FFP 594 | Is Vitamin A The "On/Off" Switch For Sperm Production?
Fertility Friday | Fertility Awareness Mastery for Women's Health Professionals
Fertility Friday Radio | Fertility Awareness for Pregnancy and Hormone-free birth control
4.8 • 848 Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
In this FAMM Research Series episode, Lisa explores groundbreaking research on the role of retinoic acid—the active form of vitamin A—in spermatogenesis, testosterone production, and overall male fertility. Discover why vitamin A may act as the biological "on/off" switch for sperm production, and how nutrient-dense foods like liver could play a pivotal role in male preconception care.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Teach fertility awareness to your clients and master the skill of advanced chart interpretation. |
| 0:07.0 | Learn to support your clients through their cycle irregularities and hormone imbalances with confidence. |
| 0:14.0 | Our fertility awareness mastery mentorship is now accepting applications for our next class in January, 26. |
| 0:23.9 | Head over to fertility friday.com slash fam live to apply today. That's fertility friday.com slash f-a-m-m-l-I-V-E. |
| 0:32.1 | This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 594. |
| 0:49.4 | Today I'm sharing a brand new episode in our FAM research series, and I'm going to be tackling the role of vitamin A in sperm production. |
| 0:53.4 | I think this topic is really important and really |
| 0:55.6 | interesting because the research is astounding, yet it's not something that I hear a lot of people |
| 1:01.9 | talking about, the importance of vitamin A, especially as it relates to sperm production |
| 1:06.4 | and fertility in general. So while we'll be focusing today on male reproduction, particularly sperm |
| 1:12.0 | production and testosterone and the role of vitamin A in that process, know that vitamin A plays |
| 1:18.3 | an equally significant role in female reproduction. And there's a lot of research through |
| 1:23.5 | animal studies that sheds light on why this nutrient is so important. So today we'll be going |
| 1:29.3 | through a paper. It's called the role of retinomic acid in spermatogenesis and its application |
| 1:34.6 | in male reproduction. So this study is a narrative review. It's not a clinical trial. It pulls together findings from animal models, cell studies, human data, and it really maps out the role of retinoic acid, which is the active form of vitamin A in spermatogenesis. So while this study goes into a lot of detail, it's really high level. |
| 2:02.3 | If you were to pull it and try to read it, there's a lot of, a lot of terms, let's just say, |
| 2:07.3 | because it goes into a lot of really specific detail. What we'll be doing today is just kind of |
| 2:11.4 | getting a feel for how essential this nutrient is in this process, how it works, and we'll also be talking about then |
| 2:20.8 | the role of nutrition and the potential for vitamin A to really support and improve sperm |
| 2:26.9 | production in men. So a little bit of background information. I've spoken about vitamin A and |
| 2:32.4 | written about it in both the fifth vital sign as well as real food for fertility. |
| 2:38.0 | We shared some research and some studies. |
... |
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