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Greening for Your Future Fertility

I have met dozens of families who suffered from infertility; then, like a switch, it was no longer an issue. The switch for many of these families seemed to be their first child. A few of the couples I knew adopted, others had IVF or fertility drug support, and still others just waited a long time, yet somehow their second, third, and even fourth children happened as if by magic. I think now it is because we make so many healthy changes for the sake of our children, and these changes improve the health of our whole family. Indeed, they can improve the health of our entire world and our future.

Fertility isn’t just a switch, however; it is a barometer of health, for women and for men. “To be fertile is to be in as balanced a state as a human can be,” says Dr. Spence Pentland, the TCM doctor and fertility book author. There are few losses more dear to a person than not being able to conceive the family of their dreams.

“I promise, you will be a mother,” a friend said to me while I floated in that space post-miscarriage and pre-child. I believed her. This friend’s path to becoming a mother had been a ten-year journey with multiple pregnancy losses and just about every known fertility treatment. Her point: that our journeys to parenthood may not be what we expect, but that for those of us with resources in the developed world, we have many options. While many of us crave the experience of growing a child in our womb and birthing her ourselves, there are many other paths to creating a family. I grew up in a family where not one of the four siblings claims the same set of birth parents: I know that we love children just as much whether we bare them ourselves or not. However we become parents, the process links us forever to our children. This is never more evident than in how we care for our health: by doing so — mothers and fathers — we care for our children. We know more everyday about how to achieve and restore fertility both as a baseline of our own health and to fulfill our dreams of family.

The Research

Few women know that about 25 percent of all women have experienced a miscarriage. One-in-six pregnancies end this way, with the incidence increasing with the age of the mother. It helped me to talk about my miscarriage because I soon discovered I wasn’t alone in this common experience. I also realized what the statistics verify: the majority of women who have miscarried eventually carry babies to term. Miscarriage is often caused by genetic defects — sometimes caused by environmental toxins — but rarely caused by something a woman did. In other words, it’s not the mother-to-be’s fault for eating the wrong food, exercising too much or too little, or having that glass of wine before she knew she had conceived. There are things, though, that women — and men — can do to help detoxify and prepare the body in preparation for the next pregnancy.

Infertility has nearly doubled in 20 years, effecting up to 16 percent of couples in Canada. It’s estimated that about 11 percent of women are infertile. It’s harder to estimate with men, but the research is clear that men’s infertility is on the rise and about 1 percent of men have no sperm in their ejaculate.

Fertility Is Also About Men

In conversations about fertility, it is often women that become the focus. Yet, when I was researching this book, the fertility experts I spoke with said it’s time to look more at the men.

Men are less fertile than they were a few decades age. The quality and amount of sperm is declining, and fast, while simultaneously there is a rise in male genital birth defects. In 2005, the largest study ever done on male fertility showed that counts fell by one-third in a 16-year period in over 26,600 French men. The study showed nearly a 2 percent annual decrease and took the average sperm count from 74 million per millilitre to about 50 million. The quality of sperm is also declining, so much so that the WHO has officially changed their definition of “normal” from greater than 60 percent healthy, un-deformed sperm in a man’s ejaculate in 1980 to just 4 percent healthy, un-deformed sperm. This dramatic shift in “normal” occurred in less than 40 years. While there is ongoing debate as to how much quality sperm is really needed to create a pregnancy — after all, it just takes one lucky sperm to create an embryo — what is clear is that more sperm of good quality increase pregnancy rates, and 4 percent isn’t much.

“Sperm is a great base line indicator of what is going on in the environment. Our sperm are sensitive to environmental toxins,” says Pentland. Indeed, the most comprehensive study yet done on specific environmental toxins and their effects on couples getting pregnant suggest that the male’s role is every bit as threatened as the woman’s, and perhaps even more sensitive to current exposures. The Longitudinal Investigation of Fertility and the Environment (LIFE) study followed 500 couples for 12 months as they attempted to conceive and measured their blood for the presence of 63 organic pollutants common in almost all North Americans and Europeans. The results suggested that greater exposures to certain environmental toxins did indeed affect the time to pregnancy. In women, the greatest associations were to persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including PCBs and perflourinated compounds. In men, the greatest associations, up to 29 percent reduction in his partner achieving pregnancy, were with an ever greater number of POPs, including seven different PCBs and one pesticide (DDE). These effects were so strong that in some cases they reduced fertility as much as age.

That’s not all. Low-quality sperm may increase the incidence of miscarriage, and, in viable pregnancies, sperm quality may be linked to conditions such as metabolic syndrome, diabetes, osteoporosis, and testicular and prostate cancer.

There is good news. These same studies suggest that male fertility responds to the same health practices as female fertility: practising proper nutrition, maintaining healthy weight, avoiding excessive alcohol consumption, limiting caffeine consumption, and using acupuncture and certain Chinese herbs. The nature of sperm also means that men may be able to improve their fertility faster and more dramatically than women. The long and short of it is that the health of the man is important in making babies, and good fertility practices for women are also vital for men.

The Fifth Vital Sign: Fertility Tracking as a Window to Health

The Justisse Method of fertility awareness is about more than preventing or achieving pregnancy, says Geraldine Matus, founder of Justisse Healthworks for Women and Justisse College. “It can be used as a window into a woman’s endocrine system,” the second most vital system after the central nervous system. “If the endocrine symptom isn’t working, you aren’t working.” Because of this, she considers a woman’s cycle the fifth vital sign, after blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate, and respiration rate.

“As soon as our reproductive health declines, our whole life health declines.” She compares the stresses that women face today to the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Wi-Fi, stress, dietary pollution, what are the stressors on the camel’s back that breaks a person? One person will say it is high fructose corn syrup and another lead in water.” Ultimately, “it’s epigenetics: the environment determines how the genetic information is realized.”

A Healthy Cycle Is About 28 to 35 Days

Cycles that include extreme pain, premenstrual syndrome, and extreme moodiness are signs that something is wrong with the system. It is possible to “see” what is happening with a woman’s endocrine system by tracking these three biomarkers: cervical fluid, basal body temperature, and position of the cervix, all of which only take a few minutes a day to observe and record.

A healthy woman with a healthy cycle can use the knowledge of her cycle to help achieve pregnancy. Conception is possible only on ovulation day, and a woman is only fertile the few days every cycle that she has cervical mucus. Preventing pregnancy naturally by charting her three biomarkers and practising abstinence during the windows when she is able to receive has been proven to be effective: up to 99.4 percent when followed perfectly. This is not the same as the rhythm method, which isn’t as effective because it depends on mathematical calculations to predict fertile days, rather than actually tracking the body’s indicators of fertility. You can learn more about fertility tracking and download an app to get started at www.justisse.ca.

If You Have Previously Used Hormonal Birth Control

If you have previously used hormonal birth control — and who hasn’t these days — you will likely need help recovering your optimal health, ideally before your next pregnancy. Hormonal birth control can deplete the body of key nutrients, including thyroid hormones and zinc, which are both crucial for reproductive health. “There is evidence that the longer a woman is on hormonal contraception, the longer it may take for her cycle to return,” says woman’s health writer Jennifer Block. “So if you [want] to be pregnant, think a year or two ahead,” she says, as it can take that long to be ovulating regularly. She cautions that many women have been on the pill since they were young to treat conditions such as irregular periods, endometriosis, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. “These women often then go off the pill and the symptoms return with a vengeance because the reality is that the pill hasn’t been treating the symptoms but masking them.”

“It’s a myth, this idea that hormonal birth control is harmless,” says midwife Geraldine Matus. She has seen hundreds of women struggle to rebuild their fertility after using hormonal birth control. “Being on the pill is not like being pregnant.” Hormonally, it is more like being perimenopausal or menopausal, a state that ages a woman quickly. It can take a few years of a woman tracking her fertility and working with a helper to recover fertility, but it is possible, says Matus. She recommends learning to track your fertility as a start.

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“One of the deficiencies of modern gynecology is that we aren’t effectively treating these conditions, we are just masking them with pharmaceutical hormones,” says Block. She cautions that many of these same women are later diagnosed with infertility and end up taking more synthetic hormones in order to get pregnant, and “we still aren’t treating their underlying health.” The answer is to plan well in advance to help restore your body to health.

Ten Steps to Overcoming Infertility

Dr. Spence Pentland is the author of Being Fertile and a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which is a degree akin to a medical doctor (MD) that usually involves about five years of post-graduate training, hundreds of hours of clinical practice, and provincial (or state) licensure exams. TCM doctors use herbs, acupuncture, diet, and holistic examination tools to assess the state of the physical and energetic body and create a plan towards balance. He is a father of three, and this appreciation and love of family has guided him to help others achieve their dreams of family. “I love treating fertility more than any other condition,” says Pentland, which is why he has made this his focus of for the past 15 years. He also conducts clinical research on IVF and acupuncture, and does research into the effects of environmental contaminants on fertility.

Pentland’s first bit of advice toward overcoming infertility is to use TCM: “Your body’s innate desire is to be balanced and healthy. Acupuncture gives it a helping hand.” There is a growing body of research to back these claims. A 2016 study done by the British Homerton University Hospital found that using acupuncture on women trying to conceive by IVF doubled their chances of conceiving: 46.2 percent of the treatment group conceived versus only 21.7 of the women in the IVF only group. Acupuncture for the father, though presently unstudied, seems likely to have positive effects as well.

His other nine steps include many of the topics covered in this book, including setting holistic goals that recognize fertility as a sign of whole body health, learning to listen to what your body is telling you, nurturing your spirit, using diet and supplements for both the future mama and papa to achieve health, partaking in enjoyable levels of exercise, becoming aware of fertility-taxing toxins and how to avoid them, being open to trying other forms of holistic treatment, understanding the assisted reproductive technology options and integrating them as necessary into your holistic health path, and remembering that men’s health and well-being is half the picture and that many of the same practices that will improve a woman’s fertility will also help a man. Two cautions: look for TCM doctors who are licensed by your province or state (www.aborm.org is a great place to start looking); and use herbs that have been tested by an independent third party for purity because, unfortunately, many imported Chinese herbs are contaminated. Find out more at www.yinstill.com.

Child Spacing

While many parents these days think of child spacing in terms of getting time off work or affording a large enough home, those wise in traditional ways say that child spacing is better determined by the health of the mother. The Weston A. Price Foundation, based on the work of dentist and anthropological researcher Dr. Weston Price, recommends at least three years as the minimal amount of time necessary for most women to be restored to full health and build back up her stores of important nutrients such as iron and folate. This advice comes from nutritional research as well as looking at traditional societies. The Mayo Clinic says that families should wait at least 18 months to reduce the risk of complications, such as problems with the placenta, preterm birth, and a low birth-weight baby. There may even be a link between shorter spacing and autism, according to one study that showed that second children were at a greater risk of autism only when the spacing was shorter than three years, and highest when siblings were spaced less than a year. The best spacing in biological terms may be between three and five years. Mayo Clinic research shows that after five years, certain risks such as preterm birth, low birth weight, and preeclampsia go back up. The reason for this isn’t known for certain.

Lighting and Fertility

The pineal gland produces the hormone melatonin in response to darkness and uses it to direct all sorts of your body’s natural rhythms, including sleep, appetite, and the onset of puberty. The hypothalamus, also located in the brain, regulates the hormonal system and is directly affected by melatonin. Also affected by melatonin are the ovaries and the testes. According to a review of numerous studies published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, regular darkness — eight hours every night — is important for both a woman’s fertility and for protecting the developing fetus. According to the research, every time you turn on a light — even a very dim light or a screen — it turns down the production of melatonin. Animal studies even suggest a link between behavioural problems in newborns and exposure to excess light in pregnancy, perhaps accounting for ADHD and autism behaviours. Studies also suggest links between disruption of darkness at night and obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Blue light — like what comes from screens and obnoxiously bright CFL, LED, and incandescent bulbs — has twice the negative effect on melatonin and the circadian rhythms as other light.

The solution to these effects is simple: don’t use your computer close to bedtime, and keep your bedroom nice and dark!

How to Green Your Fertility (for Men and Women)

Here are a series of action steps listed from ♥♥♥ (biggest impact, and possibly more work) to ♥ (quick and easy) to help improve your chances for pregnancy.

  1. ♥♥♥ Assess your overall health. Remember, fertility is about both partners. What is your daily stress level like? Are you exhausted or depressed? All of these are signs that your body may be under too much strain to conceive, or, if you do conceive, they may contribute to miscarriage or even developmental disorders in the child. If you are routinely exhausted, fighting depression, struggling with daily tension, having trouble sleeping, or struggling to gain or lose weight, you may be having issues with adrenal fatigue or even hyperthyroidism. The diet suggestions in this book may help, or you may want to seek out the help of a trusted healthcare provider to ensure your thyroid and adrenals are ready for the work of growing and nurturing a baby.
  2. ♥♥♥ Have both partners eat for fertility as you would eat for pregnancy. First and foremost, go organic. Especially with all animal products and oils. (Remember, many toxins — especially those that mess with hormones — concentrate in fats). Know the Dirty Dozen most-contaminated fruits and vegetables and always buy these organic. Learn more in the Organic-ize Your Diet section in the Greening Your Pregnancy Diet chapter.
  3. ♥♥ Eat whole foods, including animal products. The less processed the better. Whole milk is better than skimmed. Broth made from bones is better than bouillon cubes. A bit of wild caught salmon is better than fish sticks. Eat whole grains such as wholegrain sourdough bread. Soak or sprout the grains when possible, such as sprouted quinoa.
  4. ♥♥ Seek out nutrient-dense foods, like those packed with vitamins A, B, C, D, and E and iodine, zinc, iron, magnesium, folate, essential fatty acids, and antioxidants. These include organic, pastured (or grass-fed for meat) eggs and butter and organ meats, mama-and-baby-safe seafood, beans prepared at home (rather than from a can), and richly coloured (and organic) vegetables such as kale and spinach, cabbages and broccoli, pumpkins, beets, and squash. Sunflowers seeds, flax seeds, raw pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, almonds, walnuts, olives, garlic, bee pollen, and lentils are all great for fertility. Bone broth from the highest quality animal sources provides gelatin and minerals to the body in preparation for the work of growing a baby. It’s easy to make your own: just simmer bones or a carcass for several hours with a bit of apple cider vinegar to help release the nutrients.
  5. ♥♥ Take whole-food-based supplements, including a very high quality (and mercury-free) version of cod liver or krill oil to help with conception and pregnancy. Read up on all the supplemental advice in the Greening Your Pregnancy Diet chapter.
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  6. ♥♥ Drink the highest quality water. Avoid unfiltered tap water and water bottled in plastic. I recommend getting a great water filter that removes chlorine by-products, fluoride, hormones, and pesticides (yes, all of these things can be found in both tap and many bottled waters).
  7. ♥♥ Avoid foods that zap reproductive health:
    • Refined sugars (especially sugary drinks!) and refined carbohydrates: The authors of the Harvard Nurse’s study, Willett and Chavarro, said that women whose diets had the highest glycemic load — think foods that immediately enter the bloodstream as sugar — were 92 percent more likely to have ovulatory infertility than those whose diets had the lowest glycemic load. This means avoid the sodas, Vitamin Waters, Gatorades, and even pasteurized juices, all of which pack a mean punch to blood sugar levels. As well, avoid the white flour treats. Learn other tips for stabilizing blood sugar in the Greening Your Pregnancy Diet chapter.
    • Trans fats: In a previous study, the same authors found that every 2 per-­­cent increase in the consumption of trans fats was associated with a 73 percent increased risk for ovulatory infertility. Trans fats hide in poor quality or partially hydrogenated oils such as Crisco, shortening, and margarine. That means watching out for fried foods (which are almost always fried in partially hydrogenated oils), including fish and chips, French fries, donuts, potato chips, and all those other lovely, greasy favourites.
    • Soy: As a person who used to eat a lot of soy, I’m sorry to report that soy — especially soy milks and tofu — are full of phytoestrogens that are best avoided by women and men trying to get pregnant and by all children. The phytoestrogens in soy have been shown to negatively affect reproduction and endocrine function and can contribute to thyroid problems (which are linked to infertility and miscarriage). As well, soy can reduce the assimilation of minerals such as calcium, magnesium, copper, and iron and interfere with the body’s absorption of vitamins B12 and D and of protein. Men who ate or drank soy were more likely to have lower sperm counts: the equivalent of one cup of soy milk per day was associated with a 50 percent lower sperm count than that of men who didn’t eat soy, according to a 2008 study at the Harvard Public School of Health. One study linked a woman’s consumption of soy in utero to increased chances of the child developing leukemia, and others with infant boys being born with the male genital disorder hypospadias, although both results may be influenced by the pesticides used in growing soy.
    • Caffeine: Caffeine was shown to increase the time of conception in otherwise fertile women; women who reported drinking over 300 mg per day of caffeine had a 27 percent lower chance of conceiving for each cycle, according to a study by Hatch and Bracken. As well, a lot of caffeine can disrupt the body’s ability to effectively use magnesium, potassium, and calcium, which are particularly important when growing a baby.
  8. ♥♥ Avoid plasticizers — which are known to mess with hormones — touching or near food. That means to avoid heating or storing foods in plastic storage containers and to be suspicious of the plastic wrap on your cheese and meat (it’s full of plasticizers), canned foods, and any foods bought in plastic. Remember that acidic and fatty foods absorb more of the plasticizers than something like pasta.
  9. ♥♥ Care for your microbiome, so avoid antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, get rid of all those household sources of antibacterial exposure, and eat more fermented foods. I love to make and eat kimchi, sauerkraut, and ginger beer. (See the recipes in the Green Eating Recipe Handbook for inspiration.)
  10. ♥♥ Sleep: more and better. Remember, sleep is one of the only ways to add funds to your adrenal bank account, which helps with all those fertility and growth hormones. To help, especially avoid all screens near bedtime and block out all light — even if you can’t sleep — for a full eight hours every night.
  11. ♥ Follow all the other amazing advice in this book to help get toxins out of your life.