the fire there. But it’s actually part of carrying DNA to the egg from the male. And it’s because DNA wraps itself around the spermidine, normally it’d be wrapped around a histone bond, but those are very big. And when you think about sperm being a very tiny…

It’s almost like saying rather than taking a suitcase with DNA, which would be the histone bond, let’s take a little pocketbook or fanny pack with the DNA and let the sperm run with that. And that’s what spermatine does. So that’s on the male side. On the female side, it’s very important for oogenesis or egg production. It’s also needed for embryogenesis. I forgot to mention that it also helps the sperm more easily penetrate the egg. And we know that at least in animal studies with what they call elderly mice, basically the same age as your person who asked the question previously, 41, and the age I was when I had my baby, 43, that is elderly in mouse years. And with these older…mouse moms, they have higher litter size if you give them spermidine. But it is also given to our babies in breast milk. You might not have heard that there are copious quantities of spermidine and another polyamine. These are classes of compounds derived from amino acids. There are copious quantities of spermidine and spermine in breast milk. And depending on where the baby is at growth wise, the mother will, her body will automatically either up regulate the production of spermidine, which is needed for growth or more spermine, which is needed for DNA methylation. That’s turning good genes on bad genes off. Yeah. So quite interesting. Yeah.

Abby Eblen MD (15:49)

Sorry, very interestingly enough, there’s a newer test in our country called a SpermQT test. Do you know about that test? It’s a DNA-based test and it looks for, the way we describe it to patients is it looks for things in the DNA that will allow the sperm to bind to and penetrate the egg. So wonder if this is a coding for spermidine then, because I’ve never heard of spermidine.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (15:56)

Penetration of the egg is called acrosomal reaction timing. That is what it assists with. ⁓ So there you go. So that’s one of the things. What’s funny about spermidine is that it’s literally been lying under noses for centuries and we’ve not understood its importance. The name spermidine was given by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th century Dutch biologist who discovered how to create basically a fancy microscope. ⁓ He was putting things underneath the microscope. He put his own semen under the microscope and he noticed that there were crystals that developed on the slide of semen. And he didn’t know what they were, but he called those spermine. And then a few hundred years later, scientists then saw something else, which was spermidine. But we didn’t really understand how potent it was until the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Japanese scientist for his research on something called autophagy or cell renewal.

So auto means self and phagy means eating. Sounds a little bit like self cannibalism, but really it’s more like cell recycling. So I like to say this is like your cells each having their own personal Marie Kondo who goes in and says, this is rubbish and this is going to the charity shop and she bags everything up for you and she makes brand new cells and she gets rid of all the clutter. And spermidine interestingly also activates another process called mitophagy, which is improving the mitochondria. Exact same Marie Kondo magic wand approach, but with the mitochondria, which your listeners will remember from high school biology is where the energy comes from, the little energy factories. And of course you can imagine when you’re trying to conceive, this is a high energy event.

So you need your mitochondria to be tip top. These are some of the things that that spermidine can do. And it’s really because of its ability to activate autophagy or cell renewal. And that’s also, by the way, the thing that you get when you fast. So everybody says, fasting is so great. We want the benefits of fasting. Well, the benefit, it’s in some cases it’s weight loss, but

the cellular benefit is really autophagy. And in order to stay young, obviously we want ourselves to undergo this and all our tissues and organs are based on the health of these cells. They’re the building blocks. That’s what spermidine can do. It can do many other things, but I will stick to fertility for today.

Abby Eblen MD (16:19)

And that’s exactly what this SpermQT test looks for. Interesting.

So when you fast, tell me again, does that upregulate spermidine? Is that what you’re saying?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (19:09)

So it can upregulate spermidine, but interestingly, a study came out recently that showed that if you were fasting and you did not have any presence of spermidine in your body, you would not get the cell renewal benefits of fasting. So it’s almost like you need both the key and the car to start the ignition.

And fasting is one part of it, and it can work. But you don’t want to just be on the standard American diet where you’re not getting any plants into your life. You need some plants. And our gut can make spermidine. But if we’ve been exposed to broad spectrum antibiotics, then we could have destroyed the bacteria that actually make spermidine for us. So there’s a problem there. Now our tissue production is very high when we’re infants, but as we get older, we stop all tissue production. So we are very reliant on the integrity of our gut and on getting it from our diet and plants.

Susan Hudson MD (20:19)

Big news for the Bay Area. Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area is expanding. A brand new state-of-the-art IVF lab is coming soon to Menlo Park, RSC’s second in the region. With advanced fertility treatments, a high success rate, and flexible financial options, RSC helps hopeful parents take control of their family building journey. Visit rscbayarea.com to schedule your consultation.

RSC is proud to lead the way in West Coast fertility care.

Susan Hudson MD (20:49)

So, because we normally get it from the diet, this is how you’ve been able to create, I’m assuming, some sort of pill or powder to supplement?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (20:57)

Yes, exactly. I realized that a lot of people, depending on what your diet is, some people just don’t get enough spermidine in their diet. In let’s say a Mediterranean country or Sardinia, which has exceptionally long health span and lifespan, they get a lot of plants in their diet and a lot of high spermidine plants.

So these would be things like legumes, mushrooms, peas, beans. Those are great. But in the US and in the UK where I live, people are getting about one quarter the amount of spermatine that they’re getting in places like Sardinia or Okinawa or the Nicoya Peninsula where people have…diets where they get a lot of plants with high spermidine content into their diets. So I decided to go to Japan where Professor Ohsumi, the 2016 Nobel Laureate for his work on autophagy, I wanted to go to Japan to see if they had a product that could activate autophagy that had a lot of spermidine. And they did. And I decided well, just start bringing this to the UK and see how it goes. I’ll bring it to the United States. I’d love my mom to be on it because it has really good longevity, healthy longevity benefits. And then people who knew about my patient background, not just as a former fertility patient, but as an autoimmune patient said, hey, we can’t take your product because it’s made from

a highly concentrated wheat germ and we can’t have gluten. We’re on the autoimmune paleo diet and can you do something else? So that’s when I went to Okinawa and I found a really unique strain of chlorella and that had very high amounts of spermidine and then put that into, those are in tablets and is actually in a powder that you can just put in your smoothie or in capsule form. But I really wanted to make it available to people in the minimum effective dose shown to benefit humans. And in the clinical trials where the endpoint was cognition, improved cognition in older people, one milligram was the amount that was shown to be beneficial. They’re not very big. I’m just sort of thinking, do I have any?

Susan Hudson MD (23:19)

So how big are these pills?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (23:25)

Do I have any here in front of me? I’ll just open this one up. The tablets are a little bit bigger, the pills are sort of like this. They’re capsules. And then here’s a tablet. I don’t know if you can see. Yeah, it’s not bad. So it’s two of those. We will be doing a powder of this too, just because so many people have pill fatigue. And we now people want it in a smoothie and now a lot of people are incorporating this into daily healthy smoothie, put everything in, especially women who are on a fertility journey. They’re going to be on a lot of things. And I do remember all the things I was taking, all the supplements, the prenatal supplements, and all the injections I was doing, just opening a capsule and putting it into your smoothie. You could easily do that.

Carrie Bedient MD (24:10)

That’s all fascinating. My brain is going about 16 million directions to figure out, so let’s start with the practical ones. How much of this do you need to take a day and how long do you need to be taking it to see an impact?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (24:24)

That’s really good question. We should rely on the clinical trials to really guide us. There was a Canadian clinical trial, again, using highly concentrated wheat germ. And they gave five milligrams. The daily dose that I’m making and I’m suggesting to people based off the science is one milligram. But for this particular study, they did a 30-day trial. I think it was a cohort of 43 people, and mixed men and women all under 50. And after 30 days, they could see cortisol had declined by 30%, that in men the testosterone had increased about 49 % on average. In women, the estrogen, the progesterone had gone up. But what was interesting was that the precursors, DHEA and pregnenolone, had also both gone up.

And that fascinates me that this must be improving through autophagy and mitophagy by improving the mitochondria, by improving the health of the cell as well. You’re able to then get a better hormonal effect from the ovaries. From the testes. And they’re able to function better to do the things that they already innately know how to do, but they’re not as functional as they once were. And that was quite interesting. It would be great to have longer studies and not five milligrams, but in Europe, here in Europe, the European Food Safety Authority has said that the maximum daily amount you can take of supplemental food derived, not synthetic, because there are loads of synthetics or products that are hybridized, cut with synthetics.

The highest amount you can take is six milligrams per day. But I always tell people, please remember to get it in your diet. And the reason why is related to one of the questions one of you asked earlier about the gut biome production. If we’re eating legumes or beans and peas and things, there’s fiber there that we can’t digest, but which the gut biome can. And that improves the overall health of the gut. And the healthier it is, the higher the chance it will be able to manufacture more spermidine for us. And this point about, harnessing the power of our bodies to do the things they already innately know how to do. It’s so important that I put a prebiotic fiber in the original primidine original just so that we can get in there and help improve the gut biome, feed those friendly bacteria that can make more spermidine for you. Why would we ever want to leave that just lying there? Because the body knows so much. And obviously, we do know a lot about the body, but there are still so many mysteries. And if we can help the body do what it knows, then that’s a win.

I’m trying to think here in Oxford, we work with two scientists at the University of Oxford, an immunologist, Professor Katja Simon, and a rheumatologist, Associate Professor Ghada Alsaleh. And they have been looking at it more as a way to modulate the immune system. And for me, having been a fertility patient, or being told I was infertile at 39, forced to go the donor egg route, which I was grateful to have that opportunity as a biracial girl and half Chinese, half Caucasian. So not easy to find eggs, but having to be also told I was an autoimmune patient and also infertile, I wished I had this product because we know from the studies here at the University of Oxford that it can reduce the tumor necrosis factor alpha, the cytokines. These are inflammatory markers and can bring them back to baseline in a reset way, which is great. And the Oxford research was really with elderly immune cells and ⁓ bringing them back online again, but there have been multiple other studies on the anti-inflammatory effects. If there’s anyone out there who’s listening who happens to have had the same situation that I did, being a fertility patient, and I mentioned to you, I did three IUIs, five IVFs last round with donor eggs. And they weren’t successful, but that was around the time that I was told I had three different autoimmune conditions, lupus, RA, rheumatoid arthritis, and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Yeah, I wish it could have had something like this to just bring it back under control.

Susan Hudson MD (29:13)

I know you’ve talked about that there are studies that show some hormonal changes and that type of thing. Are there any studies yet with any pregnancy outcome data?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (29:24)

No, and the reason why is you can imagine that already doing a clinical trial, it’s not only expensive, but you’re dealing with pregnant women. But we have had clients tell us that they’ve either regained their cycles in their 50s or they have fallen pregnant. So last year, we were working with one of the colleges here at Oxford, St. Hilda’s, where we were doing a conference. And someone helped us there from their team. And as a thank you, we gave them three months supply of the Primeadine gluten-free. That’s the one I just showed you, the little green tablets. And we checked in with her this year just to say, ⁓ how’s it all going? We’re doing this conference again. And she said, it’s going great, but I’m I’m nine months pregnant and she is 47. And it was completely unexpected, unplanned, and it was her first pregnancy.

Abby Eblen MD (30:15)

Wow.

Carrie Bedient MD (30:23)

So is she asking you for child support?

Abby Eblen MD (30:23)

That’s crazy.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (30:26)

I know. At 47, we’re so grateful. When I think about it, I was so thrilled to fall pregnant at 43. But as you all know, there are so many different factors to think about when it comes to why someone is not pregnant. And I’m certainly not saying this is the only thing. That would not be true, but it is one of the things that we did not know about before. And now the research, the preclinical research in animals is looking really interesting. And the food derived supplements, and I would just caution anyone, do not go the synthetic route because…I’m not going to do a chemistry lesson here, but they are the difference between, say, strawberry Haribo gummies and real strawberries. And so the problem with the synthetics is that sometimes they work in the animals, but if you give them too much of the synthetics, it actually impairs fertility. So that was a study out of China, which was fascinating. They realized that there was a Goldilocks on, but they didn’t know what it was. And it will be different for each woman based on her weight, her metabolism, her ethnicity, her age. So go with food.

It’s the safest or a food-derived supplement like Primeadine.

Abby Eblen MD (31:48)

So spermidine you think may have an impact with women because it may help with cell division of the egg cell or there are other impacts that spermidine might

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (31:56)

It helps with the development of the eggs. So with the oogenesis, helps with embryogenesis. It obviously helps with that acrosomal reaction timing.

I’m very happy to share those studies with you. I don’t know if you share them with your patients or not, but for you, it might be interesting, Just to know what’s coming down the track.

Carrie Bedient MD (32:18)

Yes, please.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (32:20)

I just know that you’ll be wanting to know what the latest breakthroughs are because that’s just the nature of who you all are.

Abby Eblen MD (32:27)

Any impact on endometrium because the one area in our field that we really don’t have a real good grasp on is what happens in the endometrium. When patients come and we do an embryo transfer and they don’t get pregnant, like in your case, they’re like, well, happened? And we’re like, we don’t know. And, I always say unless somebody can develop an animal model somewhere down the road, I don’t know how we’re ever going to come up with that answer. Just curious from your perspective, being an infertility patient, going, looking at on these, has anybody developed an animal model? What are your thoughts about its effect on endometrium?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (32:59)

So autophagy will have some role to play. I don’t know how significant that role is. What I will say is that endometrial quality or lack of endometrial quality was a personal problem for me and that what changed it was getting my thyroid seen to and it was not something for which I was treated and I have heard of some clinics using very low doses of thyroid meds to ⁓ spread that. Okay, good. So there you know all about this.

Abby Eblen MD (33:32)

We do all the time. It’s a very common thing for us to do. But it doesn’t fix everybody, unfortunately.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (33:41)

Okay, okay. So that is an area that I can’t speak to and I wouldn’t want to lead anyone down the wrong path. But I know that there is a study on this and I will dig it out and I will send it to you. Yeah.

Susan Hudson MD (33:57)

When you were talking about normalization of hormonal parameters, I’m thinking about some of our gentlemen, I’m assuming it’s the same in the UK, but there is a feast of testosterone going on in the United States right now. And where every man over the age of 30 thinks that they need to get their testosterone tested and they all think that they need to be on testosterone, which is really kind of sad because a lot of them don’t realize that that’s a great way to eliminate your sperm production. And if you’ve been doing it for a long time, sometimes permanently eliminate your sperm production. And I’m curious, did you see that change only in women or did you see that in men? Is that is the spermidine production something that we see declining with age, which may lead to kind of the natural decline in testosterone profiles.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (34:54)

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ Yes, they can be linked. I’m hesitant to say it is the only thing. ⁓ Generally, these things are part of systems. But it is absolutely necessary for sperm production. From that Canadian study, and again, one study does not make all. We cannot draw all conclusions from just one study.

It was to increase testosterone so dramatically in these men in only 30 days. And again, we’re talking about a food. It’s a food derived wheat germ concentrate. Maybe it’s not sexy enough, but honestly, it’s not gonna hurt you.

And that would be my first port of call if I was worried about low testosterone. And as you say, taking the supplemental testosterone has negative side effects. And of course in young men, if you have too much testosterone, it can lead to all sorts of rage issues. I mean, looking ripped is one thing, but you do want to maintain your fertility. You want to maintain the essence of being a man. And one thing that’s interesting about spermidine is its role in the vascular system. Spermidine is made from L-arginine and then it goes to L-orinathine and then it takes some S-adenosylmethionine. So that is from what it’s made.

And people have tried to increase spermidine in the body simply by taking L-arginine, which you all will know has to do with improving ⁓ blood flow. The men who have taken our product, one of the things they tell us, interestingly, they don’t talk about their sperm, but they do talk about the fact that the vascularity improves and that they get increased, they get better erections, essentially. And it’s not, they are not always the first people to notice, it’s their wives that say, something’s different. What’s different? And that speaks to its role with, with vascular health.

Carrie Bedient MD (37:08)

So this sounds like all of us have a lot more reading to do. And any of the studies you have that can send our way, because I am very intrigued by all of this. I do want to start diving into this. But we are so appreciative for you coming to talking with us today. And again, for our listeners, this is Leslie Kenny. She is the co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, as well as the founder of Oxford HealthSpan.

And we’ve been talking about spermidine and the specific product Primeadine, which is yours, but talking about a lot of the bases behind it in general. so, so yeah, any of these studies you send, please send them our way. We’re curious.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (37:45)

100%.

Yeah, happy to do so.

Susan Hudson MD (37:48)

If someone’s interested in purchasing the Primeadine, what’s the best way to do that?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (37:52)

Direct on our website, OxfordHealthSpan.com, all in one word.

Abby Eblen MD (37:56)

Okay.

And you ship to the United States, right?

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (37:59)

We take the raw material from Japan, but we manufacture in the United States and we manufacture in the UK and in Europe and in Canada soon. And we’re actually launching in Erewhon markets. I don’t know if you know Erewhon, but it’s in Los Angeles area markets. Just launched a couple of weeks ago.

Carrie Bedient MD (38:20)

That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much. We are very appreciative for your expertise and I’m glad I have a new rabbit hole to jump down next.

Leslie Kenny Oxford Healthspan (38:21)

Thank you.

Excellent. I’m going to help you with that jump.

Carrie Bedient MD (38:30)

All right, and to our audience, thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to Apple Podcasts to have your next episode pop up for you automatically. Be sure to subscribe to YouTube. That really helps us spread reliable information and help as many people as possible.

Abby Eblen MD (38:44)

and visit fertilitydocsuncensored.com to submit specific questions and sign up for our email list. Keep an eye out for our book, the IVF Blueprint, that’s gonna be released on September 23rd. Check out Instagram and TikTok for quick hits on fertility tips.

Susan Hudson MD (38:58)

As always, this podcast is intended for entertainment and is not a substitute for medical advice from your own physician. Subscribe, sign up for emails and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye!