Eating for Fertility – How Diet & Food Can Help Get You Pregnant

Yes, it’s true – food can help improve your fertility so much so, that previously infertile couples are making babies just by changing their diets.


The reason being that food and diet play an important role in the balance of hormones for both men and women and works as a sort of internal medicine for improving your health. Using food for health is nothing new, we have been told for years that eating right will improve certain conditions, help us lose weight and even cure diseases, so it makes sense that fertility diets can also help us get pregnant.

The food pH levels itself will not affect you getting pregnant or not, but it can influence the gender of your child.

So what sort of foods should you be eating to make sure that you conceive a healthy baby?
First let’s cover what you shouldn’t be eating – and that’s junk food (refined sugars and saturated fats), caffeine and artificial substances (preservatives, colours & flavours).

These foods not only make you unhealthy, they are widely known for their effect on the hormones of your body, particularly ones like oestrogen which are needed for a healthy menstrual cycle. Have too much oestrogen and not enough progesterone and it will be difficult for you to conceive (you’ll likely have a short luteal phase if this is your problem).

People with PCOS are particularly sensitive to foods that cause hormonal imbalances.
Instead you should be eating a variety of healthy foods such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
Good sources of whole grain’s include brown rice, oatmeal and whole wheat breads. The best vegetables are the green leafy vegies and also fruits and vegetables that have lots of colour such as carrots, mango, berries, peppers and more. The more colour it has, the higher in nutrients it is.

You’ll probably also hear that you should or shouldn’t eat dairy or meat. The reason being that these foods can affect your hormone levels either for the positive or negative depending on your condition.
If you suffer from any sort of ovulatory infertility such as PCOS, then full fat dairy is your friend, and can actually help you get pregnant. If that isn’t your problem then you should decrease the amount of dairy you eat and stick to low fat.

Meat can affect some people’s fertility but not all. That’s why some fertility diet books recommend going vegan or vegetarian when trying to get pregnant. It’s definitely worth a try if you’ve ruled out everything else – you can always start eating meat again once you know there is a baby on the way.

It usually takes around two to three months to see any real changes in your body and menstrual cycle when starting a diet aimed at improving your fertility so stick with it because you just never know if that apple is going to help you finally get that baby you want.