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Let me tell you something about the RDA – it’s the bare minimum needed to avoid conditions such as rickets and scurvy, not the optimal amounts required for health. If you’re meeting the RDA, you’re unlikely to be thriving and that’s not a good thing when you’re looking to conceive. Using RDAs as your guideline can mean that you’re not meeting the body’s needs in for conception and beyond. 

We also need to think about how much we’re assimilating (absorbing). We don’t necessarily absorb and use everything we ingest, especially if the digestive system is compromised. This can mean that even supplements can be completely ineffective and a waste of money.

Doing a Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) can tell us how you’re doing with nutrient assimilation and whether we need to support the body to improve it. 

Why Prenatal Nutrition Guidelines Aren’t Optimal

When you see “100% of RDA” (or similar) on prenatal supplements, it’s easy to assume that you’ll be getting everything you need when you’re trying to conceive or are already pregnant but this isn’t the case. 

The RDA isn’t actually related to the specific nutritional needs for conception or pregnancy.  In fact, they aren’t even calculated with women in mind! 

Current recommendations for prenatal nutrition needs is based on male bodies and adjusted slightly. 

They don’t take into account the many physiological differences between adult men and adult women, let alone a woman who is TTC. 

They also don’t factor in the increased requirement for certain nutrients due to stress, exposure to toxins, poor gut health, and other scenarios that can change your nutritional needs. 

This is why RDAs are guideline – recommendations, rather than set-in-stone rules. 

There’s another problem too. RDAs look at nutrients in isolation and don’t take into account nutrition as a whole. When we eat real food, it can contain a range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other nutrients, which is very different from getting nutrients from fortified foods or supplements. As a Nutritional Therapist, I look at nutrition as part of a bigger picture, including how nutrients interact with each other. 

I want to highlight a few vitamins and minerals that we can need more of in preparation for pregnancy. 

Magnesium – We can use a lot of magnesium, especially when we’re stressed, and this can mean that the RDA isn’t enough. When you’re TTC, this is bad news as magnesium is crucial for fertility. Of course, you can eat more magnesium-rich foods but it can still be hard to reach optimal levels. 

Vitamin D – Vitamin D is another crucial one for fertility – even more so given that vitamin D deficiency is very common. The RDA for fertility is 400 IU per day but studies have suggested that you may need much higher levels of vitamin D when you’re trying to get pregnant (and if you’re successful with this).

Choline – Choline deficiency is often a factor in neural tube defects so this is a nutrient you don’t want to be deficient in while you’re trying to conceive. 

We can get choline from meat (especially organ meats), fatty fish and eggs but it can be harder to get enough from diet alone in a vegetarian or vegan diet. Despite needing more choline in preparation for pregnancy, choline isn’t included in all prenatal supplements. 

Is Your Prenatal Nutrition Supporting Conception?

Nutrition is such a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to fertility and it’s crucial to make sure that your day-to-day nutrition is supporting key systems in the body and contributing to a “safe” environment for conception. 

If you’re concerned that your nutrition isn’t supporting your preconception health and pregnancy, I’d love to help you change that. With a HTMA, we can look at nutrient status and see if we need to work on nutrient assimilation too. 

You can book a free discovery call with me to get started. 

Did you know that a vegetarian diet can mean that you miss out on key nutrients that can boost fertility? These same nutrients can also support a healthy pregnancy and nourish you and your baby before and after birth. 

These nutrients aren’t always included in prenatal supplements so it’s not necessarily a case of filling the gaps through supplementation. 

Here’s why a vegetarian diet and fertility may not go hand in hand. 

The Nutrients You May Be Missing Out On

What’s the connection between a vegetarian diet and fertility? The main concern is that you can miss out on these nutrients: 

Vitamin B12

A vitamin B12 deficiency can lead to high homocysteine levels, which can impact fertility. Most notably it can make it harder for fertilised embryos to implant and increases the risk of miscarriage. 

You need more vitamin B12 during pregnancy and a deficiency can be dangerous, not least because it’s a crucial nutrient for avoiding neural tube defects. If you’re B12 deficient during pregnancy, it often means that your baby will be deficient too. 

It’s easy to become deficient in vitamin B12 if you aren’t getting enough of it through diets or supplements – even more so if you’re vegetarian. Plant foods don’t contain vitamin B12, which is one reason why an average of 62% of vegetarian mothers-to-be are deficient. It’s much rarer for pregnant women who eat meat to have a B12 deficiency. 

Choline

Research indicates that choline is absolutely vital for fertility, especially egg health and supporting fertilisation and implantation. If you have PCOS, choline can help to balance blood sugar levels and boost your fertility. 

During pregnancy, it’s essential for brain development and protecting against the risk of neural tube defects. Choline stores can be heavily depleted during pregnancy (and if you breastfeed) as baby needs a lot of it for their development. 

Keeping your choline levels at a healthy level while you’re trying to conceive is vital for ensuring that both you and your baby have enough choline if you become pregnant. 

Because it’s a nutrient that’s largely found in animal products, it can be very lacking in a vegetarian diet. Liver and eggs are great sources, for example. 

Vitamin A

Vitamin is available in two forms: retinol and carotenoids. Retinol is the active form that is ready for the body to use and it’s only found in animal foods. Plant foods can be good sources of carotenoids but they need to be converted into retinol before the body can use them. 

Vitamin A is essential for fertility. It can encourage cervical mucus to provide a receptive environment for fertilisation and helps the follicles to mature and function in the right way. Low vitamin A levels can therefore affect how easy it is for an egg to become fertilised. 

It’s important for male fertility too. As a powerful antioxidant, it helps to protect sperm from the damaging effects of free radicals and it can improve the quality and motility of sperm. 

During pregnancy, vitamin A is crucial for foetal growth and development. 

Iron

If you have low iron levels, you’re more likely to experience ovulation issues. It also affects the production of red blood cells and decreases oxygen flow to the body’s tissues – including the ovaries and uterus. This can impact egg quality too. 

During pregnancy, the amount of blood in the body increases and you need more iron. If your iron intake isn’t high enough, the effect on oxygen flow can impact the baby’s development and increase the risk of miscarriage and early labour.

Zinc

Zinc is linked to cell growth and supports follicles to mature. During pregnancy, the body needs a lot of zinc due to the significant amount of cell growth that’s taking place. A zinc deficiency can be a factor in low birth weight. 

DHA

When it comes to fertility, DHA is a nutrient you can’t ignore. Studies have shown that women who consume plenty of DHA are more likely to conceive, especially as they get older. For women undergoing IVF treatment, higher levels of DHA resulted in higher rates of conception. 

DHA has been linked to improved sperm quality and motility.

DHA is involved in every cell in the body and during pregnancy, it supports healthy brain, heart and eye development. Research has also suggested that a healthy intake of DHA can reduce the risk of early labour. 

It’s not just helpful for baby – 2020 research has shown that DHA can be important for reducing the risk of depression in late pregnancy and the early postpartum period. 

If you’re a vegetarian and planning on taking a prenatal supplement, you may want to check if it contains DHA!

Glycine 

During pregnancy, glycine helps to build skin, nails, teeth, hair, skeleton and internal organs. While you’re busy growing a new person from scratch, glycine is an essential nutrient because of its role in building connective tissue. 

Glycine is found in abundance in poultry (especially with the skin on) and bone broth but it’s much harder to come by if you’re vegetarian. Studies have indicated that vegetarians who are not pregnant often have a glycine deficiency and this is important given that you need much more glycine during pregnancy. 

Worried that a vegetarian diet isn’t supporting fertility and increasing your chance of success?

If you would like to make sure that your nutrition is giving you the best chance of conception and can support a healthy pregnancy, you can book a discovery call with me. 

When you’re trying to conceive, egg quality is a huge concern. If your eggs are low quality, it’s a lot harder to conceive and have a viable pregnancy.

We’re often led to believe that age is the deciding factor in determining egg quality but this is a huge myth.

Age has a role to play but it’s not everything. Although fertility does decline with age, it’s not the case that fertility falls off a cliff once you’re 35. You actually have more control than you may think.

Egg health CAN be improved through nutrition and lifestyle interventions, which can boost your fertility naturally – even after 35. An egg can be healthier three months down the line, even though you’re technically three months older. 

Why three months? Because an egg has a life cycle of 90 days. If you’re able to conceive, the egg that was successfully implanted will have taken three months to mature. 

This is the window of opportunity to positively impact egg health. In the 90 days prior to an egg maturing, it can be influenced by various factors (some good, some bad). 

How to Support Your Fertility As You Get Older 

Age is far from the only factor that can affect egg quality. Your nutrition and lifestyle have a big role to play too. 

Balance Your Hormones 

Hormone imbalance is one of the biggest culprits of poor egg health. When your hormones are out of whack. It can affect your cycle and throw ovulation off track. Nutrition and lifestyle can offer a natural approach to balancing hormones and increasing your chances of conception. 

Eat A Nutritious Diet

Eating nutrient-dense foods that support good health is a must for improving egg health. If you currently have nutrient deficiencies, there’s a good chance that this is one of the pieces of the puzzle that can be addressed. Beyond this, we also want to make sure that your nutrition is supporting balanced blood sugar and gut health – both of which can affect your fertility too. This is where a qualified professional like myself can help you to fill in gaps in your nutrition and optimise your diet to support fertility. 

Support Your Mitochondria

Mitochondria is crucial for all cells, and eggs are no exception. It’s a vital source of energy for healthy eggs and also maintains intracellular pH, which can support the fertilisation of an egg. 

Because mitochondrial function tends to decrease with age, this is one of the reasons why so many people assume that fertility is purely age-related. 

Mitochondrial function can be supported through nutrition and in some cases, appropriate supplementation. 

Improve Gut Health

Supporting your gut health is often overlooked when it comes to fertility but there’s a strong link between your gut bacteria and your fertility. The microorganisms that live in the gut love prebiotic fibre, which produces short-chain fatty acids as it breaks down. Butyrate is one of the most significant of these as it can protect against damage to egg (and sperm) quality. 

Improve Blood Flow

A good supply of oxygen to the ovaries is essential for egg health. To maintain healthy blood flow to the ovaries, it’s important to stay well hydrated and exercise regularly. Fertility massage is another way to boost blood flow to the reproductive system as a whole. 

Reduce Your Exposure to Toxins

Exposure to toxins is a huge culprit for low-quality eggs. Toxins are lurking everywhere – from your beauty products to medications and scented candles. The more you’re exposed to toxins, the greater the burden on your liver. Sugar, caffeine, alcohol, processed foods and trans fats also increase your toxic load. 

Reduce Stress

Stress isn’t something we can necessarily avoid and that can impact fertility, particularly egg health. Reducing your stress is one of the best things you can do to improve egg health, especially if you’re currently not ovulating regularly. 

I hope this blog post gives you hope that you can still boost your fertility even if you’re over the age of 35. There’s still so much that we can do to optimise egg health and improve your chances of success. This includes looking at what may be affecting egg health and using a natural approach to addressing them. 

If you’d like to chat about how I can support your fertility journey, you can contact me here. 

How Does An HTMA Work?

An HTMA is an incredibly simple test. 

It looks at your biochemistry at cellular level and can pick up on deficiencies, imbalances and toxicity. It tests 20 key minerals and toxic metals and can also highlight your metabolism, how your hormones are working, blood sugar, digestion and much more.

Because hair is a soft tissue, it can act as a window into what’s going on. Minerals show up in higher amounts in the hair compared to the blood. 

Only a small amount of minerals are located in the blood and these are normalised as much as possible by the body so they’re not a useful barometer of mineral levels. 

It’s not a diagnostic test but it can tell us so much about what’s going on in the body and crucially, what’s been happening for the last few months. 

Blood and urine only give a “snapshot” of a certain moment in time. The results could be very different if you did another blood test or urine sample at a different time of day. 

What HTMA Can Look At

An HTMA can’t diagnose conditions but it can highlight imbalances and suggest that certain conditions may be present. 

It’s not an individual mineral status that matters the most. What we’re really concerned about is the ratios or the balance between different minerals, which can’t easily be picked up on. 

We want to see the bigger picture and how this may be affecting your health and in turn, your fertility.

Toxic metal status

If heavy metals have been able to build up in your body, they can affect fertility and may contribute to recurrent miscarriages. You may have no obvious symptoms and we’ll only make the link through an HTMA. 

Whether your thyroid is struggling 

A sluggish thyroid can make it much harder to conceive and to carry a baby to full-term if you do become pregnant. Low levels of thyroid hormone can interfere with ovulation and increase the chances of miscarriage and implantation failure. 

It’s definitely possible to have problems with your thyroid with absolutely no symptoms at all so you may have no idea that your thyroid is struggling until we do an HTMA. For many women, thyroid issues are one of the missing pieces of the puzzle for fertility. 

To get a clinical diagnosis of a thyroid problem, you need to have blood results that indicate disease. But many people have a thyroid that is sluggish and prompting symptoms but isn’t clinically underactive. 

Your blood results will always come back as “normal”, yet your thyroid isn’t functioning as well as it should and needs support. 

Some of the indications that can come up in HTMA:

Calcium/Potassium ratio – Both of these minerals help regulate thyroid activity and an imbalance between them can indicate that thyroid hormone isn’t getting into your cells as efficiently as it could do.

Potassium is absolutely crucial for this but if you have an excess of calcium, it will hinder this. As well as nutrition, this ratio can be affected by stress and metal toxicity. 

Sodium/Potassium ratio – Both of these minerals help to move thyroid hormones into and out of cells so that they can be absorbed and do their job. An imbalance between these two minerals often indicates that you’re under a lot of stress. 

If an HTMA indicates thyroid problems, it’s definitely worth getting Thyroid Antibody Tests done to see if autoimmunity is contributing.  

How your adrenals are functioning

If your adrenals are struggling, the effects can be wide-ranging. 

Your thyroid also depends on your adrenals. If your adrenals are struggling, your thyroid will often try to compensate and will become even more sluggish. Working on adrenal health can have positive effects on your thyroid too. 

Your adrenals can also have an impact on your sex hormones too, especially progesterone. The adrenals can begin to work even harder, which creates a vicious cycle. 

Sodium/Magnesium ratio – Both of these minerals are directly linked to adrenal function and imbalances can suggest that your adrenals are under pressure. This can at least partly help to explain symptoms such as anxiety and cravings for sweet or salty foods. 

An HTMA can pick up on things like: 

How your sex hormones are working

If your body is under chronic stress, progesterone can be “stolen” and hormones become unbalanced. 

Cortisol is prioritised over progesterone to deal with the “danger” from the “threats” you’re facing. Progesterone steal can also go hand-in-hand with estrogen dominance. 

Zinc-copper ratio – Zinc is heavily linked to your sex hormones – both progesterone for women and testosterone for men), while copper plays a role with oestrogen. 

How your digestion is coping 

If your digestion is less than optimal, your body can prioritise that over “non-essential” functions such as reproduction. 

Making sure that your digestive system is working efficiently is a crucial part of boosting your fertility. 

This involves a good balance of bacteria in the gut, efficient elimination, adequate levels of stomach acid, no leaky gut, no nutrient deficiencies and being in a “rest and digest” state when eating. 

Your digestion can also affect hormone balance. Studies have shown that imbalances in the gut have the potential to increase oestrogen levels. This can be a factor in endometriosis, a condition in which endometrial cells can develop elsewhere in the body and react in much the same way as endometrial cells in the womb. 

Once we have a much better idea about what’s happening at the  cellular level,  I can create a personalised nutrition and lifestyle plan to help you get back into balance and boost your fertility. 

Client Case Study

One of the best ways to explain this to you is by showing you a case study of a recent client. 

My client was a female with unexplained infertility who had already been unsuccessful with several IVF cycles. 

Her thyroid blood results came back as “normal” but when I looked at her HTMA, it was clear that it was far from optimal. As you can see below, her results were underneath the lower optional range for thyroid hormones. And her mineral ratios were telling too. The ideal thyroid ratio (calcium/potassium) is around 4 and hers was 114!

So as you can see, an HTMA can go a lot further than standard testing in highlighting imbalances and giving us a much better idea of why you’re struggling to conceive. In many cases, we can tweak your nutrition and lifestyle to get on top of these imbalances and give you the best chance of rewriting your fertility story. 

If you’d like to dig deeper into what may be affecting your fertility, let’s chat!