hi guys Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon today I'm going to go over five ways to increase your testosterone or boost your testosterone naturally so make sure you stick around to get each and every one of those tips first off why does everyone even care about testosterone having low testosterone can create a lot of unwanted symptoms like low libido low energy difficulty concentrating and losing muscle mass so not only does it cause these really frustrating symptoms it can also be a risk factor for other really scary things like heart disease metabolic syndrome which includes diabetes
and hypertension osteoporosis and even all cause mortality or death so making sure that your testosterone levels are optimal is really important number one lose weight yeah easy to say why why does it even matter well the reason being is that obesity or being overweight means that you have more fat cells and fat cells actually have a specific enzyme in them which takes all that good healthy testosterone and converts it into estral so it is well understood in the scientific literature that weight loss and overweight and obese men can help boost testosterone levels significantly and how
much weight do you really need to lose so in one study they looked at the amount of weight loss that was needed to increase testosterone levels and they found that an average of 21 kg or nearly 46 lbs was the average amount of weight lost by people who did increase their testosterone level but do you really need to lose 46 lbs well sure that would be great but another study looked at specifically physical activity and diet and how did those contribute to increasing testosterone so what that study concluded was that increasing your activity level could
actually reduce the amount of weight loss that you need if you increase your physical activity you might actually need to lose even less weight something like 12 kg or 26 lb and that brings us to our number two suggestion which is exercise great so exercise is important for testosterone but what kind of exercise should I just go for a walk well actually they've studied this so they looked at young healthy men and who are already Physically Active and they put them into two categories they put them into a steady state exercise where they ran to
achieve a certain output for 40 to 45 minutes at a continuous level so the other half were put into a group of high intensity exercise and what that means is they went for 90 seconds at a really high output and 90 seconds in a recovery zone and they did that for about 42 to 47 minutes they measured their blood levels before the exercise after the exercise and 12 hours later and they found that those who did the high-intensity interval training did actually increase their testosterone levels significantly more than those who did steady straight training however
after 12 hours they found that this high intensity interval training actually had a lower testosterone level and they hypothesized that they're actually using that testosterone to help recover during that time so yes there may be some benefit to doing high-intensity interval exercise rather than just going for a walk or going on steady state exercise so my take-home is do some high-intensity interval training for a short burst of time and that will increase your testosterone level and be easier to really do on a regular basis so while exercise is super important for boosting your testosterone you
can't lose weight without going to diet which is our number three recommendation diet what kind of diet should you actually eat so there's lots of claims to testosterone boosting foods and certainly there are foods that might be better to help boost your testosterone but how much do you need to eat to make a real impact it's hard to say so what I tell all my patients is avoid processed foods eat natural foods and fruits and vegetables that you find at the supermarket in the produce aisle while I was researching testosterone for this video I actually
found an interesting study on the keto diet and testosterone so if you're interested in learning more about that please comment below or if you've heard of a certain testosterone boo booster in your diet let me know so I can comment on the data behind it but I want to tell you this very recent study that just came out in 2020 they looked at the National Health and examination survey or enhan study which is a nationally done study looking at people all over the country in the United States and getting a lot of information about their
diet their activity level and blood and urine samples to obtain data that can be used to find correlations between certain things and so what this group did was they looked at the dietary type of men and their testosterone levels what they found was that men who restricted fat in their diet were likely to have a lower testosterone level than those who didn't restrict fat in their diet so does that mean you should eat fatty foods well I don't know yet I think that specifically if you are a normal weight individual who wants to boost your
testosterone I would not limit fats in your diet because that may be actually limiting your ability for your body to produce testosterone but if you're overweight improving your weight is more important than changing the components of your diet also I get a lot of questions about soy products so are soy products going to make my testosterone level drop so the reason this comes up is because soy has estrogen like compounds called isoflow veins which then are concerning for people who want to increase their testosterone level but what does the data really say so a 2010
meta analysis looked at 47 different studies and compiled all the data and what they found even a really high intake of soy would not reduce your testosterone levels and I going to tell you about one of these studies because I thought it was really interesting this study took young men between the ages of 18 and 30 and they were randomized for a period of 4 weeks to twice a day take either a vanilla flavored soy protein or a vanilla flavored whey protein or vanilla flavored cake mix and so they didn't know what they were getting
they got these little plastic baggies with them and they were supposed to take it for 4 weeks and see how it impacted their testosterone levels and what this study found was that even this high intake of soy proteins which was the equivalent of 41.5 G of soy protein per day did not affect testosterone levels even after taking it consistently for 4 weeks so my advice to you is don't worry too much about the soy products that you're eating especially if you're getting good healthy protein from soy products it's probably probably not going to impact your
testosterone levels that's what the data says number four good sleep so did you guys know from 1985 to now there has been actual data to suggest that American adults are getting less and less sleep and poor quality of sleep so how does that sleep impact your testosterone levels so there's actually two interesting studies on this one study looked at 2300 men in that same national health and nutrition examination survey or the N Haan survey and what they found found was that per each hour of sleep that people reported getting less their testosterone decreased by almost
six points another study looked at 10 healthy men and what they did was they had them sleep for 3 days over 8 hours and then after that they slept for 8 days and they were required to sleep for only 5 hours and they measured their daytime testosterone levels and what they found was that they decreased their testosterone levels by 15% and where they get this idea of sleeping for 5 hours well actually they found that this is the exact sleeping pattern or sleep restriction of 15% of the working adult population so sleep is super super
important more recent data has suggested that it might be related to the time when you wake up so there may be some circadian rhythm Association so if you're waking up really really early that may be more detrimental to your testosterone level than going to sleep a little bit later so bottom line is get better sleep and sleep for longer periods of time so try to reduce sleep interruptions avoid looking at your phone before bedtime and try to really get into a bedtime routine and go to sleep around the same time and wake up around the
same time each and every day and number five avoid endocrine disrupting chemicals so endocrine disrupting chemicals are found throughout our environment due to pollution in certain Cosmetics or consumable items as well as plastic the most popular of these are called bpas or bisphenol a and how do these actually work to impact your testosterone levels so they actually disrupt endocrine action and testosterone is created through an endocrine process so being exposed to endocrine disrupting chemicals can actually result in a number of problems they've been found to be associated with not only low testosterone but diabetes obesity
learning problems and even cancer another study looking at the enh Hanes database looked at young adults so young kids and found out their level of BPA exposure by looking at the urinary concentration and also correlated this with their testosterone level and they found that in adolescent boys having a higher amount or higher exposure to bpas was correlated with a lower testosterone level so how can you avoid BPA well avoid using plastic containers use Alternatives like glass or metal or other things and don't warm things up in plastic containers you can also cut back on your
use of cans and look for products that are labeled BPA free you'll see that all over BPA free that means that they don't have bisphenol a which is really important in avoiding those kind of endocrine disrupting chemicals so wait don't leave yet I'm going to talk about a supplement that I've read about that people said might boost testosterone this is called ashwagandha what is Ash ashwagandha ashwagandha is an herb that has been touted to have really good benefits of stress relief and anxiety reduction and so this has actually been studied in a randomized trial meaning
that they took 60 adults and they randomized them to receive either ashwagandha or a placebo medication and what they found was that they did actually increase their testosterone levels but this was not statistically significant so what does that mean it basically means that it's likely due to chance that that increase happened they did find however that there was a reduction in anxiety and depression in people who were taking the supplement so certainly that can reduce your stress levels which can be important for improving testosterone levels overall all right thanks so much for watching hope you
enjoyed it if you like what you saw make sure you subscribe and comment below on other things you want to learn about and always remember to take care of yourself because you're worth it
