The Fertility Diet: Groundbreaking Research Reveals Natural Ways to Boost Ovulation and Improve Your Chances of Getting Pregnant [Hardcover]

Jorge Chavarro (Author), Walter Willett (Author), Patrick Skerrett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2007

Could having the occasional small bowl of ice cream lead to a midnight craving for pickles and ice cream?

It's common knowledge that diet and exercise have profound effects on your health. Can they affect your ability to get pregnant, too? Until now, the answer to that question was a qualified "Maybe." Today, it's "Yes!" thanks to exciting findings from a landmark long-term study of female nurses. As described in The Fertility Diet, ten simple changes in diet and activity can have profound effects on fertility. You can increase your chances of getting pregnant with such simple strategies as:

• Avoiding trans fats
• Eating more beans, nuts, and other fertility-boosting plant protein
• Embracing whole grains such as oatmeal and barley
• Having a glass of whole milk or other full-fat dairy product every day (a small bowl of ice cream every now and then counts, too!)
• Staying away from sugared sodas

The Nurses' Health Study exhaustively examined the effects of diet and other lifestyle changes on fertility among nearly 20,000 female nurses. It scrutinized everything from alcohol to vitamins. In plain language, two of the study's lead researchers translate its groundbreaking findings into changes you can put into practice today, setting the stage for a healthy pregnancy and forming the foundation for an eating strategy that will serve you well for the rest of your life. The Fertility Diet also offers a week's worth of meal plans and fifteen delicious recipes.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (November 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071494790
• ISBN-13: 978-0071494793
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #417,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jorge Chavarro, M.D., Sc.D., earned both master's and doctoral degrees in epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he is currently a research fellow studying the role of diet and lifestyle on reproductive function.

Walter C. Willett, M.D., Dr.P.H., is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is one of the leaders of the influential Nurses' Health Study, as well as the author of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

Patrick J. Skerrett is coauthor, with Walter Willett, of Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. He is the editor of the Harvard Heart Letter.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (November 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071494790
• ISBN-13: 978-0071494793
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #417,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

308 of 343 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Might Cause More Harm than Good December 12, 2007

By Julia Indichova

Format:Hardcover

In 1992, I was in desperate search of a miracle cure for my furiously rising hormone levels, which - according to a well-documented study - reduced my remaining childbearing years to zero. At the time I was eating close to the recommendations of The Fertility Diet: whole milk products, brown rice, tofu, poultry, nuts and fruit, multigrain bread, an afternoon desert and coffee. Yet there I was, at forty two, going into premature menopause with several endocrinologists proclaiming my "ovulatory infertility" to be beyond repair.

One day, in a last-ditch effort to prop up my wilting ovaries, I resolved to raise the bar on my eating habits. The first food I eliminated was dairy. My decision to do so was inspired by my chronic sinus headaches. Several sources indicated a strong correlation between milk products and high levels of congestion. Amazingly, after three dairy-free weeks, my sinus headaches vanished. And eight months later (following a regime of additional diet changes and rigorous self-examination) I conceived a baby girl. After publicly sharing my story, I received hundreds of e-mails from women who emulated my process with similar results.

Notably, in 1994, the year of my daughter's birth, a large scale study in the Journal of Epidemiology, surveyed women in over 35 countries, showing that those in countries with the highest milk consumption experienced the sharpest, age-related drop in ovarian reserve. Women between the ages of 35-39 reported the highest rate of declining reproductive function. Some experts proposed that this delayed impact might've been caused by the cumulative toxic effect of galactose on ovarian germ cells.

No, not everyone needs to give up dairy to become pregnant.... Though a substantial body of clinical research documents the adverse effects of dairy on endocrine and immune health.

Overall, for the reader who has not done extensive prior research, many of The Fertility Diet recommendations can be dangerously misleading. Consider this: "It has been hard to keep up with the fortunes of soy over the last decade..." followed by: " don't turn up your nose at tofu... or ignore soy milk..." If you're going to write a book, entitled, The Fertility Diet, you might care to do what it takes to keep up with the fortunes of soy. Women with irregular ovulation might in fact, do best to turn up their noses at tofu and soy milk. Non-fermented soy products have been linked with impaired thyroid function. Not a desirable condition for an aspiring mom.

Or here is another equally troubling recommendation: "Drink coffee... and alcohol in moderation...we didn't see any effects on fertility at moderate levels of caffeine intake, which is the equivalent of three to four cups of coffee a day." The interested reader will indeed find a number of sources documenting the adverse affect of caffeine, including higher miscarriage rates, increased blood pressure, excessive urinary excretion of magnesium, potassium, and calcium (essential nutrients for maintaining a healthy pregnancy) to name a few. The followers of Dr. Chavarro's guidelines might want to take note of an alarming piece of research* that points toward larger risk of mammary and bladder cancer among coffee drinkers on a high fat diet. And if none of these findings were convincing enough, when attempting to create a most welcoming environment for new life, wouldn't it make more sense to abstain from ingesting a substance that leads to physical dependency serious enough to result in withdrawal symptoms?

What about the suggested curative effect of ice-cream and whole-fat-dairy? Tinkering with the natural proportion of elements within a food system has been known to spell trouble. Thus, whole fat foods are for the most part healthier than their low-fat counterparts. But the claim that whole-fat milk products in particular are responsible for reversing ovulatory imbalance is highly misleading. Looking at the original study, one could also easily surmise that women who eat low fat dairy, are likely to be chronic dieters with fluctuations in weight. And such fluctuations have been known to result in impaired hormonal health. The reason that even one serving of low-fat foods is shown to increase the risk, is not the milk, but the fact that it marks a particular personality trait, and relationship to food in general.

In the last fourteen years of counseling people with ovulatory issues, I have found that eight out of ten women have digestive difficulties. I wonder about the effect of - a four cheese soufflé, a few cups of coffee, a glass of wine, fruit desserts and nuts and berries for an evening snack, to name but a few suggestions in the back of the book - on an already compromised digestive system.

Oh, yes, many readers might miss the irony of the lovely image of two peas in a pod on the jacket of the book. At first I thought it was an odd, but interesting, conscious choice. Until I found them listed in one of the charts without any mention of their damaging effect. Peas, you see, are not quite the libido lifting edibles you want to mix into your husband's, or your own dinner salad. At least not if you're trying to have a baby. They are one of the few vegetables known to have contraceptive properties.

By no means do I mean to imply that scientific research is to be dismissed. But in case you're tempted to wait for the Harvard sequel (Dr. Chavarro has assured us that "Plans are underway to conduct a...study to test the diet in a more scientifically rigorous manner") to determine your menu, here is something I learned observing hundreds of people who conceived robust babies, often in direct contradiction of current food science dogma. When it comes to something as dynamic, and mysterious as a human organism, as complex as food, and as miraculous as creating a life, nothing can replace the value of doing your own thinking and the solid science of direct observation.

* Int J of Cancer (1983) 32:479-84 Read more ›

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars it works. August 17, 2010

By M's Mom

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book taught me that, contrary to what many of us have been led to believe, fats are not evil. We women of fertile years NEED fat. Not too much, of course, but having enough is essential to ensure our bodies are working properly. My husband and I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant for quite some time. I considered myself a healthy eater who led a healthy lifestyle. I had been a follower of a "clean" diet (See Tosca Reno's Eat-Clean Diet books--great for staying trim, and I still recommend them to people to teach them to avoid processed foods), and I exercised regularly, being a personal trainer as well. Reading this book opened my eyes to the need to incorporate more fats into my diet in order to boost my fertility. I ate ice cream, I drank milk that wasn't skim, and I followed other aspects of this "fertility diet" in the hopes I would prove the doctors (including the fertility specialists) wrong, that we COULD and WOULD get pregnant on our own.

I was almost at my wit's end. Since I had begun tweaking my diet as the book suggested, my period had returned so I thought I was having cycles again. However, the "experts" still said pregnancy was nearly impossible since there was such a ridiculously slim chance I could be ovulating. The last statistic I was given was that I had a slim 4-5% chance of getting pregnant without an egg donor only if I was on hormone replacement therapy, but zero chance without. Meanwhile, I skipped yet another cycle. I thought it simply meant they were right, that I was going through menopause at the age of 28. This time, however, I was pregnant! I had been on the fertility diet for about 2 months, and now, almost a year later, I have a very healthy, beautiful, 4-month old baby girl.... Not only that, but my cycles have been fairly regular since having her. Before pregnancy, I could expect to get maybe 4 or 5 periods a year. I have high hopes that not only has this book helped us have a child when we thought the only way for us to be parents was through adoption or an egg donor, but that we can get pregnant again when the time is right.

Let me add that I had never begun taking fertility drugs of any sort. Each doctor I saw just ran tests and then sent me to yet another specialist. The last doctor who handed me the last statistic was only looking at test results from two and a half months prior to me seeing him and was waiting to run his own tests. He was so sure of his diagnosis of premature ovarian failure that he failed to run a pregnancy test to rule out that possibility! Had he run another test to check my hormone levels, I wonder what he would have found (other than the pregnancy).

If you are trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, you MUST read this book! Read more ›

143 of 186 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Book Contents Do NOT Align With Study Data December 6, 2007

By Regina Wilshire

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

If researchers from Harvard University - Dr. Jorge Chavarro and Dr. Walter Willett - had merely published their data and encouraged additional study to validate their findings, I'd have nothing to write about today. In fact, I may have penned a quick post about the study since it did find some intriguing associations between diet and risk of infertility in women participating in the Nurse's Health Study II.

But, they didn't simply publish a paper. No, they also published a book - The Fertility Diet - that is now featured on the cover of Newsweek and also being touted in the media as the low-tech, do-it-yourself way to prevent and even reverse ovulatory infertility!

Worse though is the media advancing the findings in a way that implies the dietary strategy has been tested in infertile women!

Take a look at how MedScape opened their article - "Higher intake of monounsaturated fats; vegetable protein; and high-fiber, low-glycemic carbohydrates improved fertility outcomes in women with ovulatory disorder infertility, according to the results of a cohort study reported in the November issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology."

The data is not from women who specifically had a diagnosis of ovulatory dysfunction (irregular or absent menstruation). Rather, the data was from a cohort of women within the Nurse's Health Study II who were identified as actively trying to get pregnant during the period of follow-up data collection. That is a very different cohort of subjects than one exclusively made up of women with infertility, or a cohort designed as a comparison study of women with and without fertility issues due to ovulation!...

But the thing that really irks me is the media falling all over itself to highlight one finding in particular, the supposed reduction of ovulatory dysfunction if women follow the dietary strategy outlined in the book - "their research shows that women who follow five or more of the tips could boost their fertility by up to 80 percent," is how the Boston Channel presented it.

Charles Platkin (Diet Detective) wrote, "In fact, the Nurses' Health study showed that those who did not follow a healthy diet were six times more likely to experience infertility related to ovulation than women who did."

Oh really?

How about we look at the published data - let's look specifically at those cases with ovulatory disorder infertility published in the study:
Diet Score .Cases .RR (95% CI)
Q1 (lowest) _117 _1.00
Q2 _100 _0.68 (0.52 - 0.89)
Q3 _77 _0.65 (0.48 - 0.87)
Q4 _80 _0.53 (0.40 - 0.72)
Q5 _42 _0.34 (0.23 - 0.48)

Do you see a six-fold difference between Q1 and Q5? I didn't think so!

Do you see an 80% greater chance of pregnancy in those in Q5 than those in Q1? I didn't think so!

And as an aside - I don't get is how in Q4 they reported more cases of infertility, yet managed to report a lower RR? Anyone want to help me out with that one?

Anyway, I was scratching my head, trying to figure out how they came up with these incredible numbers - statistics being used to heavily promote the book right now - and they're in the study all right, in a theoretical computer model (which should be called a fantasy search for significance) run with different scenarios of possibilities, not data of real women eating in the real world!

As the researchers noted in their paper, "we calculated the population attributable risk associated with specific combinations of dietary and lifestyle factors to estimate the proportion of cases that may have been avoided had all the women in this cohort adhered to these habits."

So now, rather than state these numbers are based on computer models and are, at best, theoretical - they're promoting the book as if it's fact that the dietary strategies actually work.

And they're doing it in a way that is promoting the idea that a woman with ovulatory dysfunction can fix it herself, without medical intervention, and get pregnant on her own.

To say this is a travesty for women's health is an understatement!

Just when you think it's not possible, it really does get worse.

If the promotion of theoretical as fact isn't bad enough, here is a real hard fact that should send chills up your spine - while the majority of cases of ovulatory dysfunction are attributed to PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), a large enough number are due to hyperprolactenemia, usually cased by a small tumor at the base of the brain. Yet, the book has absolutely no warning to women that a diagnosis for the cause of ovulatory dysfunction is critical before beginning the do-it-yourself diet approach.

Think about that for a moment.

Then consider that ovulatory dysfunction can also be due to disease of the pituitary, adrenal or thyroid glands. It can also be due to premature ovarian failure (premature menopause).

Without a diagnosis, you're flying blind as to cause and without any warning in the book about the many causes of ovulatory dysfunction, you may in fact be delaying critical medical intervention to resolve the problem if you simply take the book and run with the recommendations.

Oh and it just keeps going too. Also noticeably absent is any warning to women already experiencing ovulatory dysfunction that continuing to attempt pregnancy in the absence of regular menstruation is futile. In fact the book promotes the standard advice that one year of trying to get pregnant is recommended unless one is over 35, then six months of trying is appropriate before seeking a medical evaluation.

When a woman has a regular cycle, this advice is fine - when she has absent or irregular periods, she's wasting precious time continuing along and trying without a diagnosis because without ovulation there cannot be a pregnancy!

One recommendation in particular can also be problematic for a woman already experiencing ovulatory dysfunction - the recommendation to increase iron intake. You see, if the researchers who wrote the book bothered to look at the literature, they'd have learned that women with ovulatory dysfunction often have elevated stores of iron. As the researchers in the above linked study noted, "Because the periodic blood loss resulting from regular menstruation protects pre-menopausal women against excessive iron accumulation, oligomenorrhea and amenorrhea might contribute to the increase in ferritin observed in overweight and obese PCOS patients. When studying PCOS patients and control subjects as a whole, ferritin levels were increased in women with amenorrhea compared with women with regular menstrual cycles, whereas women with oligomenorrhea presented with intermediate values (means ± SD: amenorrhea 159 ± 144 pmol/l, oligomenorrhea 114 ± 95 pmol/l, and regular menstrual cycles 83 ± 51 pmol/l; F = 3.295, P = 0.040)."

Also of note is the fact that in the book they recommend reducing saturated fat intake to less than 8% of calories.

Where, pray tell, is the data to support that recommendation?

It certainly isn't in their published paper. In their published data, the women with the lowest risk of infertility not only consumed the highest level of total fat, but their intake of saturated fat was also higher than the other groups - in fact, their saturated fat intake accounted for 11.5% of calories.

But hey, let's not let the actual data get in the way of recommendations that align with the author's previous book, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy!

While we're at it, where is the data to support eating less meat? Their published data found absolutely no difference in heme iron intake between the various groups - none at all - yet they're promoting the idea that reducing red meat in the diet is going to make a difference in getting pregnant. Their data does not support this idea; and add to that this idea has not even been tested in women attempting to get pregnant, yet that doesn't stop them from making the recommendation.

Worse though (can it really get worse?) is the inclusion within the book of the politically correct idea that reducing or even eliminating red meat is better for the environment - who needs data when you can convince women to limit or eliminate red meat on emotion.

If you're a woman wanting to get pregnant, do you want to based your diet on politically correct advice or hard evidence?

Do you want to make changes to your diet based on theoretical computer models, or data from studies that have actually investigated how a change to diet improved pregnancy rates in those participating in the study?

As Albert Einstein once pointed out, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Stupidity or just plain old ignorance contributes greatly to the millions of people who succumb daily to the latest or most heavily promoted "facts" generated by epidemiologist's findings concerning diet. Today it happens to be diet and fertility, tomorrow it'll be diet and aging, the next day diet and cancer.

The problem though, with such data from epidemiological studies on diet and lifestyle, remains (and will forever remain) that correlation does not imply causation. I don't know how many times that can be repeated, but it is true and will always be true. Just as it is true that eating red meat does not cause ovulatory dysfunction anymore than consuming high levels of non-heme iron prevents it. Just as consuming regular ice cream does not make you fertile anymore than restricting saturated fat to less than 8% of your calories will make you get pregnant.

That the media is heavily promoting this book only tells us one thing - they don't understand science, the scientific method, or the difference between correlation and causation. And they certainly have not read the study in full and then compared it to the book's recommendations.

No doubt the findings are intriguing, but they do not make a proven strategy or evidence-based approach to prevent or reverse ovulatory dysfunction.

What they do provide is a starting point to actually test the dietary strategies in women with ovulatory dysfunction. Until those studies are conducted, the book is merely speculation, potentially a waste of precious time or worse for a woman with ovulatory dysfunction.

On this book I have to strongly suggest taking a pass and instead do what's best - go to the doctor if you're having problems getting pregnant or have irregular or absent periods. Without a diagnosis, you're flying blind on assumptions - it's better to have a diagnosis and tackle the problem based on facts rather than guessing what's wrong. It's true that you can make changes in your diet and see improvement, just as it's true that if your ovulatory dysfunction is caused by a tumor your diet isn't going to make a difference. Read more ›