IMPROVING DIET FOR FERTILITY: COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES

April 23rd, 2009

Carbohydrates include sugars and starches. They are an important source of energy and are all eventually broken down in your body into the simple sugar, glucose. There are two types of carbohydrate – complex and simple. Complex carbohydrates include grains (such as wheat, rye, oats, rice, barley and maize), beans and pulses (such as lentils, chickpeas and kidney beans), and vegetables. Simple carbohydrates include white and brown sugar, honey, fruit and fruit juice.

To optimize your health, you should eat plenty of unrefined complex carbohydrates. This means choosing brown whole meal bread, brown rice and brown pasta, instead of the refined white versions which have been stripped of essential vitamins, minerals, trace elements and valuable fibre content. (In order to digest these refined foods your body has to use its own vitamins and minerals, thus depleting your stores.)

Simple carbohydrates, in the form of fruit and dried fruit, certainly have a place in a healthy, balanced diet. But it’s important, for your health and fertility, to maintain a steady blood sugar level. For this reason, you should avoid sugar, honey and undiluted fruit juice, which can all produce a sudden rise in blood sugar, followed by a sudden fall.

Soya

Soya is being studied extensively around the world for its effectiveness in lowering cholesterol and preventing cardiovascular disease. It also appears to have an important role to play in balancing male and female sex hormones. Scientists believe that hormonal imbalance and over-exposure to chemicals that have oestrogen-like qualities may be one reason for the rapid increase in breast and prostate cancers over the last couple of decades. Crucially, this hormonal dysfunction and overload are also implicated in the menstrual and reproductive problems that affect fertility.

Soya is classed as a phyto-oestrogen, which means that it contains substances that act like hormones. These phyto-oestrogens fit into oestrogen receptors in the breast and block them, effectively shielding the body from exposure to oestrogen which is believed to be one of the major causes of breast cancer. Studies of Japanese women, who traditionally eat a great deal of soya, suggest that it may protect them from this disease.

Oestrogen is not only implicated in breast cancer but is also believed to play a part in causing other problems like endometriosis, fibroids, and heavy and/or long periods – all of which can affect female fertility.

Some women have problems conceiving because the second half of their menstrual cycle, just after ovulation, is shorter than it should be. This ‘luteal phase defect’, as it is known, means that there is not enough progesterone at the right time to maintain a pregnancy. Scientists have found that if they add soya to a woman’s diet it can lengthen the cycle by 2.5 days.

For all these reasons, it’s well worth adding soya to your diet – perhaps in the form of soya milk and tofu (soya bean curd, often used in Oriental stir-fried dishes). However, you need to ensure that the soya used to manufacture these products is not genetically modified, so buy organic.

So, for optimum health, you should eat plenty of:

• Essential fats (nuts, seeds and oily fish)

• High-fibre foods (fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds)

• Complex carbohydrates (whole grains, beans, pulses and vegetables)

• Non-GM organic soya

*27/73/5*

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