 Hello and welcome to CNM's Naturopathic Nutrition Year 2. My name is Linda Witzoli, I'm a nutritional therapist and health coach and today I'm going to be taking you through the lecture on fertility and pregnancy. So in today's lecture we're going to look at the factors that affect both male and female fertility. Things like hormonal health, maybe some structural abnormalities. We're going to be looking at environment and lifestyle factors. Things that we can look at to further investigate what the root cause of the fertility issues in both a female or male client could be. We're going to familiarize ourselves with the fertility investigations that are done in the orthodox treatment. So looking at the different tests that your client may have already undergone with their GPs for example. And then we're going to look at some of the functional testing that we can do to really get to the bottom of what may be causing our client's fertility problems or say like pregnancy issues for example. We're going to look at different tests and functional testing and looking at lab tests that we can use with our clients. And we will have learned some of that already in your assessments and diagnostics lecture. But we're going to look at the ones that are specifically for fertility. We're going to familiarize ourselves with assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF in semen in vitro fertilization or IUI. Just so that you understand the actual process of assisted reproductive technologies and how we can actually support our clients who are undergoing assisted treatment for fertility. And then we're going to look at how to boost fertility naturally. So naturopathic treatment, naturopathic things that we can use like nutrition, lifestyle to really boost fertility and looking at how we can support our clients through all the phases from preconception all the way through to pregnancy and then really importantly as well in the postpartum period. Because a lot of the times our clients will come to us, they might have had fertility issues, they'd be wanting to get pregnant, they'll will help them, we can assist them to get pregnant and they're like right I'm off I'm done and actually it's really important to work with our clients throughout the whole pregnancy stage as well and really important to work with them in the postpartum period because this is a time that where clients can really become depleted, where sleep is not you know where sleep is restricted, where they may be you know not having as they might not have as much support so they may not be nourishing themselves properly. And this is something that doesn't really get taught in any of the prenatal courses and everything's always geared around labor and birth, labor and birth in a bit of breastfeeding for example but the postpartum period is really crucial time for the mother to look after herself to recover from pregnancy and birth and to set her health up for you know future pregnancies as well but also you know for her future health like you know even during her menopausal years. So we're going to look at how to support our clients through all these phases through like their reproductive years and we're going to look at some things that we can help our clients with with regards to preparing for birth but also again focusing on the importance of postpartum care as well.