Diet And Sperm Count

In a country like India, it is odd that we should have so many couples going to doctors complaining about their inability to have children.

A number of men, predictably, put the blame on their wives. But when family pressure forces them to take tests, then it is usually the man who has a low sperm count. This is not God’s will, as the family priest would say. This could be a direct result of your diet.

Diet has a huge impact on sperm count and its quality. Diets high in meat and dairy are not just bad for waistlines, they have a negative impact below the waist. They lower sperm count, size, shape and concentration.

Advice from doctors, to men with fertility problems, ranges from stopping smoking, wearing looser underpants, keeping laptops away from laps and having less sex so that the sperm build up. But the most important part involves the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The Director of the Men’s Health Clinic, Wake Forest University, Dr. Ryan Terlecki says that “We’ve noticed that fertility has been decreasing over the last several decades. Most men have never even heard that anything in their diet could impact sperm count.”

A large body of research suggests that the foods you pile on your plate may play a role in the number of sperm you have (count), whether they’re normally shaped (morphology), and how well they move (motility).

In 2006 a paper presented by Kochman, Herko, Brewer, Andolina and Song from the University of Rochester showed the link (“Dietary antioxidants and sperm quality in infertile men: Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine”): Infertile men were twice as likely to have a low intake of fruits and vegetables compared with fertile men. Specifically: men with the lowest intake had lower sperm motility than men with higher intakes. Simply eating fruit and vegetables improved fertility. A 2011 Brazilian study found that men who ate more whole grains – such as wheat, oats, and barley – had higher sperm concentrations.