Can nutrition affect IVF success?

Yes, I actually do think it affects IVF success because during the process of IVF again you’ve got this very complex IVF drugs, you’re stimulating your ovaries. Normally, an ovary will produce one dominant follicle a month and it’ll pop an egg out into the fallopian tube and off you go and Bob’s your uncle, hopefully it gets fertilized maybe not. Obviously with IVF, mostly they’re trying to push the ovaries to produce as many mature eggs as possible and that requires extra nutrients. So things like protein, you’ve got to watch your protein. There are lots of studies on the use of milk and protein powders. Milk is an interesting one actually. I myself, if somebody isn’t intolerant of dairy or there are proper reasons why they shouldn’t have milk. I’m afraid not liking it is not a good enough reason for me but if it makes them sick. I think the research on milk during stems is very interesting. It seems that full fat dairy does impact IVF outcome and if you think about it, it’s probably multiple reasons for this. Milk is for growing baby animals bigger – that is its main function. So it must contain well, it does – it contains growth factors. Do these growth factors act on the follicles? Do they help the follicles mature? Do they help the eggs mature? Full fat milk has got fat soluble vitamins in it like vitamin A and beta-carotene. We know beta-carotene impacts the way ovaries work. Beta-carotene is found in orange vegetables and dark green leaves. If a cow, I’m very keen on them being organic, eats organic grass and clover and things like that, it’s very rich in beta-carotene so, it will go into the cow’s milk and then we’ll have it and it’ll go into us and it seems to be very good for all our ovaries both the cow and humans. Different essential fatty acids are in full fat milk. If you take the fat out of milk and you make it just skimmed, you’re going to have the protein, you’re going to have the calcium but you’re not going to have those complex array of nutrients that I’ve just talked about and also estrogen. It’s an estrogenic food product and estrogen again is fat soluble so you take it out of, take the fat out of the milk and you’ve lost a lot of those nutrients that potentially may impact your IVF outcome. So I’m quite a fan of that. I use whey protein powder, quite a protein rich diet but not loads of meat actually. I am not a great fan of big meat eating diets during fertility treatment and again, your antioxidant rich foods. You want to protect your eggs from damage, that’s what antioxidants do – they’re like your army of cell protectors basically against the free radicals which are on the other side. We need our free radicals actually for implantation and also for sperm fertilization but if we have too many free radicals and not enough antioxidants which come from our diet, we get cell damage and that’s egg damage. So again, we’ve got protein, we’ve got all the things in milk, we’ve got our antioxidant rich diet with lots of carotenes and I also give people flaxseed powder because there’s lots of really interesting.
I tend to look at animal research quite a lot because the fertility of animals is financially very beneficial so there’s lots of research into how. Bull sperm, sperm of breeding males, male animals has been far better research than sperm of breeding men. A bull, a good bull’s file of bull sperm is worth a fortune and those farmers know how to feed those bulls, they know the things that they’re meant to eat to get good quality sperm and the same with with dairy cows – you know they undergo IVF essentially, they don’t just meet some nice bull in the field – they just have to have IVF and because they constantly have to lactate so their ovaries get hammered and we know from research that flax which contains compounds called lignans, lignans also seem to  be very good for the ovaries. So lots of human research around IVF looking at whole grain consumption because whole grains contain lignans but flaxseed powder is very high in lignan so, I tend to give people flat just get them to have it in their breakfast but the research on lignans is very good round IVF. There are a lot of answers to that. I do believe that diet impacts IVF outcome.