Patrick Holford and nutritional therapist Susannah Lawson show how you can support your health to increase your chances of conceiving quickly for a trouble-free pregnancy and a healthy baby.
When we spend so much of our lives trying to avoid getting pregnant, it’s natural to assume that conceiving is a piece of cake. Often it can be. But sometimes it isn’t, as is evident by the one in six couples who today experience fertility problems.
The good news is that we now know if you get yourself ready by following some basic steps, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of getting pregnant when you want to, with a healthy baby to show for it. For a woman, what you do in the month leading up to conception, when you are maturing that auspicious egg, is the most critical. For the man, it takes up to four months to make new sperm from scratch, so they have to be good for a little longer!
Fertility and the speed of conception depend on many factors – some psychological, some physical, some nutritional and some environmental. For example, conceptions are very high during holidays since stress has a major impact on fertility. Knowing how to time sex to coincide with ovulation (where the female egg is released to be fertilised by the sperm) also greatly increases your chance of conceiving. But most of all, your nutrition, especially your vitamin and mineral status, plays a crucial role.
It has been estimated that only one in twenty people in Britain genuinely receives adequate amounts of all vitamins and minerals to meet the European ‘recommended daily allowance’ (RDA). And we don’t even consider these ‘RDA’ levels to be optimum. But while a diet lacking in all you need may not actually make you infertile, it could make you ‘sub-fertile’ and reduce your chances of getting pregnant. A marginally fertile woman trying to have a baby with a man with a low sperm count, for example, may not be able to conceive.
So anything that can be done on either side to improve fertility increases your chances of getting pregnant when you want to and also increases your chances of having a super healthy baby. You don’t just need to be fertile. You need maximum fertility.
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• Hatching healthy eggs
• Tune up your sex hormones
• Why the right fats are essential
• Limit the impact of ageing
• Protect yourself from ‘anti’ nutrients
• Weight matters – fertility decreases in both obese and skinny women
• Is too much stress reducing your fertility?
• Maximise your fertility by lowering Your homocysteine
• Wannabe parents over 30
• Know when to try
• Still having problems conceiving?
• References
