Why Pre-Conception Health Matters—And How You Can Optimize Yours

I spent my early career in the corporate world—investment banking, management consulting, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then I transitioned to clinical practice, obtaining my master’s in nutrition and certification as a functional medicine practitioner. Once I became a clinical nutritionist focused on women’s health, I was really shocked and disturbed by what I saw. I watched as clients and friends ping-ponged between many different healthcare providers—all in search of clear guidance on their fertility journey. Despite having access to these providers, they still struggled to get answers. It was a minefield to navigate the confusing and conflicting information about what to do when they wanted to conceive. At some point, I couldn’t ignore the problem anymore. I realized that many doctors are not trained in or equipped to provide adequate pre-pregnancy care. And it’s really not their fault!

Yes, I decided I had to do something about the problems I witnessed with pre-conception care. I couldn’t believe that there weren’t any resources to help couples plan for pregnancy—just like they plan for a wedding or a career. That was the impetus for writing my book, 9 Months Is Not Enough, and founding my pre-pregnancy testing company, Poplin. My goal is to normalize pre-conception preparation and make the process accessible to as many people as possible.

Oftentimes, we think about fertility as a “below the waist” conversation, focused on reproductive organs. However, fertility is an extension of your overall health. Because of that, anything that you can do to improve your health also improves your fertility. I have an entire checklist in the book about the key areas to consider. These include nutrition, stress, sleep, environmental toxins, menstrual cycle health, supplementation, movement, medications, management of chronic health conditions, and relationship dynamics with your reproductive partner.

Local air and water can be surprisingly high contributors to one’s toxin load. I would suggest testing both and looking into air or water filters if you find results that you don’t like.

I’m obviously biased, but I firmly believe in “testing before you try”. The majority of people with abnormal preconception labs either have no symptoms or think what they are experiencing is normal. This is precisely why it’s so important to get screened in advance of a potential pregnancy. Pre-pregnancy wellness is about more than how you intuitively feel. There are lab tests that can check what is happening at a cellular level. As I mentioned above, this goes beyond just measuring your hormones—to measuring your overall health. At Poplin, we look at five different categories of health: blood status, hormone status, immune status, metabolic status and nutrient status. This gives us a really comprehensive picture of what is going on in your body and how one metric, like stress hormone levels, might affect another, like sex hormone levels.

I like to think of these biomarkers as key performance indicators, or KPIs. In business, KPIs are metrics that are tracked to determine the trajectory of the business. Your pre-pregnancy wellness status is a KPI for your health and, by extension, your fertility. You don’t know what needs to change unless you measure it, and identify an imbalance. And you don’t know how to change something unless you measure progress against your efforts.

So many! A few to get you started—WeNatal couple’s prenatal vitamins, ARMRA colostrum, Organifi superfood blends, Paleovalley meat sticks, Brodo bone broth, Ziva meditation, Attitude cleaning products.