I wasn't always interested in preconception health. For most of my twenties, I was a kid skeptic. Someone who believed we had no business bringing children into an increasingly uncertain world. I had intellectual reasons, ethical reasons, ecological reasons. Kids felt irresponsible.
Then something shifted.
I started to see the world's hardest problems differently. Not as things one generation solves alone, but as challenges that demand the next one be ready. And for them to be ready, they need to be healthy. My wife was a quiet, steady voice through all of this, grounding what I was learning intellectually in something simpler: the power and importance of family.
In my professional life, I was training in functional oncology nutrition, digesting complex health histories and recognizing a pattern: by the time most people seek help, the damage is decades deep. I kept asking the same question: what if the real leverage point is earlier than anyone is looking? That led me to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, and everything clicked. The research wasn't abstract. It was a blueprint for exactly what my wife and I were about to do.
So we ran the experiment on ourselves. We started with functional labs. The results were humbling. We weren't as healthy as we thought. Over the next 10+ months, we treated our bodies like the preparation mattered. We changed how we ate, how we moved, what we were exposed to, how we slept. We tracked, adjusted, and stayed deliberate the entire time.
The result: a healthy daughter. Living proof that thoughtful preparation matters.
That experience became the foundation of everything I do now. Nobody was coaching men in the preconception window. So I built a practice around it. Because the choices a man makes in the months before conception aren't optional details. They're among the most important variables he controls.
The answer is simple: it's the biggest gap in modern medicine.
Men contribute to roughly half of all infertility cases. But when couples struggle to conceive, the conversation almost always starts and ends with her. She gets tested. She gets coached. She makes the changes. He maybe shows up for a semen analysis and hopes for the best.
This is a failure of the system.
Sperm health isn't static. It's built over a 74 day cycle called spermatogenesis. Every round of sperm production is shaped by what a man eats, how he sleeps, what he's exposed to, and how he manages stress during that window. The sperm used for conception are a direct product of the months leading up to it. But almost no one is teaching men what to do with that information.
Fertility clinics focus on diagnosis and treatment. Urologists focus on pathology. Primary care focuses on blood pressure and cholesterol. Nobody is focused on the modifiable inputs: nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, and environmental exposure.
I built Mandrake to fill that gap.
Whether you're actively trying to conceive, planning ahead, or working alongside a fertility clinic, the process starts in the same place: understanding what actually moves the needle.
Most men have never been taught how their daily choices shape sperm health, reproductive outcomes, or the long-term wellbeing of their future children. That's the first thing that changes. I help clients see the science clearly, rethink assumptions they didn't know they had, and build a plan they can act on.
That plan is built on the S.P.E.R.M. framework — a structured, evidence-based system grounded in reproductive physiology, epigenetics, and behavior change. It covers the five domains that matter most: what you eat, what you're exposed to, how you move, how you recover, and how you manage stress. Every client works through the same framework, but no two plans look the same, because every man's biology, lifestyle, and timeline is different.
I find the highest-leverage changes you can actually sustain, and hold you accountable until they stick.
The process starts with a short application. I'll review your situation, your goals, and whether we're a good fit. No pressure. Just clarity.
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