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Seven Steps to Increasing Your Fertility

You probably know that changes in diet and exercise can effect improve you heart and decrease your risk of cancer. But a recent study published in Obstetrics and Gynecology found that women who followed a combination of five or more lifestyle factors, including changing specific aspects of their diets, experienced more than 80 percent less relative risk of infertility due to ovulatory disorders compared to women who engaged in none of the factors. Ovulatory problems have been indentified in between 18 to 30 percent of infertility cases.

The study followed a group of over 17,000 married women who were participants in the Nurses' Health study based at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. The research team devised a scoring system on dietary and lifestyle factors according to information from previous studies found to predict ovulatory disorder infertility.

If you are worried about the risk of infertility or just want to keep your options open, here are the changes recommended:

1) Eat fewer trans fat and sugar carbohydrates, which tend to go hand in hand. According to the FDA 40% of the trans fat consumed by adult Americans come from cakes, cookies, crackers, pies, ect, so making steps to limit these things in your diet can make a bid difference.

2) Increase fiber and iron consumption. Have oatmeal for breakfast or a bowl of bran cereal. Oysters, tofu, molasses, and chicken liver are all high in iron.

3) Eat more protein from vegetables than animals. Experiment with adding beans, collard green, and kale to your cooking.

4) Take multi-vitamins, which is not a very hard change. Just leave a bottle on your nightstand or by the fridge, wherever it is that will remind you to take one.

5) Exercise more. The women who had the highest fertility rates in the study exercised more each day and more often overall.

6) Lower your BMI. In other words if your overweight you might want to consider going on a diet, although making most of these changes would probably help anyway.

7) Consume High Fat Dairy instead of low fat dairy. Surprised? So were the researchers.

The lead author of the study says that,%u201D we found a sixfold difference in ovulatory infertility risk between women following five or more low-risk dietary and lifestyle habits and those following none,%u201D so making some of these changes is worth doing.

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