Who else wants to crush inflammation and get pregnant faster?

Inflammation - the naughty 'I' word everyone keeps talking about.
Do you have inflammation in your body? Absolutely. Everyone does. Here I break down what it is, what causes it, and what you can do about it. I'll cover ambiguous words like:
- oxidative stress
- antioxidants
- free radicals
You'll learn how inflammation can hurt fertility, sperm and eggs. But you'll leave knowing there are simple - I mean, simple - things you can do to show the inflammation who's boss.

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:00:07 Welcome to Season 2 folks! 
• 0:01:24 What is inflammation, what causes it and what does inflammation do to the body? Find out what supplements can do for inflammation.
• 0:04:38 How inflammation impacts fertility (including egg and sperm health). The goal is to reduce oxidative stress and boost fertility. 
• 0:06:14 Which foods can impact inflammation - for better or worse? 
• 0:09:03 We cover 5 easy ways to reduce inflammation through diet. Listen up for a bonus fun fact (believe me, fun).

FREE STUFF
Click to snaffle the downloadable I mentioned - here you can see if you're eating enough yummy antioxidants to tip the balance.


Here's the episode link when 'inflammation' next drops into conversation with a mate.

On the DIY train but want some more support? I created these for you - take what you need:

🤰🏽Preparing for Pregnancy Pack - The 3 Essentials for Pregnancy Success

🥰 10 Ways to Feel Wildly More Supported on Your Fertility Journey

👌🏼25 Simple Things to Curb Your Cravings with PCOS

💃 Beat Your Endo Belly


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Email me love notes, questions, or comments at hannah@ognutrition.co.nz

Oh Goodness! Nutrition is an evidence-based dietitian practice. However, given the general nature of the content presented on this podcast, it can not replace individualised medical advice. Get yo'self a professional (psst, lik...

Transcript

Welcome to season two of the "I'm thinking of having a baby" podcast. We're back , ready to dish up on all the things you can do to nurture fertility. Our goal is to get you closer to having your dream family. I'm your host Hannah Eriksen, and I'm all about harnessing food to boost baby making potential.

I run Oh Goodness! Nutrition, a virtual clinic that helps people make sustainable and easy dietary changes without having to say no all the time. You're welcome to stalk me by visiting ognutrition.co. nz or following me on IG @ohgoodness_nutrition.

 Inflammation, it's such a buzzword right. After today, my hope is that you won't have to pretend you know what it is any longer. We're gonna find out how inflammation can mess with your fertility game, what it is, what causes it, and what you can do about it. So if you're struggling with fertility issues or just wanna boost your baby making potential, tune in as we explore how inflammation can impact egg and sperm health.

I'll give you five practical things you can do today. So you can tell that inflammation, whose boss. 

What is inflammation? When I hear the word - this is gonna sound silly - I envision a creepy guy in a cape firing off radioactive laser rays inside my body. Pew pew, uh, just me? In reality, inflammation is a normal process that your immune system uses to find and deal with things that don't belong, like viruses, toxins, damaged cells.

So you could think of inflammation as part of the garbage truck system of your body. It finds waste and then recruits inflammatory markers, so things like cytokines, immune cells that we can measure, to get rid of it. Now, this process can cause redness, swelling, and loosening between cells... heat, like when you get an infection. Okay, that's inflammation and it is essential for healing your body.

Unfortunately, sometimes the balance between inflammation and healing gets thrown off. Let's call this oxidative stress. We'll meet the players of oxidative stress soon. When it goes unchecked, oxidative stress can lead to chronic inflammation that can wreck havoc on your body. It can cause tissue damage and chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and it can even accelerate the aging process. No thanks. 

So it's time to meet the players. Let me introduce to you free radicals and antioxidants. Free radicals. {It's a pretty RAD name.} Are atoms missing an electron and they're byproducts of good things like breathing and exercise. And they're byproducts of some not so good things like toxic chemicals, pollution, UV ray, stress, and certain types of food.

So I like to think of free radicals as homeless in our bodies. They steal things - electrons from neighboring atoms perpetuating the cycle and causing damage to cells in your body. 

Now, antioxidants, on the other hand, prevent this widespread damage by giving a conveniently extra spare electron to the free radicals to satisfy them. They put out the flame of inflammation. 

Let's drop an equation here. More free radicals than antioxidants equals oxidative stress. Oxidative stress unchecked equals inflammation. So bring on the antioxidants. 

Antioxidants, they're made by our bodies. They're found in some of the food we eat and we can buy them as supplements, for example, vitamin E, vitamin C, classic examples.

It's essential to ensure that we are getting enough antioxidants and mainly through the food we eat, rather than relying mostly on supplements. And the reason I say this is there are some large studies  have shown  that just increasing vitamins through supplements before pregnancy actually has no impact on the rates of miscarriages.

And having too many antioxidants can backfire. They can become free radicals and join the rebel side.  Not great. So dieticians like myself, look, we're specially trained to guide people on how to get enough antioxidants through food, which supplements might be beneficial, and how much to dose so that you're staying safe, well, and healthy, and promoting pregnancy. Of course, in this, everybody is different. 

So now let's shift and talk about fertility and inflammation specifically. Several conditions produce higher levels of free radicals: endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, celiac disease, being overweight, obese, underweight, thyroid disease, and chronic stress.

Research about the direct impact of inflammation on conception and pregnancy is actually still in its early days. For example, I can't say exactly how much inflammation is preventing your conception. However, we do know that reducing inflammation can have positive benefits on related aspects of fertility.

Like, the right kind of food can actually reduce endo pain, it can increase the regularity of periods and also reduce the male type hormones and insulin resistance found in PCOS. Where high levels of cytokines, which is a type of inflammatory marker, in the abdomen have been found, these high levels have been associated to increased DNA damage in eggs. There's a direct correlation there between inflammation and DNA damage in eggs, potentially impacting fertility. 

High levels of inflammatory markers can increase the risk of testosterone deficiency and obviously - you smart people know -that low testosterone equals low sperm production. And we know that certain types of foods can improve the quality, the count, and the swimmability -that's not a word, I just made that up - of sperm. Certain kinds of antioxidants can even improve embryo quality during IVF. 

Okay,  get to the chase already, right? You wanna know what these foods I speak of are. Now without providing, I suppose, a list of super foods and things that you must rush out and buy, here's the thing. It's actually not so much about individual foods that are being more beneficial here, but big picture stuff like the pattern of how we eat.

For example, if you consistently eat 

vegetables and fruit, 

whole grains, 

legumes, 

lean protein, including soy, 

fish like salmon, tuna, 

extra virgin olive oil, 

nuts and seeds, your pattern is pretty good. So most of us, I would say, eat a smattering of these things, but we probably also eat: 

sweet, yummy things,

take aways or things out of a box,

white grain foods like bread and pasta, 

butter, high fat dairy, 

red meat. 

Now just a quick note, um, parenthesis here on the high fat dairy. Full fat dairy is actually not helpful for sperm. There's been research to show that it is not a friend of sperm, but women high fat dairy seems okay.

So if you're a dude, potentially think about switching to lower fat dairy. 

Now, if you can remember, think about what you ate yesterday. You could always count up how much food from each group you ate, from the first group, from the second group. If you find maybe the weekends are a bit looser, you could always include a weekend day too.

So what we want is when you add up everything in the groups, we're not actually looking for balance. I don't want you eating equal quantities from each. I want you eating most, like, I'm not gonna give you a number, but most from the first group, okay? We're wanting to tip the scales in that direction.

 I have a downloadable, which I'll link to you in the show notes where you can see how much of the first group you're eating and how much you really should be eating. Uh, you might be shocked!

So why pick more from the first group? Okay. Not only do they all sound ridiculously healthy, I'll give you that.

They're also brilliant sources of the things that we are chasing after: antioxidants. Okay? They're good sources of vitamin A, C, E and D. They're rich in poly and monounsaturated fats like Omega 3's.  and they're a fabulous source of fiber, which is absolutely essential for a healthy gut and immune system.

Whereas the foods in the second group can make our bodies more inflammatory- not what we want- and the foods in the first group can make it less inflammatory. So need I hammer home the point? Less inflammation makes a happy, healthier, more fertile you. 

All right, so to wrap up, here are five easy things you could do to get on the side of the antioxidants.

Now, please add to this list, take what works for you if you have other ideas, if I inspire some genius, and you go chase it. 

For one, you could pick different colors of plants to eat each day: green, purple, white, orange, blue, right? Endless. Each color represents different antioxidants, so go to town. 

You could include one meal a week that has legumes, or if you're already doing one meal a week, why not two? I'm thinking lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, dal. Even just adding in lentils or chickpeas into a dish that you are already cooking up. Like spag bowl, for example. Lentils, just slide on in. 

You could reach for the extra virgin olive oil rather than the butter more often.

Men, you could switch to lower fat milk, 

and you could also enjoy a quarter cup of nuts or a tablespoon of nut butter each and every day. On this, you can pick the kind, of course. Unsalted is preferable, but I'd say if you're not really having nuts on a regular basis, and I've given you the portion size there, it's still better to have some than none. 

Now here's something I came across in my travels as I was preparing this. Inflammation, funnily enough, can actually make you want sex less.

And there's even early evidence linking the right kind of diet with increased arousal. I thought that was pretty cool. Amazing what food  📍 can do for you, huh? 

That's us for today. Do let me know if there was anything that stood out to you. You can drop me a DM on Instagram @ohgoodness_nutrition or an inquiry form on the website ognutrition.co.nz

I would love to hear from you and tune in again soon.