Healthy Fathers, Healthy Families: Lifestyle Medicine for Preconception and Sexual Health

Presentation Summary: Men experience substantial and often underrecognized health disparities, including shorter life expectancy and higher mortality across most leading causes of death. A key driver is lower engagement with healthcare and preventive services beginning in late adolescence and continuing through early adulthood—often after the last school, sports, or employment physical—followed by re-entry into care years later with established chronic disease. This session addresses this critical gap by reframing preconception care as a strategic, underutilized entry point to engage younger men in health promotion and disease prevention.

Preconception care offers a uniquely relevant and motivating framework—family planning—to initiate conversations about lifestyle medicine in young men, including those not yet planning a family. These discussions provide a gateway to address foundational health behaviors such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, substance use, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, while also promoting preventive care such as STI screening and vaccination. Importantly, optimizing these factors has implications not only for erectile function and sexual health—often a strong motivator for engagement—but also for fertility, cardiometabolic risk reduction, and long-term health outcomes.

The session will synthesize current evidence on how lifestyle factors influence male reproductive and sexual health. Nutrition patterns, particularly diets high in alcohol, red and processed meats, are associated with poorer erectile function and reduced fertility, whereas whole-food, plant-predominant dietary patterns rich in antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids support endothelial function and sperm quality. Physical activity improves libido, testosterone levels, erectile function, and semen parameters, while also enhancing mental health and self-esteem, though considerations around excessive exercise and oxidative stress will be addressed.

Sleep quality and circadian health play critical roles in hormonal regulation, testosterone production, and reproductive function, while also influencing metabolic and behavioral regulation. Chronic stress contributes to erectile dysfunction and disrupts the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis, with emerging evidence linking stress-related epigenetic changes in sperm to intergenerational health effects. Alcohol, smoking, vaping, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as bisphenols, parabens, and microplastics further compound risks to sexual function, fertility, and offspring health.

Beyond individual outcomes, men’s lifestyle behaviors significantly influence partner health, pregnancy outcomes, and even the long-term health of future children through epigenetic mechanisms. The desire for fatherhood can therefore serve as a powerful catalyst for behavior change, supporting engagement in lifestyle medicine interventions that benefit individuals, families, and future generations.

This presentation will highlight evidence-based strategies for engaging men in preconception care, summarize key gaps in the literature, and offer practical approaches for integrating lifestyle medicine into reproductive and preventive health discussions with young men.