All Your Eggs In One Basket.
If you’ve been through IVF like I have you’ll know that a lot of hope and emotion is spent on how many eggs get collected on collection day and that the older you get, quite often the lower this number gets. It’s super annoying when someone says ‘it only takes one’ (heck, I’ve even said it to someone myself!) but the fact is, it’s true. When it comes to fertility, we’re all looking for that one golden egg.
So, what if you were to turn all that focus of getting a certain number of eggs into instead doing your best to work on the quality of a few? I’m not saying food is the cure-all (a lot of factors go into creating healthy eggs) but it goes a little way towards giving your eggs the nutrients they need to be able to perform their best too. “A food ingredient alone can not ensure the treatment of infertility, but changes in diet may increase the likelihood of fertilization.” (Delimaris & Piperakis, 2014).
A review published in 2020 found that when it comes to nutrition and reproduction, “refined carbohydrates should be avoided and care should be taken to achieve proper intake of omega-3 fatty acids.” I’ll take a look at some food sources of omega 3-fatty acids in an upcoming post. The review also found that “for men, antioxidant measures are especially effective.” Don’t forget that what a man eats today is potentially going to have an affect on sperm quantity and quality in 90 days time (due to the sperm life cycle). Let’s check out antioxidant food sources in a future post but as a heads up, there’s loads of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables.
A paper looking into preconception nutrition found that “Women of reproductive age, especially those who are planning a pregnancy, should be counseled to consume a well-balanced diet including fruits and vegetables, calcium- rich foods, and protein-containing foods daily and increase their consumption of iron-rich or iron-fortified foods in conjunction with vitamin C–rich foods to enhance iron absorption.” (Gardiner et al, 2008)
A 2016 review noted that “Even though we are far from identifying a “fertility diet”, lifestyle and dietary interventions might represent a promising and invaluable strategy to manage infertility in premenopausal women.” The review goes on to comment that “nutrition and lifestyle changes are still one of the most promising and invaluable interventions in preserving human health and women fertility.”(Fontana & Della Torre, 2016).
So try not to put all your eggs in one basket thinking about numbers, focus on what nutrient dense goodness you can add to your meals today to give those eggs a helping hand.
References
Delimaris, I., & Piperakis, S. M. (2014). The Importance of Nutritional Factors on Human Male Fertility: A Toxicological Approach. Journal of Translational Toxicology, 1(1), 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1166/JTT.2014.1006
Fontana, R., & Della Torre, S. (2016). The Deep Correlation between Energy Metabolism and Reproduction: A View on the Effects of Nutrition for Women Fertility. Nutrients, 8(2), 87. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu8020087
Gardiner, Paula M. et al. (2008) The clinical content of preconception care: nutrition and dietary supplements. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 199, Issue 6, S345-S356 https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(08)02076-0/fulltext