Balancing Hormones Through Diet: The Role of Nutrition in Fertility

Oct 2

As a Nutritional Therapist, when my husband I started trying for our first baby, I wanted to do more than just take a prenatal. I wanted to fully lean into my nutrition and lifestyle choices to optimize both my and my husband’s fertility, so we decided to take a bit of a different approach.

Traditional Wisdom on Fertility

Quick fixes and shortcuts often take precedence, it’s easy to overlook the fundamental aspects of health that support our well-being. Throughout history, traditional cultures around the world have recognized pregnancy as a sacred time, deserving of careful attention and respect. These cultures understood the importance of nutrition not just for the mother’s health, but also for the developing baby. Women of childbearing age were provided with specific, nutrient-dense foods to support their reproductive health and ensure a healthy pregnancy. Women of child-bearing years were intentionally fed full-fat dairy, seafood, organ meats, and other fertility-boosting foods that supported not only fertility, but also a healthy pregnancy and postpartum.

Debunking Myths: Pregnancy and Depletion

A common misconception is that pregnancy depletes the body. In reality, how you nourish your body before and during pregnancy is vital not only for the health of your baby, but also for how well your body copes with the entire life cycle of pregnancy. How you nourish your body now can have lifelong effects on your child.

The Modern Diet Dilemma

In our fast-paced society, we often resort to quick fixes and trendy diets in an attempt to meet our health goals. Unfortunately, many of these diets—whether it's the standard American diet, veganism, low-carb, low-fat, carnivore, or keto—can lead to nutrient deficiencies and imbalances. While these diets may offer short-term benefits, they often fall short in providing the comprehensive nutrition needed to support reproduction, pregnancy, and a healthy baby.

Modern diets can lead to malnourishment and fail to meet the specific biological needs essential for reproductive health. For instance, the elimination of entire food groups or reliance on processed foods can leave critical nutritional gaps that are vital for balancing hormones and supporting fertility.

Needed Nutrients

Let’s talk about some of the most-needed and/or the nutrients/vitamins most often found in prenatals and why.

Vitamin A: Vitamin A is important always because it supports vision, immune function, cell growth, reproductive health, and it’s full of antioxidants. It’s especially important for pregnancy because it’s crucial for fetal development including but not limited to development of the heart, lungs, kidneys, eyes, and bones, as well as the circulatory, respiratory, and central nervous systems. Vitamin A also plays a critical role in regulating iron.
Vitamin C: Vitamin C is important in pregnancy because it’s essential for collagen production (which is always important, but especially in pregnancy because it is estimated that collagen in the uterus increases by 700-900% by the end of pregnancy), it aids in iron absorption, it supports fetal brain development, and it helps with wound healing and tissue repair which is critical because of all of the changes the body goes through during pregnancy.
Vitamin D: Vitamin D is important for both supporting fertility and a healthy pregnancy. It helps regulate blood sugar, gut and vaginal microbiome, and the entire reproductive system needs Vitamin D to function. It also boosts progesterone which is not only needed to become pregnant, but to maintain a healthy pregnancy.
Side note: I highly recommend finding a provider that can run early testing on you in pregnancy, as low progesterone levels can be a main cause of miscarriage.
Vitamin E: Vitamin E is important for both men and women while trying to conceive as it is a powerful antioxidant that helps protect cells from oxidative stress, as oxidative damage to reproductive cells and tissues can impair ovulation, sperm quality, and egg health. It also improves sperm quality and supports ovarian function. During pregnancy, Vitamin E helps to boost immune function, promotes healthy skin and tissue, supports healthy blood vessels, protects the placenta, and can reduce the chances of preclampsia and miscarriage.
Vitamin K: Vitamin K is important for making sure that calcium goes where it is needed. Often times in today’s world people get diagnosed with osteoporosis. This is rarely due to a lack of actual calcium, but rather to the calcium not being transported properly to where it needs to go. Calcium can even be harmful in some instances, when it isn’t transported to its proper place. This is especially important in pregnancy for the development of facial structuring in the baby, where airways are being developed. Beyond that, Vitamin K is also important for proper blood clotting, cardiovascular health, and preventing preclampsia.
B Vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9 and B12): We could talk for hours about the different forms of B Vitamins and what they do, but I’ll give you brief summary. One of the most important roles they play in pregnancy is the development of your baby, especially the brain. They also help to produce pregnancy hormones, reduce leg cramps, protect against miscarriage as well as congenital abnormalities.

The Prenatal Problem

If you decided to take a prenatal, I want you to know there is zero judgement! My hope is not to disuade you or shame you for your decision, but rather to help you make an empowered decision, whether that’s through nutrition and targeted supplementation, or through a prenatal. Later I will be listing some of my most trusted prenatal vitamin brands if that is the route you decide to take!

Vitamin A: Beta Carotene is the form of Vitamin A found is most prenatal supplements, which is not an active form of Vitamin A, meaning that the body has to convert it to a usable form of Vitamin A. The problem with this is that many people have genetic traits that prevent them from being able to convert carotenoids into Vitamin A. Conversion can also be toxic for someone who has metabolic dysfunction.
Vitamin C: Ascorbic acid, the form of vitamin C typically found in prenatal vitamins, multivitamins, and supplements, is just a part of the complete vitamin C complex found in whole foods. It's often derived from GMO corn and, when taken in high amounts, can interfere with the absorption of natural vitamin C from whole foods.
Vitamin D: Contrary to it’s name, Vitamin D is actually a hormone, and not a vitamin, and I never recommend blindly supplementing with a hormone. Supplementing Vitamin D can also, in many cases, deplete your body of other essential nutrients.
Vitamin E: Most prenatals that contain Vitamin E are derived from sunflower oil, an oil high in polyunsaturated fats. This is not as stable or as effective as a high-quality Vitamin E supplement that has an oil base such as olive oil or MCT oil.
Vitamin K: Phytonadione is the synthetic version of Vitamin K1. While always best to opt for a naturally occurring version of vitamins, K2 is a more ideal option as it has been linked to fertility improvement as well as it’s protective properties over the body.
B Vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9 and B12): In many prenatals, you’ll find that synthetic versions of B vitamins are used like thymine hydrochloride, riboflavin-5-phosphate, niacinamide, d-calcium pantothenate and pyroxidine hydrochloride. Using these synthetic versions of the vitamins can reduce the absorption of the real vitamins, and are often derived from chemical sources, and are poorly absorbed by the body.

Whole Food Sources for Nutrients

Vitamin A: Vitamin A can be found in foods like beef liver, cod liver oil, whole milk, and eggs. If you’re like most people and don’t love the taste of liver, Perfect Supplements has their Desiccated Liver that can be purchased in both capsule form or powder form (best used for mixing into dishes with ground beef or sauces)
Vitamin C: Mango, oranges, strawberries, and red and orange bell peppers. Another one of my favorite ways is to use Acerola Cherry Powder to add to tea, smoothies, or into healing gut gummies.
Vitamin D: Whole milk, pastured eggs, sardines, and cod liver oil. And, of course, absorbing Vitamin D through natural sunlight by practicing safe sun exposure.

Vitamin E: Pastured eggs, Atlantic salmon, and cod.
Vitamin K: Pastured eggs, dark chicken meat, pastured eggs, and gouda cheese. While supporting fertility and a healthy pregnancy, I recommend LifeBlud’s Regulate supplement.
B Vitamins (B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9 and B12): Pastured eggs, beef liver, beets, Brewer’s Yeast, Nutritional Yeast and beef liver. While it is possible to get all of the recommended amount of B Vitamins from food, people often find it difficult to consume enough of the foods with higher amounts like brewer’s yeast. For my pregnancy, I opted to take LifeBlud’s Energi+ supplement.

Intentional Nourishment

Many might look this and think, “Isn’t is so much more complicated to eat and supplement this way, rather just taking a prenatal?” And honestly, it can be! It takes a lot of intentional planning, which is why I don’t always recommend this for everyone. What I love about intentionally nourishing and supplementing in this way is that it doesn’t just act as a catch-all for your nutritional needs. You can eat what you know your body needs, and supplement in the areas that might come up deficient. The unfortunate part with prenatal supplements is that you can’t change the amount of a specific nutrient based on your individual needs. That isn’t to say that taking a prenatal is bad. Like I’ve said before, my intention is not to dissuade you from taking a prenatal if that is the route you decide to take, but rather to educate you on how to best nourish your body during this important time. If you do opt to take a prenatal, my most-trusted recommendations are Seeking Health Optimal Prenatal and Ancient Nutrition Prenatal Multi. If you know that you would like to take a more bio-individual approach to fertility and/or pregnancy nourishment, you can book a discovery call to see if 1:1 Nutritional Therapy support would be a good fit for you!