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 Compared to women who generally avoided fast food, women who
indulged four or more times a week before they conceived took almost
a month longer to become pregnant, the study of 5,598 first-time
mothers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK found.
Overall, 2,204 women, or 39 percent, conceived within one month of
when they began having sex with their partner without contraception
and 468, or 8 percent, experienced infertility and failed to
conceive after 12 months of trying.
While women who rarely or never ate fast food had an 8 percent risk
of infertility, the risk was 16 percent among women who ate fast
food at least four times weekly.
"Fast foods contain high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, and
sometimes sugar," said lead study author Jessica Grieger of the
Robinson Research Institute and the University of Adelaide in
Australia.
"Although these dietary components and their relationship to
fertility has not been specifically studied in human pregnancies,
higher amounts of saturated fatty acids were identified in oocytes
(an egg cell in the ovary) of women undergoing assisted reproduction
and studies in mice have demonstrated that a high fat diet had a
toxic effect on the ovaries," Grieger said by email. "We believe
that fast food may be one factor mediating infertility through
altered ovarian function."
Roughly 1 in 10 women of childbearing age have difficulty getting
pregnant. Most of the time, it's caused by problems with ovulation,
often related to a hormone imbalance known as polycystic ovarian
syndrome (PCOS). Some signs that a woman is not ovulating normally
include irregular or absent menstrual periods.
Less-common causes of infertility in women can include blocked
fallopian tubes, structural problems with the uterus or uterine
fibroids.
The risk increases with age, and can also be exacerbated by smoking,
excessive drinking, stress, an unhealthy diet, too much exercise,
being overweight or obese or having sexually transmitted infections.
Women in the current study were typically overweight and most of
them ate fast food at least twice a week, the study team notes in
Human Reproduction.
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Researchers also looked at how often women ate fruit and found that
those who had it less than once a month took half a month longer to
become pregnant than women who ate at least three fruit servings a
day.
With the lowest fruit intake, the risk of infertility was 12
percent, compared to 8 percent with the highest fruit consumption.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how the amount of fruit or fast food women consume might impact
their fertility. Another limitation is that researchers relied on
dietary questionnaires women completed during prenatal visits that
asked them to recall how they ate in the month before they conceived
- a method that isn't always accurate.
"A lot of maternal lifestyle factors are associated with
infertility, like smoking, alcohol drinking or obesity," said Dr.
Joachim Dudenhausen, a clinical professor of obstetrics and
gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
The current study offers fresh evidence of the role diet can play in
helping women conceive, Dudenhausen, who wasn't involved in the
study, said by email.
"There are some studies showing that preconception intake of fruits
and fish increase fertility," Dudenhausen said. "The study is in the
same line and has clear data supporting the advice for women who
wish to get pregnant to have greater intake of fruit and lower
intake of fast food."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2Ic3Y6R Human Reproduction, online May 4,
2018.
(This version of the story has been refiled to adds dropped comma in
paragraph 6 and corrects year to 2018 in Source line at bottom)
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