Toxins and toxicants: Is BPA, BPS or Botox sabotaging your fertility?
Let’s talk toxicants, toxins and your fertility.
Our exposure to chemicals is absolutely epic, we just can’t avoid it. Three we find ourselves speaking about often at The Fertility Suite are;
BPA - toxicant
BPS - toxicant
Botox - toxin
What are toxins and toxicants – what’s the difference?
The term ‘toxicant’ and ‘toxin’ both refer to toxic substances that act, essentially as poisons. However, they do differ.
Toxin: The term toxin refers to a natural product. They can be powerful, but toxins often exist in small amounts. We generally deal with toxins through avoiding the toxin, developing immunity or finding an antidote. A good example of a toxin is snake venom.
Toxicant: Toxicants, on the other hand are manmade, artificial products we have introduced into the environment. They often exist in epic proportions. When we deal with toxicants we have to minimise exposure, or look to offset.
Differentiation is important simply because when we refer to toxicants as toxins, we really are minimising the huge impact of these unnatural products.
BPA: a chemical used to make plastics.
The debate around BPA has shifted from ‘does it impact our health?’, to ‘what is our exposure threshold?’
How does it impact fertility?
BPA disrupts normal hormone function, it’s known a known endocrine disruptor. BPA mimics estrogen essentially increasing total estrogen, and given that our hormones don’t act independently, this creates a cascade of hormonal disruption.
High levels of BPA negatively impact fertility. A 2012 study looked at BPA levels of women going through IVF and found those with higher levels of BPA in their urine samples had
lower estrogen level,
retrieved smaller numbers of eggs,
had fewer Day 5 embryos and
were less likely to achieve implantation.
Further research from 2014 found women with high urinary BPA levels were more likely than women with low levels to suffer a miscarriage.
As of 2020 it is well understood that this chemical is more frequently detected in sub-feritle women than women without fertility challenges.
What do we do?
1. Minimise exposure to BPA:
Decrease plastics.
Some aluminium water contain lining
Microwaving plastics
2. Offset
It appears it may be possible to offset the impact of BPA. Research from 2016 found that activated folate from food sources appears to have a protective impact against BPA. Sources of activated
BPS: A chemical that replaces BPA
In our efforts to remove BPA, we inadvertently switch out one chemical for another. BPA-free plastics often use a chemical called BPS place of BPA. Unfortunately BPS acts very similarly to BPA. 2018 investigation into the impacts of BPA on fertility found that “BPS significantly affects female reproduction astoundingly in extremely low doses.”
BPS negatively impacted:
Number of follicles,
structure of the egg,
the genetic material carried within the eg
Botox: A toxin in the form of a drug, made from a toxin produced by a bacteria.
Botox as a drug is highly refined and highly diluted and generally speaking has a broad margin of safety.
Botox and fertility
Unlike BPA and BPS botox is not an endocrine disruptor and doesn’t enter the blood stream, so is unlikely to impact fertility. However, there are currently no clinical trials investigating botox and reproduction. Ethically, this type of research is unacceptable and it is unlikely that we would see these clinical trials anytime soon. However, we do have retrospective information.
A 2015 study looked at women who had had botox treatment in the 3 months prior to conception or in the first trimester of pregnancy. They found They found 574 cases over the 23 years between 1990 and 2013.
Only 137 had known outcomes and dose information, so the data is fairly small. 21% ended in fetal loss and 2.7% had fetal defects, the general population rate is about 3%.
Botox and preconception care
Research shows it takes approximately six months for botox to leave the body. With this in mind, the last botox session should be six months prior to trying to conceive, to allow time for the toxin to be fully metabolised and leave the body.
Want to know about preconception care? Take a look here.