Fertility: 6 Lifestyle Choices That Impact Your Reproductive Health

Maintaining a healthy weight, getting regular exercise, and eating foods that help with conceiving, are all important for fertility.

Diet is one of the most important lifestyle elements that may have an impact on the reproductive rate. A diet consisting of processed foods, sugar, and saturated fats as well as a few other lifestyle choices might cause hormonal imbalances and impaired fertility. Two crucial measures of population growth and the general well-being of society are the fertility rate and reproductive health. Albeit, each of these signs can be significantly impacted by lifestyle factors like stress, food, and exercise.

Fertility expert Dr Suparna Bhattacharya of Nova IVF Fertility East in Uttam Kumar Sarani, Kolkata, advises expecting parents that making the right lifestyle decisions is crucial for both easy conceiving and healthy development of the fetus during pregnancy. The health expert emphasizes the significance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle in order to avoid any issues in the future.

6 LIFESTYLE CHOICES THAT CAN IMPACT YOUR REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

1. Unhealthy Diet: Consumption of high amounts of junk food is one such unhealthy lifestyle choice that can have a detrimental impact on an individual’s health and can affect both male and female fertility. Even doctors recommend patients lose weight, gain weight depending on a particular case, or follow a certain diet for a healthy pregnancy.
2. Obesity: It can cause disruptions in a female’s menstrual cycle, ovulation irregularities, or even for the worse can lead to a failure of monthly egg release. It can also lead to a complicated pregnancy resulting in preterm birth, gestational diabetes, or even maternal hypertensive disorder.
3. Being Underweight: Women with lower body weight than usual indicate a BMI lower than 18. Underweight one can experience menstrual disorders and delayed or missed periods for a long period which impact their reproductive health.
4. Use of Tobacco: Apart from having an obvious potential risk of cardiovascular or lung disease, tobacco holds more than. It can affect both male and female reproductive health. Men who smoke are reported to have an overall decreased sperm quality. Females who consume tobacco are more likely to have a decreased egg count as well as highly prone to miscarriages.
5. Alcohol Consumption: consume alcohol is high levels are susceptible to the following undesirable health effects on their fertility decreased sperm count and overall quality of the semen, oocyte maturation failure, irregularities in the menstrual cycle, decreased rate of fertilization and implantation and sperm morphology abnormalities.
6. Other Factors: There are certain environmental factors that directly or indirectly affect one’s reproductive health:

• Stress – There is a lot that comes from work or personal issues that make it a mental load. In males, it has been found through a sperm analysis, that males who experience stress for a long period have a decreased sperm count. Similarly, the stress in females can cause an interruption in fertility treatment.
• Caffeine – Even though there is no significant clinical evidence of coffee affecting one’ s reproductive health. A female who is trying to conceive is advised to cut down on her dosage of caffeine to one cup a day to prevent any mishap during conceiving or the risk of a miscarriage.
• Drugs & Chemicals – Consuming drugs such as Marijuana can affect the male reproductive system severely affecting spermatogenesis. Toxic chemicals, street drugs, heavy metals, or pesticides can also hinder male fertility affecting the normal growth and development of spermatozoa.

Lifestyle factors can affect fertility rate and reproductive health. Regular exercise can help maintain a healthy weight, which is important for fertility, and also help to reduce stress, which could enhance fertility.