Fertility Supplements Part 1

   Holistic Treatment Options: How Fertility Supplements Can Measurably Increase Your Chances of Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant  

By Julia Indichova

In the last decade and a half of my work as a fertility educator and activist, I've encountered a great deal of controversy and confusion around the subject of fertility supplements. It seems almost daily I receive questions ranging from brand recommendations to dosage of specific nutrients.  Many of my clients have wondered whether fertility supplements can make any measurable difference in their overall health and their chances of getting pregnant and to carry a full-term pregnancy.

The next few paragraphs hope to offer a few simple guidelines and suggestions, and cite relevant research.

A Radically Holistic Fertility

Ours is a culture that loves the promise of the quick and easy, the salvation of pills and magic potions that will do the job without any effort on our part. A subliminal message behind the advertising slogans of fertility supplements is that if we find the right brand we won't have to fret about the food we eat or the lives we lead.

In both of my books, Inconceivable (Broadway Books 2001) and The Fertile Female (Adell Press 2007), I speak about my conviction, born out of personal experience and my work with clients with fertility challenges, that deep change doesn't happen without our full participation in the healing process.  On a physical level, there is nothing that can match the reparative power of whole, fresh, nutrient-filled food.  Much can be done simply by eliminating a few of the chief culprits that tax our digestion, burden our liver and other organs of elimination. The liver is one of the key cleansing organs that not only sweeps out toxins, but plays a central role in instructing the pituitary as to the release and regulation of estrogen, FSH, prolactin and testosterone. A weekly twenty four, or forty eight hour green juice fast with appropriate fertility supplements to support the cleansing process can do wonders for an overburdened liver. (See Ally in the Cupboard chapter in The Fertile Female, and Cleaning the Refrigerator in Inconceivable, for a more detailed discussion of this subject).

Having said all that, when it comes to overall health, pre-conception and fertility related difficulties, pretty much everyone-whether it's a holistic practitioner or mainstream physician-agrees that fertility supplements are necessary, and can increase our ability to prevent degenerative disease and certainly increase the chances of getting pregnant and carrying a full term pregnancy. Mark Hyman, MD, an integrative health practitioner and author of several books, makes an observation worth noting.  Doctor Hyman speaks about the difference between preventing a disease, and maintaining optimal health. "Long-latency deficiency disease," he says, is caused by less than optimal levels of nutrients over decades. For example, an acute deficiency in folic acid will cause anemia in a few months. A lesser deficiency over 30 years might appear harmless, except that it doubles the risk of Alzheimer's.

Doctor Hyman's observation validates my view of infertility as the great opportunity to discover latent depletion on physical, emotional and spiritual levels, which, if ignored, might lead to much more serious health issues.

The overall intention of a holistic approach to fertility difficulties, is to use food, fertility supplements, and mind body heart tools that help increase one's overall physical and emotional health to the point when the body's internal self-healing mechanism kicks in and re-establishes hormone balance and more efficient organ function. 

Research Supports Supplementation

A study published in the April 2004 issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, showed a correlation between fertility supplements and pregnancy rates. The double blind study (in which neither the researchers nor the subjects knew who was taking placebo and who was taking the fertility supplements) conducted at Stanford University, involved thirty women between the ages of twenty-four to forty-six, who had not been able to conceive. After five months, five of the fifteen women taking fertility supplements conceived, while there were no pregnancies in the placebo group.

In fact, research and clinical practice come down on the side of fertility supplementation for both aspiring parents.  Regardless of which one of you has been diagnosed with an imbalance, increasing both partners' level of health has been linked with higher pregnancy rates. This is of course common sense-the healthier the genetic material, the healthier the child. To cite just one of the fertility related studies that validates this theory: A 1962 study published in the International Journal of Fertility found that miscarriage was more common with low sperm counts. 

For Specific Brand Recommendations and the Do's and Dont's of fertility supplementation see: Fertility Supplements Part 2: Quality Counts