Food and Fertility: Getting Started

How Diet Affects Fertility

You’ve probably been hearing for years that what you eat and how you live affect the health of your heart and blood vessels, your chances of developing certain kinds of cancer, the strength of your bones, and more. What about fertility—can what you eat help you get pregnant? It certainly makes sense. After all, the reproductive system is subject to the same influences as the circulatory system, nervous system, and others.

Farmers, ranchers, and animal scientists know a fair amount about how nutrition affects fertility in cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and other commercially important animals. But until recently, fertility experts knew next to nothing about whether food and fertility are linked in humans. That hasn’t stopped folks from offering advice on what to eat to get pregnant. There are a few infertility diet books in circulation, and the Internet is rife with dietary advice for couples trying to get pregnant. But their recommendations—eat oysters, yams, kelp, and garlic; go organic; stop drinking coffee and alcohol—are scatter-shot approaches based on limited information.

The first systematic study of diet, lifestyle, and fertility has revealed several common-sense strategies, and at least one surprising approach, that can help women avoid ovulatory infertility. This type of infertility stems from trouble making mature eggs or releasing eggs at the right time. It is the single most common cause of infertility in America today.

This work is part of the landmark Nurses’ Health Study, the grandmother of research into women’s health. It is based on information supplied by nearly 19,000 women who were trying to get pregnant at one time or another over an eight-year period. The results were initially published in respected, peer-reviewed medical journals such as the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Human Reproduction, and Fertility & Sterility. Rather than have this information languish in medical journals, we decided to get it to the people who need it the most—women and couples having trouble getting pregnant. So I helped researchers Jorge Chavarro and Walter Willett, both of the Harvard School of Public Health, compile the findings, translate them from science speak, and add some recipes. The end result was The Fertility Diet (McGraw-Hill, 2007), which offers a natural way to boost ovulation and improve the odds of getting pregnant.

The plan described in The Fertility Diet doesn’t guarantee a pregnancy any more than in vitro fertilization or other forms of assisted reproduction. But it helps restore the balance of hormones essential for reproduction provides a nutritionally receptive environment for conception and the survival of a fertilized egg. The Fertility Diet focuses on:

• avoiding harmful fats and choosing healthful ones
• switching to whole grains and other slowly digested carbohydrates
• eating more vegetable protein, like beans and nuts, and less animal protein
• taking a multi-vitamin that contains folic acid and other B vitamins, and getting plenty of iron from fruits, vegetables, beans and supplements (not from red meat)
• picking the right beverages
• getting into the “fertility zone” for weight and exercise
• and for women who drink milk or eat dairy foods, choosing the best ones

In the Nurses’ Health Study, women who said their diets or lifestyles included five or more of the ten steps described in The Fertility Diet were 84% less likely to have had ovulatory infertility as women who didn’t practice any of them.

The steps we describe are virtually free, available to everyone, and have no negative side effects. They work for women who have neverf had a child as well as for those experiencing secondary infertility. Best of all, they set the stage for a healthy pregnancy and form the foundation of a healthy eating strategy for motherhood and beyond. That’s a winning combination no matter how you look at it.

I’ll outline the plan in installments that focus on different parts of a fertility boosting plan, from fats and carbs to beverages and exercise. First up: Fats and fertility.