Answer from:
This is always a difficult one when it comes to vitamins and minerals so, compared to drugs, we don’t have a regulatory body to control how much they are in supplements. We have the recommended nutrient intakes but when it comes to supplements, we don’t have specific numbers so, I would always think a normal supplement – not a very high dose supplement would be more than enough.
Answer from:
Well we’ve talked about it before. Everybody always talks about folate. It’s mandating folic acid into flour and so one of the last countries actually to to take that on board and it’s been a very controversial thing putting folate into flour but it does seem that it’s going to happen because it is so important and the research on folate for both male and female fertility seems to be fairly compelling. So that’s so and that’s back to your green leafy vegetables. If you’re having, I mean, this is what I always say: if you’re having unprotected sex, you really need to take folic acid. If nothing else, you need to take folic acid but even if you’re not, you need to eat your beans so, that’s probably my mantra: to eat your greens. So folate, zinc – very important, long been known that zinc deficiency affects hormone production. Because we’ve got such a lot of, it’s such a busy world of stuff that goes on, we’ve got all our hormones and they’re very complex reproductive hormones. Men’s reproductive hormones are a bit more simple (testosterone) but women, we’ve got our luteinizing hormone, FSH our estradiol, progesterone and it’s also complicated and this hormonal axis needs fueling with the right cofactors and these are nutrients in our food. So if we don’t eat properly, we might skip a period, we might have very heavy periods, we might have very light periods – all sorts of things can happen and certainly zinc, vitamin E – again found in healthy foods, nuts, seeds, vegetables again. Long been known – since Roman times, that vitamin E was somehow important for fertility. They knew that it was related, so before they even discovered vitamins weirdly. We’re sort of back to our mediterranean diet and not impacting our eggs and our sperm with basic basically crap food.
