Andrew Huberman· PhD
So if you're young and healthy and you don't have metabolic syndrome, then caloric restriction will likely decrease your testosterone.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
So if you're young and healthy and you don't have metabolic syndrome, then caloric restriction will likely decrease your testosterone.
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That's correct. If you look at an individual in a caloric deficit, several changes will happen. One is that they'll have less building blocks for hormones. Another is that they will be in a catabolic state more often, so that balance of anabolism and catabolism will be different. They'll likely have less signaling from growth hormone and IGF-1, and they'll also have the high SHBG that we defined earlier as the binding protein, so their free androgens and free estrogens will go down.
If, however, a male is already lean, well, then actually increasing calories will increase testosterone. So it's a bit of a complicated story, although not so complicated that none of us can understand it. Basically, if you're overweight, you should focus on losing weight in order to maximize sperm quality and health. If you are very lean, well, then restricting your calories to the point where you are starting to lose weight or you're dropping even more body fat is unlikely to increase your testosterone further. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad or that you shouldn't try and go, for instance, from 15% to 10% body fat. I'm not saying that that's bad and that will reduce your testosterone. But in general, if you're already very lean-- so 10% body fat, 5% body fat-- and you start restricting calories further, your testosterone levels will drop.
There has been a study and they talk about all these studies in a systematic review from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. They note that there is a study in young healthy men and they chlorically restrict them and their testosterone does decrease.
If you're restricting calories, your testosterone is going to drop unquestionably.
Being very lean (<10% body fat) likely will start to negatively impact testosterone levels because of the chronic calorie deficit generally required to reach that level.