3 Simple Nutrition Tips that Will Improve Your Reproductive Health

Natural Womanhood FABM FAM Fertility Awareness Based Methods NFP Natural Family Planning Health Nutrition

It seems like evidence mounts daily for the myriad effects that diet and exercise can have on our overall health and well-being. For women especially, there is evidence to suggest that the things we eat can have a big impact on our fertility.

For example, a recent, very small study indicated that the Mediterranean diet could be effective in helping women have more successful IVF experiences. Nutrition is no less important for couples seeking conception with natural options such as NaProTechnology and Organic Conceptions.

Of course, you don’t have to be trying to get pregnant to care about the effect of your nutrition on your fertility. You don’t have to follow some fancy diet to a tee to improve your reproductive health either. By following a few basic, mindful nutritional principles, you might just improve your fertility without too much effort at all—and I’m speaking from experience!

When I was in college, I started dating my now-husband. At the time, he was a medical school student with a passion for good nutrition, and he shuddered to find all of the low-fat milk and sweetened yogurts in my fridge, and the sugar laden-cereals, and jars of low-fat peanut butter in my cabinet. At the time, I couldn’t understand why! But he was so adamant that I needed to eat more full-fats and eat less sugar, that he offered to even take me to the store and buy my groceries for the week—on the condition that I bought items he approved of, of course. As a poor college student, I was just happy to have a little extra wiggle room in budget, so I agreed.

To my great surprise, I did not get fat from eating fat! In fact, I found that I got fuller faster, and stayed satisfied longer when I ate full-fat, plain yogurt instead of the low-fat sugary stuff. My taste-buds even changed; when I went home for a school break and had a sweet Yoplait yogurt from my parents’ house, I ate one bite and tossed it—it tasted sickly sweet!

Later on, after we were married and trying to get pregnant, I got even more serious about eating good fats like those found in full-fat dairy products, egg yolks, and meat, and decreasing my sugar intake. It didn’t take long before I saw the benefits in my reproductive and overall health—not to mention dropping a pant size. So, based on my own personal experience and the research I’ve done on diet and fertility, here are three simple rules that I believe can set anyone on the path to better reproductive health.

1. Lower your sugar intake.

Sugar has been under a lot of fire lately, and perhaps rightly so. Along with the usual suspects of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, there is now good evidence to suggest that too much sugar can wreak havoc on your hormones, too. For example, it is now believed that insulin resistance can be a major contributor to the development of PCOS. And guess what may cause insulin resistance? You guessed it, excess blood sugar levels from high sugar consumption. And while the root causes of endometriosis are still under investigation, the known effects of sugar on the body—like inflammation, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome—suggest that sugar could be a culprit in that condition, too.

The trouble is, sugar is positively everywhere. Gary Taubes’ 2016 book The Case Against Sugar does an excellent job detailing the history of the sugar industry in America over the last century, including how fat was often used as a scapegoat for health issues that may actually be caused by sugar. Reading The Case Against Sugar and learning to read nutrition labels helped alert me to where hidden sugars were lurking in my food where I least expected it. You can make a huge difference in the amount of sugar you consume daily by eating whole, minimally processed foods like meats, veggies, fruits, and dairy, limiting your intake of simple carbs, pre-made condiments, and dressings, and ditching sugary drinks like sodas and sweetened lattes.

2. Increase your healthy fat intake.

While low-fat foods may have been all the rage in the 1990s and early 2000s, it’s good to see that the tide in nutrition advice is shifting in favor of full-fat products. And why is that? For women especially, good fats are essential to proper hormone production and balance, all of which promotes good reproductive health.

That’s right, ladies: fat is your friend! So seek out smaller quantities of full-fat yogurts, milk, cheeses, and so on. and ditch the low-fat stuff. Getting rid of your “low-fat” labeled foods will likely also help you cut out sugar, since a lot of low-fat products have added sweeteners to make them taste better.

3. Ditch the trans fats.

There is simply nothing good about trans-fats. Trans-fats, or trans fatty acids, are a type of unsaturated fat almost always industrially produced and is intended to give foods longer shelf lives. Their consumption is strongly linked with the development of heart disease, and now research suggests that trans-fats may be associated with infertility, too—and it doesn’t take consuming very much of them to see damage. A very small amount of naturally occurring trans-fats are found in some meat and dairy products, but it’s the artificial trans-fats—listed as “partially hydrogenated oils” on nutrition labels—that you really need to look out for (even if the box or wrapper says “No trans-fats” doesn’t mean that the product is free of all partially hydrogenated oils). The good news is that avoiding processed foods, and eating healthy fats and foods low in sugar should naturally help cut out most of the trans-fats from your diet, too.

These three no-nonsense nutrition tips can improve your reproductive health, without requiring adherence to a fancy diet or meal-subscription service. So if you’re a woman looking for some simple ways to improve your reproductive health, in addition to avoiding hormonal birth control and learning a fertility awareness based method, I suggest that you begin taking a mindful approach to the things you eat, and start making these easy changes today. Start small—like ordering an unsweetened, whole milk latte instead of your usual low-fat mocha—and go from there. Before long, you might just realize that you don’t miss the sugary stuff after all—and that you feel better, too.

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