Couples that struggle to conceive children have options to help them, including in vitro fertilization.
Seattle clinical dietitian Judy Simon says those options include good nutrition. Simon is a clinical dietitian and instructor at the University of Washington and co-author of a book called “Getting to Baby.” She’ll give a talk tonight at 6 at the Hemmingson Center on the Gonzaga campus.
“For the last 20 years, I have just really focused on preconception, how we can help people build healthy families, have healthy pregnancies, and help the next generation. And nutrition is really foundational,” she said.
Simon tells SPR’s Doug Nadvornick that one-in-six women who want to have children have a hard time conceiving.
This interview is lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Judy Simon: I learned from the reproductive endocrinologist, and this was kind of just came out in maybe the 90s, early 2000, that a lot of these women had something called insulin resistance, similar to prediabetes, despite their size, whether they were in larger bodies or smaller bodies. And so we were learning, well, what medications, but then we started learning about lifestyle, and that's where nutrition came in.
So how could we help these women? And the more we learned about the reasons they were struggling to get pregnant, we found, how could nutrition reduce inflammation? How could it reduce oxidative stress? How could it provide the nutrients that could help both men and women be healthy? Because it all starts with the gametes, the eggs and the sperm, and we want them to be healthy.
Doug Nadvornick: Think about different diets, keto diet, Mediterranean diets, and all that sort of stuff. Do diets like that sometimes go off the beaten path as to what we're used to with a normal diet? Can they affect reproductive health?
JS: Absolutely. Yeah. So there's been a number of studies. One of the first ones that came out in 2007 was the fertility diet study, where they looked at the nurses' health study, which is this rich data set of thousands and hundreds of thousands of nurses that they follow over their lifetime at Harvard and they have data from them every year.
So they looked at women who were trying to conceive and they found dietary and lifestyle patterns that predicted 87% success in conception. And those are like really basic things like drinking water instead of sugar sweetened beverages more often. They ate more plant foods. They had less of transferred acids in their diet. So really what these behaviors really led to is kind of a more plant forward diet. It didn't mean it had to be vegetarian. And then fast forward to a lot of the international studies. There were Dutch studies and diet studies. And we kept finding the same patterns, so couples who ate more fruits and vegetables, less sweet.
One thing that came up a lot was frequency of fish and seafood. So couples who had fish and seafood two to three times a week had a shorter time to conception.
Looking at dietary patterns has really given us a lot of good information. And the good thing is these recommendations are healthy for everyone.
DN: Is nutrition becoming a more regular part of the consultation between OBGYNs and their patients?
JS: Absolutely. Yeah. A couple of the questions you can ask, even in a wellness visit, and bringing up preconception, even saying, hey, right now, this might not be on your radar, but did you know that if three months prior to trying to conceive you and maybe a potential partner, healthy eating behaviors can have an impact on the quality of the egg those 90 days before. And for guys, they make new sperm every 70 to 80 days.
So they have a lot of options. They can cut down on alcohol and smoking. They can go to the doctor and get their blood pressure or their cholesterol checked because with men, their sperm are really a reflection quite often of their health.
And so if they have a healthier diet, healthier lifestyle, you know, limiting or avoiding cannabis, smoke, you know, sleep stress, all those kinds of healthy things are much more likely to have better sperm quality. And that goes on for a longer age than women.
With women, we haven't figured out anything to turn back the clock. But that 90 days, three month window of thinking ahead, like, hey, maybe before you stop birth control, you might want to work on lifestyle habits. And then those positive antioxidants can help that fluid around the egg and help to have the best quality egg.
