Here's another reason to stay fit (reason #2,064, I think. I lost count):
Thin People Make Babies Better!
Notice I didn't say make better babies, I said make babies better. It's like the old Starkist commercials where Charlie Tuna is playing the violin in his tuxedo and they tell him, "Starkist doesn't want tuna with good taste, Starkist wants tuna that tastes good!"
Here's The Fit Doc scoop:
Researcher report in the Feb 2008 edition of the journal Human Reproduction that a woman's chance of getting pregnant goes down as her weight goes up.
They looked at over 3000 women and their partners with no obvious reason for infertility, and who have spent a year or more without contraception and without getting pregnant. The researchers followed them for another year, or until they became pregnant or started fertility treatments. They found that obese women (BMI >30) had a 4% drop in their chance of getting pregnant for each 1 point increase in BMI. For very obese women (BMI 35-40) the probability of pregnancy was between 26 and 43% lower than for normal weight women (BMI 21-29).
Obesity is known to be a risk factor for low fertility due to anovulation. This, however is the first study to look at obesity and fertility in women who are ovulating normally, but are subfertile.
According to lead author Dr. J W Van Der Steeg, "Owing to the fact that more women of child-bearing age are becoming overweight and obese, this is a worrying finding." Since women in developed countries are putting off childbirth at the same time they are putting on weight, the two factors combine to lower fertility even more than either one alone.
The cause for the relationship between lower fertiltiy rate in obese women is unknown, but Dr Van Der Steeg thinks it may be related to the hormone leptin. Leptin is secreted by fatty tissue and is know to regulate appetite. Like many hormones, leptin may have additional effects in different parts of the body. "There is evidence that leptin may influence the process of steroid production by the ovaries'" he stated. "It is possible that obese women may have disturbed hormone levels, which decrease the chances of successful fertilization and implantaion."
"Although this study does not show whether women's chances of conceiving rise if they lose weight, because of the size of the cohort, with comparable women in different weight groups, we hypothesize that losing weight will increase the chance to conceive without treatment. Therefore, we would advise women to lose weight. Although the effect on better fertility is not proven, it is shown that the chance of a serious complication during pregnacy and labor is reduced (with weight loss)."
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3 comments:
Actually this is not true, when women hit puberty, there is a reason that their bodies tend to store more fat then men, because the higher you body fat ratio is the better your chances at conception. That would be the key reason that athletic women or women who are anorexic do not get their periods, because of lack of body fat, so please stop feeding women false information, Thanks
Some statistical proof:
MEMBER QUESTION:
Can being underweight affect fertility?
CURTIS:
Yes, it can. One of the main ways that being underweight can affect getting pregnant is it can change your periods, or even make it so that you don't have periods at all. This can be a problem, especially for athletes who are training heavily and stop having periods. Along with not having periods, they are also not ovulating, which means they are not making eggs and won't get pregnant.
A woman that is underweight and trying to get pregnant, or gets pregnant, should try to gain more weight during her pregnancy and even before she gets pregnant. Doing this will give her baby a better chance at being healthy during pregnancy and after birth.
Lady Snuka
Thank you for your interest in my blog.
You are correct when you point out that extreme low body weight/ anorexia and intense physical training in women athletes are both related to anovulation and therefore lower fertility rates.
However, you are using that as a straw argument. When you assert that "actually this is not true" about my post, you seem are comparing underweight women to normal weight women, missing (intentionally, I believe) the point of my post.
My post was not about low body weight and its effect on fertility. It was about overweight and obesity and their role in fertility compared to women of normal weight.
Asserting that my post and the findings of the involved study are not true is simply incorrect. The body of scientific evidence clearly shows that overweight and obesity contributes to infertility. To suggest otherwise is to bury your head in the sand.
You can attack the study based on its design I guess. It is not double blinded (I don't know how you could study this in a double-blinded fashion), and includes a moderate sample size (3000 patients), but it is prospective and appears to have been well run.
For your convenience, here is a link to a WebMD article on the same topic. Also, below are references to the cited article in case you'd like to read it fully.
SOURCES: Van Der Steeg, J.W. Human Reproduction, December 2007; online edition. Jan Willem van der Steeg, department of public Health, University Medical Center Rotterdam, Netherlands. William Dodson, MD, Penn State Hershey College of Medicine, Hershey, Pa. Dodson, W., Fertility and Sterility, September 2006; vol 86.
Please do not misinterpret me. I am not making any value judgments about people who are overweight. The intention of this blog is to point out health benefits of an active, healthy lifestyle and to motivate people to adopt the same. I choose to do it in a light-hearted manner in order to make it more fun to read. I hope readers will understand this and take my words as they were intended...
...And that, actually, IS the truth.
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