Eating A lot of Beef May Affect Son’s Sperm
“In sons of ‘high beef consumers’ (more than seven beef meals/week), sperm concentration was 24.3 percent lower,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Human Reproduction.
The team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York studied data on the partners of 387 pregnant women in five U.S. cities between 2000 and 2005, and on the mothers of the fathers-to-be.
Of the 51 men whose mothers remembered eating the most beef, 18 percent had sperm counts classified by the World Health Organization as sub-fertile.
“The average sperm concentration of the men in our study went down as their mothers’ beef intake went up. But this needs to be followed carefully before we can draw any conclusions,” said Shanna Swan, who led the team.
Well, I’m glad that I’m not trying to conceive any time soon with this news looming over my head.
I have tried before to be a vegetarian. It doesn’t work for me. Even when I try to go for a couple of days without eating meat, I have a hard time actually sticking to my plan.
Being a rancher’s daughter, I think that beef consumption is in my blood. Chris could probably live off of chicken for the rest of his life, but I get very tired of it. And very tired of cooking also.
As I’m thinking now about the sperm quality of my son, which is very hard to do in the first place, I’m very glad that he was born to his Africa mommy. If he would have been born to me, I would have been racked with guilt that if he had fertility problems, that they would be my fault!
Maybe I’ll stick to having seafood tonight instead of a steak or nachos as I had planned. Just because.
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