EAAC Best Of: Health and exercise help fertility

The importance of a healthy diet and exercise are becoming more and more evident, even in the world of infertility.

A recent article appearing on Reuters.com confirms that a healthy body can help lead to healthy embryos. The article, published on August 18th, explains that exposing eggs to high levels of fatty acids, often found in obese women, can harm the development of embryos leading to difficulties with fertility.

Information for the article comes from studies conducted by scientists in Belgium, Britain and Spain including Jo Leroy of the University of Antwerp. Preliminary findings came from studies conducted on eggs from cows, but in theory, can apply to humans as well.

“In cows we can induce very similar metabolic disorders leading to reduced fertility… and compromised egg quality,” Leroy said in the Reuters article. “This is one of the reasons that bovine eggs are a very interesting model for human reproduction research.”

Leroy and the other researchers published results of their full study on plosone.org and report that certain fats have “negative consequences” for those women trying to achieve pregnancy.

“We report that elevated NEFA concentrations, specifically Oleic Acid (OA), Palmitic Acid (PA) and Stearic Acid (SA), during oocyte maturation have negative consequences for the resulting preimplantation embryo, measured 8 days later at the blastocyst stage.”

Essentially, when eggs were exposed to high levels of fatty acids, they displayed decrease levels of oxygen, glucose and lactate which hindered their development.

While no cure has been found for the embryos exposed to fatty acids, Leroy recommends in the study that achieving a healthy weight is import before beginning a pregnancy.

Women struggling with infertility can also consider embryo adoption, a relatively new form of adoption where donor couples donate remaining frozen embryos to an adoptive couple.

To learn more about Leroy’s research visit Reuters.com or read the complete study at plosone.org.

To learn more about embryo adoption visit embryoadoption.org.

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