Fast food is known to expose consumers to higher risks of obesity, digestive disorders, and even cancer. Now, a recent Australian study determined that fast food, when consumed regularly, doubles the risks of infertility in women.
Researchers have found that women who regularly eat fast food are doomed to face a huge problem, namely, the difficulty to remain pregnant, as it is more likely for them to develop infertility.
Moreover, the study showed that women who did not eat many fruits presented a 50% higher risk of developing infertility. At the same time, the consumption of fruits, at least several times a day, seemed to increase the women’s chances to get pregnant.
The study has been conducted on 5,600 women aged between 18 and 43 from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. These women were supervised by midwives who asked questions about the diet they had a month before conception but also how long it took them to get pregnant once they had proposed it.
The study showed a connection between diet and infertility, fast food being the main culprit for fertility issues
Dr. Raj Mathur, secretary of the British Fertility Society, said that “the study could help women who seek to conceive”.
The study labeled as infertile couples those couples for which it took more than a year to conceive. “The main finding is that the risk of infertility […] has increased from 8% for all women in the group to 12% for women with the lowest intake of fruit,” explained Claire Roberts, the leading author of the study, a researcher at the Robinson Research Institute, at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
“It’s consistent with other research that shows that your eating patterns could affect fertility,” Mathur told. “The message of these studies seems to be that processed foods are bad, and fresh fruit and vegetables are good for fertility.”
Therefore, the scientists concluded that fast food doubles the risks of infertility in women, especially when fruits and vegetables are not part of the dietary habits of those affected women.
