Lifestyle Choices, From Diet To Supplements
Dietary Patterns and Fertility
Video Lesson
Experts you'll learn from
Instructor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Associate Professor
Harvard School of Public Health
Reproductive Fertility Specialist
Nova Fertility
Director, Male Fertility
Stanford School of Medicine
Written Lesson
Check out the summary and checklist.
Mediterranean Diet’s Impact on Fertility
The degree to which maintaining a healthy diet improves both partner’s ability to conceive is astonishing. Here we’ll take a hard look at how adhering to a traditionally healthy diet improves fertility and, in the next chapter, we’ll contrast that to rates of success amongst couples that consume high levels of fast food. Unfortunately, a lot of fad diets (keto, paleo) undermine a woman’s ability to conceive - we’ll cover these closely in our video tutorial.
Conceiving on the Mediterranean Diet
Amongst women trying to conceive naturally, Spanish women who most closely adhered to a Mediterranean diet (high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, fish and low consumption of non-fish meat) were 46% more likely to conceive than women who more loosely adhered to the diet.
Fertility Treatments and the Mediterranean Diet
The same held true amongst women undergoing IVF, where this phenomenon was documented in 100+ Dutch women. Those who stuck with a Mediterranean diet were 40% more likely to conceive during an IVF cycle than women who had the loosest adherence to the diet.
Mediterranean Diet for Men’s Fertility
The same is true for men, as those who most loosely adhered to a Mediterranean diet were far more likely to record low sperm counts, motility, or rates of abnormal morphology.
Diet for Men’s Fertility Amongst IVF Patients
Despite the data above on how adherence to a mediterranean diet improves male semen parameters, amongst couples undergoing IVF, the data is less conclusive that male diet correlates with outcomes. One study conducted at Harvard on 214 men adhering to eight different dietary types (Trichopoulou Mediterranean, Alternate Mediterranean, Panagiotakos Mediterranean, Healthy Eating Index, Alternative Healthy Eating Index, American Heart Association, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, and Plant-based diet) showed no significant correlation between male diet type and live birth rates.
Profertility Diet
Another diet with interesting data as it relates to IVF outcomes is the “profertility diet,” which tends to emphasize seafood over meat, low pesticide fruit over high pesticide fruit (see here), an increase in soy or dairy intake and healthy levels of supplemental folic acid, B12, and Vitamin D.
As you can see below, women with the highest adherence (pre-treatment) to the profertility diet notched higher rates of IVF embryo implantation, pregnancy and live birth.
Fast Food Diet
On the other end of the spectrum, women who consume a fast food diet four or more times per week (a relatively low bar) are significantly more likely to have fertility issues (unable to conceive after 12 months of trying) compared to women who rarely eat fast food. Below you can see the varying levels of infertility based upon fast food consumption in over 5,000 women in a superb study run out of Australia. In the next lessons we’ll cover the effect that meat and fatty acids can have on fertility.