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Boost Fertility with Good Nutrition    

     by Cindy Bailey, Co-author, The Fertile Kitchen(tm) Cookbook

 

Diet makes a difference in your fertility! I know from experience. After trying to conceive for over a year, I visited a popular reproductive endocrinologist who said I had a 2% chance of conceiving on my own. Devastated, I decided to do what I could to be in that 2%. I would not give up!

After much research, I put myself on a fertility friendly diet and four months later I conceived. I didn’t need more evidence than that.

It makes sense, though.  How we eat affects our general health, so of course it affects reproduction as well.  

The premise of a fertility diet is to increase the availability of nutrients to support your reproduction, as well as your overall health, and also to eat to support hormonal health – because those finely tuned balance of hormones is so important to fertility and conception. 

To do that, you will need to get rid of the “bad” foods, which can overly tax or stress your body—foods (or substances) such as alcohol, caffeine, trans fat and processed sugar.  You’ll then want to keep or add in the “good” foods—foods such as beans, nuts, seeds, lean protein, a variety of vegetables and so on.

Here are a few dietary changes you can make to help boost fertility:

 

• Eliminate processed sugar. I know this can be hard if you have a sweet tooth. It doesn’t help that sugar is added to practically everything these days. But processed sugar negatively affects blood sugar and insulin levels, leading to hormonal imbalance. It also suppresses our immune systems and can cause inflammation.

 

• Cut down on processed foods. That’s everything that comes in a bottle, package or can. Most are full of additives, preservatives, trans fats and other substances that are just plain not good for you. Learn to read labels. Google an ingredient on the Internet if you don’t know what it is.

 

• Eat organic as much as possible, to avoid chemicals and, in the case of meat, growth hormones which mess with our own hormones negatively.

 

• Consume a variety of vegetables for all their wonderful nutritional value. Go for five servings a day.

 

Don’t forget to eat the beans! They are high in folate, which boosts fertility in men and women and decreases the chances of certain birth defects.  For a great  Spicy Garbanzo Beans  recipe, visit our website at Fertile Kitchen.   

This will make for a great start not only for better reproductive health, but for your general health too!

* Cindy Bailey is co-author of The Fertile Kitchen™ Cookbook: Simple Recipes for Optimizing Your Fertility.  She also writes for FertilityAuthority.com and is on the Advisory Board of TheBabyPlanner.com  To learn more, please visit http://www.fertilekitchen.com/