Male Fertility and Everyone Else: Eat Your Antioxidants

[Okay, my husband has voted for Adrienne's idea of the drill icon...it's it, for now.]

Many environmental factors can affect maturing sperm, as we’ve seen, something as simple as using your laptop computer as a laptop computer can have serious consequences for fertility. We’ll get into other environmental stresses—lead, cigarette smoke, marijuana, alcohol, radiation, prescription drugs, occupational toxins—in a bit.

The good news is that eating a healthful diet also helps maintain a healthful male fertility. We all have heard about about antioxidants…but what are they? I’m a nice person, should I be “anti” anything? Actually, oxidative stress occurs as your body tries to break down toxins. If you have more toxins that you can break down, things like cancer result. Or reduced sperm motility, quality, and quantity. It can even affect things at the DNA level—oxidative stress can switch on harmful genes that otherwise might be left alone.

However, eating a diet rich in antioxidants is plain good for everyone. ANTI oxidants help reduce excess oxidation…think of it this way, you leave out a nice iron skillet, it’ll rust—oxidize—right? But if you take care of it, it’ll last a good long time.

So what are antioxidants? A diet rich in highly colored fruits and vegetables is a great start. But because our earth’s soil has become so nutrient poor, especially in important minerals like selenium, it may be important to supplement these things in your diet. Folate, which a woman needs to stock up on like crazy before she becomes pregnant to prevent neural tube defects in the baby, is also very important for healthy sperm, and the American diet is woefully low on this nutrient as well. Of course, one visit to the supplement aisle at your health food store with its gajillions of supplements with a gajillion and one claims may be enough to send you running to the freezer section for a calming pint of organic Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

However, my doctor recommended a fertility supplement called FertilityBlend for Men. A few people on an email list I’m on use it, and so I checked it out for my husband.

I was pretty happy to see it contained all the major things I was looking for:

• The amino acid, L-carnitine, has been shown to be critical to the formation of healthy sperm. Vitamins C and E, green tea and selenium are all potent antioxidants that help improve sperm counts and quality.
• The antioxidant ferulic acid is found in Dong Quai, has also been shown to improve sperm quality.
• Ingredients zinc and B vitamins (B6, B12 and folate) are critical nutrients in male reproductive systems for several benefits, including hormone metabolism, sperm formation and motility.

Please note, I am not a health professional, and I am not recommending the use of any product nor guaranteeing that you will achieve conception with any of the suggestions I am offering here. I am only telling you what we are doing, and you can decide from there.

Here’s a link to more clinical information from its manufacturers:

http://www.fertilityblend.com/html/fertilityblend__optimize_repro7.html

Fertility blend is available in a number of drug stores like RiteAid. You can also find good deals at http://babyhopes.com/fertilityblendmen.html. The site also has links to lots of good fertility information, nice people, and the best, FREE downloadable ovulation predictor calendars.

Related posts:

1. Male Fertility: Protecting the Army
2. MALE Fertility — The Basics
3. Male Factor Infertility: Is He Less of a Man?
4. Exercise Addiction and Male Fertility
5. Fertility and Eating Disorders

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 8:40 am and is filed under Supplements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.