Picture this…
You just got married to the love of your life. You both are sitting down to open wedding presents from friends and family. There is one gift in particular you have to open first because of the odor it is emitting. You unwrap it to find a fermented cod liver full of oil…what kind of gift is this?!?!
This was a typical wedding gift in historical native tribes that cared deeply about young people’s fertility. The oil from fish or shark livers is full of fat soluble vitamins that are great for fertility, pregnancy and building healthy children. These cultures would often put the young women and maybe even the young men on a particular fertility diet before marriage to ensure that their bodies had plenty of nutrients for childbearing. They understood that nutrition is the foundation for fertility.
Nowadays to think about your nutritional and health status in regard to fertility years before it’s time to start thinking about having a baby is very rare. Worse yet, a common pre-marital practice is to start taking birth control medications which depletes a lot of important nutrients that you need in order to conceive.
When it comes to fertility we often think that if we just have regulated hormones everything will work fine. So we go on a search to find what will ‘fix’ our hormones.
“Maybe I should lose weight”
“Maybe I should gain weight”
“Maybe I should exercise more”
“Maybe I should see a chiropractor/massage therapist/acupuncturist etc
“Maybe I should get more sleep”
Yes, all these things can affect our healthy d hormones but we won’t make much progress if we don’t address the foundation of our hormones status which is nutrition and what we eat.
Every single cell in the body depends upon nutrients to do its job. If these cells are not working, the organs can’t work properly and if our organs aren’t working properly they can’t produce and regulate hormones properly.
Therefore, when our hormones are out of balance we need to wonder what our cells need.
Consider how important some of the following nutrients are
Zinc - needed to make stomach acid which we need in order to break down food. Without proper stomach acid we can’t effectively get the minerals out of food (including zinc). It’s an ugly catch 22.
Zinc plays a big role in hormone balance and even a small deficiency can result in infertility. Zinc is involved in the creation and release of eggs from the ovaries.
Magnesium - important for the production of estrogen and testosterone.
Vitamin A - needed for cell growth and differentiation. A deficiency can impact the quality of the egg, implantation and embryo development.
Vitamin D - involved in hormone production and embryo implantation.
What nutrients are we lacking?
Is our diet providing enough fat to keep the cells protected and happy?
Are we eating enough protein for essential building blocks for every cell?
Are we drinking enough water to maintain healthy cell to cell communication?
All of these are good foundational questions to ask if we are noticing imbalanced hormones and decreased fertility.
So if nutrients are the foundation for fertility will a prenatal cover all the bases?
Well actually, no.
A prenatal can’t make up for an unhealthy diet. Plus most prenatals have synthetic forms of vitamins.
For instance most prenatals use beta carotene as the form of vitamin A but most people can’t convert enough beta carotene to retinol palmate (the active form of vitamin A) to supply all their needs (and the baby’s needs once you do conceive).
Therefore the food you eat at every meal needs to be nutrient-dense.
Follow along as I begin a blog series on my top ten nutrient dense foods for fertility and pregnancy!
