Food and fertility

**Disclaimer:  I'm not a medical or dietary expert.  I don't have any double-blind, randomized controlled trials to support any of the info in the post.  I'm a scientific experiment with n=1.  ;)


A few years ago I listened to a talk given by Dr. Boyle, a NaPro physician from Ireland, on his observations connecting diet and fertility.  If you're interested, you can listen to it and view the slides here (it's the second one listed).  It's also a great overview of NaPro in general.

I was really intrigued by the concept that what you eat—or what you don't eat—can help improve fertility.  He talked about several of his infertile patients who did not become pregnant after exhausting all of the treatment options he offered.  These same patients made some changes in their diets and then conceived.  He tried to figure out what specific diet changes these women had in common and started to investigate various diets.  He wanted to give his other patients the option to adjust their diets in the hopes of improving fertility and immune function, and he settled on recommending gluten free (GF) and dairy free (DF), with these optional changes: no refined sugar, no legumes, less red meat, and more fish/chicken/fruits/vegetables.  I remember thinking that I could never live with a diet like that.  I love pasta.  I love bread.  I love milk.  I love cheese.  (the list goes on)  I was seriously impressed that there were women who would be willing to try such a diet—what a sacrifice!  But I was even more impressed that something as simple as diet could help a woman become pregnant.

Now I know he frequently uses food intolerance tests to determine what foods a woman should remove from her diet instead of necessarily recommending GF/DF for every patient.  That made sense to me:  eliminate only the foods you're intolerant to and see if it improves fertility.

Fascinating, right?  This was all great for my curious mind to learn, but it was purely academic and abstract.  There were "some" infertile women out there who needed to give up certain foods to conceive.  This didn't apply to the infertility clients I was working with at the time; they all ended up with successful pregnancies going the "traditional" NaPro route (no diet changes involved).

Then enter polkadot, the infertile.  Now the thought of giving up something as monumental as gluten wasn't seeming as impossible as before.  Before infertility, I did not quite understand the motivation you find once you're having difficulty conceiving.  Still, I was not going to rush into anything that meant I had to give up my beloved bread....and cake...and cookies...and ice cream.  ;)

At that point, we had been TTC for four months without success. After six months, you can start working with a NaPro doctor.  In the mean time, I wanted to do something that might help our fertility while we waited.  I think I was most impatient to conceive during those early months before I was even labeled as IF!  After learning a bit more from various sources, I decided to do my own experiment:  I would go GF/DF for a month.  In retrospect, adding a bunch of vitamins or supplements would have been a much easier experiment to do.  hahaha  However, I was convinced that going GF/DF had a fair possibility of being beneficial.  If I didn't become pregnant, then any change (vs. no change) in my chart would be the gauge of whether my experiment was having any effect.

DH was understandably skeptical.  I explained to him the reasons for thinking this was not a crazy experiment.  He reluctantly agreed that we'd try it for one month.  He wasn't about to change his diet, but he did a lot of the cooking so he would have to learn along with me.

I remember the night well; it was the week before Thanksgiving.  I would start my GF/DF diet the next day.  I am not normally so decisive or so quick to implement change.  For some reason, this was different.  Anyway, since it was such short notice for me, I wasn't prepared...at all.  Not my brightest hour.  hahaha  It was late so we didn't want to go to the grocery store that night.  Somehow I scraped together enough food to eat the next day.  Then I began the massive undertaking of learning what foods were okay and what weren't.  Grocery store trips were truly a group effort. :)  It took forever reading labels.  I threw mini tantrums when a perfectly good food would have one banned ingredient... ;)  I really should have done all of that research ahead of time and planned meals to eat.  Instead I just jumped in and hoped I wouldn't starve.  ;)  I don't recommend this approach at all!  hahaha

I was really not expecting what happened next.  I was hoping for either A) a pregnancy or B) zero change (so I could go back to happily eating all my favorite foods).  What I got was actually C) none of the above.

I think pictures convey it best.  Here's a typical cycle from my chart before any diet changes:

I had cervical mucus all day, every day.  Up until that point, I had used less than five green stamps (dry days) in several years of charting.  It was yellow stamps all. the. time.


Here's my chart the cycle when I started GF/DF (on day 9 of the cycle):

Look at those beautiful green stamps!!!!  I was practically giddy that I could use so many green stamps in the same cycle!  DH was as shocked as I was to see that.  Remember I said he was really skeptical at the diet change idea?  By the end of that first cycle, he emphatically said to me, "You need to stay GF/DF!"  Now I was secretly hoping to become pregnant after making these diet changes, which obviously didn't happen, but seeing how my chart changed really encouraged me.

Eventually I wanted to put a little more structure to the science experiment I was doing on myself, so I had food intolerance testing done.  Since I had eliminated gluten and dairy at the same time, I didn't know if it was one or the other or both which was causing my chart to improve.  While I was in the midst of the hormone profile last year (which meant frequent lab trips), I had the blood drawn for the food intolerance test during one of those visits to the lab.  Even though I knew Dr. Boyle only had his patients do testing with a smaller number of foods (~40), I ended up choosing the test panel with 100 foods because I suspected some specific foods that were in the larger panel.  Based on a few recurrent symptoms I had been tracking (headaches and stomach aches), I was pretty confident that dairy and either strawberries or bananas would be on the list.  I was hoping (really hard) that gluten was not on the list.

A few weeks later I received my results.  There was no way I could have been prepared for it.  DH opened the letter before I got home and called me to warn me that the list was longer that we thought...

Here's my list:

Severe intolerance:  beef, tea, sesame
Moderate:  chicken, turkey, potato, shrimp, tuna, banana, peanut, coffee, soy, gluten
Mild: strawberry, blueberry, grape, cherry, lamb, string bean, whey (dairy)

At first I was surprised at some of the foods on the list, especially the meats.  But then a light bulb turned on in my head...all of a sudden it made complete sense that those foods were on the list.  I frequently would have mild stomach aches after meals, and I had ALWAYS blamed it on either the food being too greasy (pizza, spaghetti, tacos, meatloaf, hamburgers, etc.) or that I simply ate too much (or, in the case of coffee or tea, drank too much at once).  Stomach ailments are common in our family, so I just figured I had a sensitive stomach or mild GERD or something similar.  After getting the results, I realized it wasn't the greasiness or the amount that was the problem; it was actually that my body was intolerant to the food itself.  That explained so much!  (And I realized that I had totally been in denial about how often I had a stomach ache...)

To help improve the food intolerance, I was supposed to completely avoid each food in the severe or moderate list for at least 3-6 months before attempting to reintroduce it.  I started the elimination diet gradually, and over time I have been able add back most of the foods on a limited basis.  The gluten and dairy intolerance are the exceptions...there's no schedule to add them back.

So will these diet changes improve my fertility?  I don't know, but they definitely made my chart look much better, so I am hopeful.  Aside from fertility, I don't get headaches or stomach aches from food anymore, which in itself is a happy ending for me and made my little experiment worthwhile.