The Men Obsessed With Optimizing Their Sperm
Twice a week, Ashton Pienaar wakes up, pulls down his pants, and sticks a syringe in his butt. He injects himself with peptides like hCG, a hormone produced during pregnancy, to stimulate sperm production and glutathione to lower oxidative stress, which he says can contribute to “unfavorable sperm.” For the past year, Pienaar — a former cast member on Bravo’s Below Deck who has pivoted to “health consulting” on Instagram — has been on a mission to fix his sperm. The 36-year-old takes more than 21 supplements a day and steers clear of aerosol sprays and dishwashing detergent, which he says are full of endocrine disruptors. In the mornings, he adds a cup of pineapple juice to his smoothie, which, if you believe what you read on Reddit, can not only make your semen taste better but also help sperm swim faster. He wears underwear with a pouch designed to hold an ice pack so he can cool down his testicles while he answers emails.
Everywhere I look, men are worrying about their sperm. In a viral video earlier this year, one husband declared men should have to spend the nine months prior to their partner’s conception getting into the best physical shape of their life to ensure a healthy pregnancy. On Instagram, influencers warn that most miscarriages may actually be “the man’s fault” and claim that if your husband isn’t working out and eating a perfect diet, he’s “willingly putting you and your baby’s health on the line.” Now, women are using makeshift microscopes to examine their husbands’ semen samples and see if their “swimmers are Olympic level.” On Reddit, men concerned about the quality of their sperm say they’ve stopped taking hot showers (“only tepid lukewarm ones”) and started experimenting with Chinese medicine. This spring, two college students in Los Angeles competed in the “world’s first live sperm race” purportedly to raise awareness about declining male fertility. Former Bachelor star Colton Underwood recently said he had to go into “sperm rehab” after spending too much time in the sauna, and the millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson has been posting about his personal quest to eliminate microplastics from his semen. (Ironically, he credits his sauna regimen, though he makes sure to put “ice on the boys.”) A recent New York Times op-ed argued that “men should start getting fertility assessments as a basic standard of care, just like women have annual visits to the gynecologist.”
Finally, men are waking up to the idea that they have a role in bringing children into the world beyond just getting off; historically, fertility has been seen as something only women had to worry about. This newfound attention is thanks in large part to the manosphere. To hear longevity podcasters tell it, masculinity itself is under assault by our chemical-laden modern world. Andrew Huberman has devoted ample airtime to the theory that phthalates and pesticides are destroying sperm counts. Appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, surgeon-general nominee Casey Means warned that we’re all living in an “estrogen stew” that is “feminizing men” and “depleting our vigor.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that “today, the average teenager in this country has 50 percent of the sperm count, 50 percent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man.” Men are increasingly convinced we’re facing a male-fertility crisis — and they’ll try just about anything to revive their fallen soldiers.
“Our environment is against us,” Pienaar says. “Toxic chemicals, microplastics — all these things are attacking our endocrine system.” He and his wife have been trying to get pregnant for about a year, and a recent semen analysis showed he has poor sperm morphology. Now he’s even careful about where he puts his iPhone. “I used to drive with my phone between my legs,” he says. Not anymore. He keeps his phone as far from his front pocket as possible. He also bought an EMF blocker — a sticker you put in the back of your phone that claims to protect users from harmful emissions, which the Federal Trade Commission has warned is a scam — and won’t sleep in the same room as his phone.
If Pienaar is afraid of his phone, David Ireland is paranoid about what’s in his tap water. After he found out he had a low sperm count, he bought a filter in an attempt to avoid estrogens — which are “a big no-no for men,” he says — but suddenly he saw endocrine disruptors everywhere. Anything with artificial fragrance had to go. “Deodorant sprays have lots of chemicals in them, particularly things like parabens,” he says. “They are really, really toxic.” Now, he doesn’t eat anything that comes wrapped in plastic and buys all organic produce. “If it looks too perfect, it’s probably got pesticides on it and it’s been sprayed with so many chemicals,” he says.
When Ireland and his wife had trouble getting pregnant in 2016, it was a shock; he was in his mid-30s, didn’t smoke or drink, and considered himself healthy. After reading studies on PubMed, he started eating more pumpkin seeds and oysters, which are high in zinc, and sharing his discoveries on the Instagram account he called Fertility4Men. He started acupuncture to increase blood flow in his groin and drinking Chinese herbal medicine mixed in hot water. “Whatever was in there, it kept giving me an erection,” he says. By this point, he was visiting a clinic in London every six months to get his sperm evaluated. While his sperm count shot up, he says his semen analysis still came back as poor quality. It’s not just the number of sperm you have that matters; doctors also assess sperm motility (speed) and morphology (shape).
Sensing an emerging market, supplement brands are eager to convince men that they need to be taking prenatals too. After Steve Zanette and his wife had multiple miscarriages, he turned to Huberman and Reddit to cobble together his own fertility stack, which he says included almost two dozen capsules a day. He’s now the founder of SwimClub, a supplement brand that claims to “start improving all sperm parameters in as little as two weeks” and costs $135 for a 30-day supply. On Amazon, there are hundreds of supplements that will purportedly enhance your sperm, most of which include high doses of antioxidants like CoQ10, selenium, and zinc. In addition to products with names like Load Boost that are clearly marketed to men, a growing number of brands that sell fancy prenatals — including Ritual, Needed, and Perelel — are encouraging women to buy male-fertility supplements for their husbands while they’re at it. Samantha Diamond, the CEO of Bird&Be — which sells a Male Fertility Power Pack for $63 — argues that taking a prenatal before trying to conceive is just as important for men as for women.
Meanwhile, TikTok is full of videos recommending wives throw out their husbands’ polyester boxers and replace them with undies made from natural fibers. Among the brands popping up to fill this need is NADS, which markets its briefs as “made without the use of harsh chemicals and toxins commonly used in conventional underwear production” and therefore “better for your balls.” A newer brand, EDN, is selling $38 all-cotton boxer briefs it claims can help support optimal fertility. “When we really decided to do this and put the business idea together, it was the same week that the article came out that 99 percent of men had microplastics in their testicles,” co-founder Matthew Domenscek tells me. “Most underwear is polyester,” he says. “It all sheds microplastics.” EDN’s website warns that “typical stretch clothes” are full of “blood barrier crossing chemicals that disrupt hormones, impact fertility, and hurt cognition.”
It’s hard to talk about vitamins or underwear promising to give you better sperm and keep a straight face. But no one would bat an eye at a woman doing everything in her control to try to get pregnant and have a healthy baby. “In the past, I think men got a free pass,” says Sheeva Talebian, a reproductive endocrinologist at CCRM NY. “There was this laissez-faire attitude that, because there’s millions of sperm, the guy could basically do whatever he wants and it didn’t matter.” Now, among her patients, she says it’s more common for women to ask if there’s a supplement their husbands can take or if they should stop drinking.
Experts estimate that one in eight couples struggle with infertility — and in more than half of those cases, male factors play a role. Sperm quality generally starts to decrease after age 40, though fertility declines much more slowly for men than for women. Yet in many cases, male fertility is often overlooked, according to urologist Paul Turek. Among couples who go through IVF, the male partner may not be evaluated until late in the process, even though treating male infertility can be more cost-effective and less invasive than the treatments available to women.
There’s some truth to the idea that, the healthier you are, the better your sperm is. Talebian estimates that in about half of cases, men can improve their sperm quality through lifestyle changes, often in just a few months. Whereas women are born with all their eggs, men make new sperm all the time. Technically, it takes 72 days — “so three months later, it’s a new batch,” says Talebian. There are certain things we know aren’t good for sperm, including obesity, smoking, marijuana and other recreational drug use, and heavy drinking. Excessive heat can also impact sperm quality, so doctors advise that men trying to conceive avoid hot tubs and keep laptops off their laps.
“There’s no magic bullet that suddenly makes you super-fertile,” says Steven Palter, a reproductive endocrinologist and founder of Gold Coast IVF in New York. Still, for a lot of men, simple changes to diet and exercise — and not smoking weed — can make a big difference, especially compared with supplements, which Palter says have “marginal, if any” benefit. “Most of the men who come to me, they’ve done the fertility supplements. They’ve tried all those things and it’s not working,” says Justin Houman, a urologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
There’s also no evidence that switching to cotton underwear makes much of a difference. While the vaginal canal is full of blood vessels, male genitals are mostly skin, which is a pretty good barrier, Talebian says. As for endocrine-disrupting chemicals, no one really knows how much of a role they play — but some doctors I spoke to thought the panic was a little overblown. It’s also not as if men have to be in peak physical condition to get someone pregnant. “A lot of unhealthy men have been able to have kids for many years,” Houman points out.
The doctors I spoke with felt that men starting to take their fertility more seriously is long overdue. “For so many years, the blame was just on the female side and on the eggs,” says Talebian. But there’s a line between well-meaning advice and snake-oil marketing. Trying to boost your fertility by eating organic and avoiding plastic sounds harmless. But the idea that it’s your personal responsibility to get as healthy as possible prior to conception sounds a lot like “restorative reproductive medicine,” in which practitioners focus on addressing root causes of infertility — which reproductive-health experts say is far less effective than medical interventions like IVF.
Pienaar told me he doesn’t believe in “forcing” conception by using IVF. “My personal opinion is I want to do everything in my power to naturally fix stuff in my body because ultimately that’s going to lead to the healthiest pregnancy,” he said. But there’s only so much that lifestyle can fix. “The No. 1 cause of male infertility is unknown,” says Palter — and many apparently healthy men with abnormal semen analyses may never get an answer. Yet with medical help, many can still become fathers. “Once you’re doing IVF, sperm count and motility matter a lot less,” says Talebian. “We only need one good sperm per egg.”
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