Lifestyle Choices, From Diet To Supplements

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.

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.