New research has found that eating less meat and more fruits and vegetables may improve fertility. But does a vegan diet—which contains no meat, poultry, seafood, dairy, or eggs—boost fertility even more . . . or is it taking a good thing too far?
The evidence is building that vegetables are a smart fertility food, and that means vegetarians—including vegans—may have some fertility advantage. And as long as women following the more restrictive vegan diet take some precautions, a no-animal-products diet appears to be perfectly safe for women’s health and fertility, and for pregnancy.
“If this type of diet means less heart disease, less diabetes, less cancer, it’s no surprise to me that you’re going to find it leads to less infertility,” says Susan Levin, R.D., director of nutrition education at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit organization that promotes health through nutrition.
Though experts have suspected that a vegetable-rich diet is better for fertility, results from the large scale Nurses’ Health Study, published in 2007, provided some needed support for the theory. The study found that women who received more protein from vegetables than from meat had a significantly lower rate of infertility caused by ovulatory problems than those who ate more meat. Ovulatory infertility accounts for as many as 25 percent of all infertility cases.
As exciting as the research is, some experts warn about basing recommendations on it. “The data from the study is very interesting and intriguing, but this is an observational study, not a randomized controlled trial,” says Alex J. Polotsky, M.D., assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and women’s health in the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. It didn’t, in other words, take women who were unable to get pregnant and ask them to follow a vegetable-rich diet to see if it improved their fertility compared to those who stayed the course. So it’s possible that other factors could have explained their fertility risk.
Yet there may be several reasons why vegan/vegetarian diets have some fertility advantage. For one thing, vegetarians tend to weigh less than meat-eaters, and vegans are even lighter. And there’s good evidence that being overweight or obese decreases fertility.
Also, animal protein tends to be high in saturated fats, which can increase insulin resistance, a known culprit in infertility. When there’s more insulin circulating in your body, it can affect the hormones that regulate ovulation, explains Jorge Chavarro, M.D., lead author of the Nurses’ Health Study and author of The Fertility Diet (McGraw-Hill, 2007). Insulin resistance is one component of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), another leading cause of infertility in women.
Meat, poultry, and fish also contain chemicals such as dioxins, which are known hormone disrupters. Vegetables, on the other hand, contain more protective antioxidants.
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