Dr. Mark explains how sugar and insulin resistance damage fertility, citing Harvard research. He shows how nutritional changes can restore it, walking through a patient who regained the ability to conceive by fixing her diet.
Did you know that one in seven couples are infertile, can't have a baby? And you know that one of the major reasons for that is sugar? See insulin resistance can cause this unrecognized syndrome of polycystic ovaries. And this causes infertility. But it's not really an ovarian problem, it's a nutritional problem and is caused by our toxic diet and our toxic environment. Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard, he wrote about his research on infertility caused by pre-diabetes in a book called the Fertility Diet. Researchers studied fertility in 19,000 women from Harvard Nurses Health Study, and they found that the majority of infertility, which affects one in seven couples, as I said, might be treated effectively through diet and lifestyle and supplements. Fixing nutritional deficiencies, by taking a multivitamin and by eating a whole foods, low glycemic load, nutrient rich, plant-based diet can have an enormous impact on fertility. A friend of mine, Dr. David Ludwig, also from Harvard, found that low glycemic load diets prevented preterm labor in overweight women. So eating according to the plan in my book, the Blood Sugar Solution, and eating a low glycemic load diet can help you not only get pregnant, but stay pregnant. Now, I want to share a story of one of my patients, Lisa, who faced this problem and she overcame it. She desperately wanted to have babies. After failing with the best doctors and infertility specialists in the New York, New Jersey area, she came to see me. Her doctors told her she had PCOS or Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which is really a nutritional and metabolic problem that affects your hormones. And it's caused by, guess what? Pre-diabetes. and you can get lots of symptoms like irregular heavy periods, acne, facial hair, loss of your scalp hair, and you get of course increased belly fat. Now after pills and shots and hormone cocktails that pushed and prodded her ovaries to work properly, and after multiple in-vitro fertilization attempts at $15,000 a pop, there was still no baby for Lisa. But the problem wasn't her ovaries, it was her diet. Three months after she transformed her diet from processed foods to whole, fresh, real foods, and she started exercising daily and taking some nutritional supplements that supported normal blood sugar control, Lisa got pregnant naturally. And a year later, I got a cute little baby picture with a little note that said, Thanks Dr. Hyman for getting me pregnant. I wasn't sure how to explain that to my wife. So in fact, using this This principle and the principles in my book, the Blood Sugar Solution, I've gotten so many women pregnant and my office wall is full of baby pictures.
