The Better Baby Book (16 page)

For any couple reading this book, maintaining good sperm quality in the male will be quite convenient—all of the recommendations we make for women concerning diet, detoxification, and psychological and emotional well-being also boost sperm quality in men. Aspiring fathers and mothers who have followed our program have felt so much better from it that soon after they began, they didn't view it as a chore anymore. Also, by sticking to the program, the man supports the woman and helps her to follow it.

There are a few supplements that boost sperm quality: zinc, acetyl-L-carnitine, coenzyme Q10, lycopene, and vitamins C, E, and B12.

Zinc is a key supplement for male fertility. The testes and the prostate naturally contain high levels of zinc, and a zinc deficiency can lead to reduced testosterone levels. Supplementing with zinc has been found to improve sperm quality in infertile men: taking 250 milligrams of zinc twice daily for three months significantly improved sperm count, progressive motility, and fertilizing capacity while reducing the presence of sperm-fighting antibodies.

The acetyl-L-carnitine level has been shown to be lower in infertile men than in fertile men. In the study, the treatment group received acetyl-L-carnitine and showed significantly improved mobile sperm counts compared to the control group. Carnitines appear to be necessary for the function of sperm cells, and supplementation with acetyl-L-carnitine is effective at raising the level.

As a mitochondrial factor involved in energy metabolism, coenzyme Q10 protects sperm from oxidative stress. Infertile men who were given one hundred milligrams of coenzyme Q10 twice a day for six months showed a significant rise in sperm motility, from 9 to 16 percent. When the men stopped taking coenzyme Q10, their semen profiles returned to the 9 percent baseline level two months later.

Lycopene is an antioxidant found in high concentration in the testes and the seminal plasma. In one study, twenty infertile men took two thousand micrograms of lycopene twice a day for three months. As a result, 66 percent showed an improvement in sperm count, 53 percent had improved progressive motility, and 46 percent showed improvement in sperm morphology.

Vitamin C protects sperm from oxidative damage and is especially helpful for sperm quality in smokers and men with agglutination, a problem with semen consistency.

The herb ginkgo biloba has been shown to support blood flow and erectile function. L-arginine and L-ornithine, which we discussed earlier, strongly support male sexual function and fertility as well.

Alcohol, tobacco, and excessive caffeine—all commonly consumed by men—are just as harmful for sperm and male fertility as they are for pregnant women and fetuses. Alcohol abuse lowers the testosterone level, shrinks the testes, creates difficulty in achieving and sustaining an erection, and slows sperm production. One Danish study found that miscarriage was more frequent among women whose partners had two or more alcoholic drinks per day during the month before conception. California researchers found that couples in which the male partner routinely drank alcohol were less likely to have a successful pregnancy than couples in which the male didn't drink alcohol.

The father's age is also a factor. Researchers in Israel sifted through medical records and discovered that children born to fathers over forty years of age were six times more likely to have autism, and children of fathers over fifty years of age were nine times more likely. One of many possible explanations for the dramatic increase in the rate of autism in the United States is that the rate of men over forty who are fathering children has increased by about 40 percent since 1980. Simultaneously, men under thirty are having 21 percent fewer children since 1980.

The same researchers linked older fathers to an increased rate of birth defects, cleft palate, water on the brain, dwarfism, miscarriage, “decreased intellectual capacity,” and schizophrenia. Like the rate of autism, the rates of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in children also increased with a father's age.

Other studies mention that older fathers may contribute to prostate or other cancer in their children. Other disorders linked to the father's age are progeria (rapid premature aging) and Marfan syndrome (strangely long arms, legs, and fingers, along with heart defects). Overall, the data suggest that the father's health is just as important as the mother's health for a successful pregnancy. For example, the rates of a forty-year-old man having a child with schizophrenia and a forty-year-old woman having a child with Down syndrome are the same.

We're not presenting this information to suggest that older men refrain from having children. When we did our own research, age was an important consideration for us because Lana was almost forty years old. Yet even though Dave was only thirty-four when we had our first child, he took just as many precautions as Lana did. We know that there's a higher risk of things going wrong for older parents and that this risk increases with age—there's no dispute about that in the scientific community.

Because of this, we do believe that like older aspiring mothers, older aspiring fathers owe it to themselves, their partners, and their children to take appropriate steps to counteract the higher risk that they face. After careful research, we believe that we present the best techniques for reducing risk that are available today. These include proper diet and supplementation, detoxification, and emotional support for mothers and fathers. And we recommend that like aspiring mothers, aspiring fathers start on this regimen six months before the couple plans to conceive.

Sex for Pregnancy

The most fertile sexual positions are those that stimulate orgasm in the woman. Orgasm isn't necessary for a woman to become pregnant, but it does help pull sperm toward the egg. For a couple trying to get pregnant, the man's goal should be to satisfy the woman and bring her to climax. Finishing sex in the missionary position can help with conception, because this position is conducive to releasing sperm deep into the vagina.

After sex, the woman can put a pillow under her hips to elevate them and give gravity a chance to help sperm and egg meet. Using a lubricant can help a lot and can take pressure off the woman to perform sexually. Pre-Seed is a safe, nontoxic lubricant that won't harm sperm or the womb environment.

7

Your Prenatal Supplement Regimen

Six months before pregnancy is an ideal time to start a supplement regimen. This will help your body to detoxify, build up reserves, and achieve greater health and vitality in preparation for pregnancy.

The supplements we took before pregnancy cost about three hundred dollars per month because both of us were taking large amounts of high-quality brands. Depending on your choices, it's possible to keep your prepregnancy supplement bill to under one hundred dollars per month. Even this isn't cheap, but we've found it to be an excellent investment, considering the reduced health risk and the lifelong health benefits you and your kids will gain. As with many products, when it comes to dietary supplements, you usually get what you pay for, although there are some very expensive, and useless, supplements. And supplements are most expensive when they don't work, no matter what you paid for them.

Some nutrients work best when taken on an empty stomach, and some work best when taken with food. Some are ideal in the morning, and some work best at night. For this reason, Lana took some supplements when she woke up, some when she ate, and some before she went to bed. Many supplements do not stay in your system for more than eight to twelve hours, so taking them twice a day will keep your level of nutrition more even during the vital period that your baby is growing in your womb. As we discuss each nutrient separately, we'll explain how it is best used.

Before buying and using nutritional supplements, we suggest that you work with an alternative or holistic doctor or health-care practitioner to measure your vitamin and mineral levels and correct deficiencies or excesses. The central principle to supplementation is realizing that your body is individual and therefore biochemically different from other people's bodies, which means there's no one-size-fits-all supplement regimen that will be best for everyone. Some people may need many times the FDA's recommended daily intake of a particular nutrient. Working with a holistic physician is best, because the physician can help you to determine your individual needs. Our suggestions are general guidelines, but your needs are specific, so please do work with a doctor.

How to Tell if a Supplement Is Useful and Safe

A key element of supplementation is making sure you buy supplements that are
bioavailable
, that your body can absorb and use. You can test absorbability by taking an individual tablet or capsule and placing it in a glass of white vinegar heated to ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit. This simulates the stomach environment rather well. If the tablet or capsule dissolves within thirty minutes, your body is probably absorbing a good amount of the supplement. If the tablet or capsule doesn't dissolve, the supplement is a waste of money, because it's likely to move through your gastrointestinal tract with minimal absorption. So if the supplement doesn't dissolve, it's time to find a new brand. You'll find that the supplements that dissolve best are often capsules and not tablets. We've tested all the brands we recommend on
www.betterbabybook.com/supplements
, and we use them ourselves.

When evaluating supplement brands, we always read the label to see if the inactive ingredients (the binders) are harmful or make the supplement hard for the body to use. Ideally, your supplements will be in capsules, so the only ingredient should be the nutrient blend itself, the gelatin capsule or vegetarian capsule material (listed as MHCP), and magnesium stearate (a safe binder). Many cheap and popular supplements, especially those sold in drugstores and by large vitamin chains, contain added sugar, starch, salt, wheat, gluten, corn, colorings like titanium dioxide, dairy products or casein, flavoring, or preservatives. The same principles for buying food apply to buying supplements: if you see any ingredient you don't recognize, find out what the ingredient is before buying and trying.

Just like food, supplements can go bad or get moldy. Most supplements are best stored in a cool, dry, dark place. If a supplement can go bad, we store it in the refrigerator when appropriate.

Any time you take a supplement, it's best to evaluate its interactions with foods, other supplements, or drugs. This goes especially for herbs. If you're not sure about a particular combination, we suggest checking with a holistic physician, a midwife, or an herbalist. As health experts, we knew the things that we did were safe.

The Myth of
a
Prenatal Supplement

Most pregnant women get
a
prenatal supplement from their physicians and assume they're covered. They are, if the goal is to avoid the diseases caused only by extreme nutritional deficiency, like rickets. The acute deficiencies that cause these diseases aren't a problem in most Western countries, however. So even though a prenatal supplement will surely help, most pregnant women need far more than what's contained in one tablet or capsule for their pregnancies to go as well as possible. One prenatal a day isn't likely to give your child the best start he or she can have.

Nonetheless, people are led to believe that if a woman takes a single one-a-day prenatal supplement, her fetus will be protected from birth defects and her womb will be an optimal developmental environment. This is a marketing lie. Most prenatal supplements don't contain near the amount of nutrients a pregnant woman needs. In fact, we found that most prenatal supplements aren't much more than basic multivitamins that contain extra folic acid. The size of most prenatal supplements isn't even large enough to contain just the calcium and magnesium alone that a pregnant woman needs, not to mention everything else. Also, many prenatal supplements are glorified candy loaded with sugar and toxins. They're dyed with artificial coloring and contain dangerous binding agents.

Even though prenatals aren't enough, if you do only one thing we recommend in this chapter, take a high-quality food-based prenatal supplement in conjunction with a multivitamin. Depending on the brand and the potency, three to five prenatal capsules per day in addition to five to seven multivitamin capsules is usually ideal. Our website lists high-strength, high-quality prenatals and multivitamins that have no additives or ingredients known to be harmful to a fetus at normal doses. As always, consult with a holistic physician if you don't know what to do.

Prenatal supplements are also helpful when you're trying to conceive. The same factors that promote a healthy pregnancy promote fertility. This is even more important for women who have just stopped taking oral contraceptives. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, women who take oral contraceptives often have lower levels of essential vitamins and minerals, including B2, B6, vitamin C, folate, and zinc. Deficiencies in these nutrients invite problems, which we discuss in the following sections.

Multivitamins

Multivitamins are an effective way to cover your bases and make sure you aren't dangerously deficient in any essential vitamin or mineral. A good multivitamin will be a nonsynthetic food-based capsule, tablet, or liquid that contains carotenoids; B complex; vitamins C, D, E, and K; and a good mix of minerals and fatty acids in a form useful to the body.

Before and during pregnancy, we used multivitamins as general support for our specialized supplements for fetal brain development and function, birth-defect prevention, and prevention of a premature delivery. We took the multivitamins, because there's little point to high-end, targeted supplementation without covering the body's basic needs.

As a result of marketing, many people believe the lie that one or two multivitamins a day provides your body with all of the nutrients you need. Many of these recommended daily doses are based on the FDA's recommended daily intake figures. Studies have proven some of the FDA's figures to be woefully inadequate, however, especially for vitamin D3. During pregnancy, of course, the requirements are even higher. Lana took seven to nine multivitamin tablets a day during both pregnancies. “One a day” is good for marketing, but not for nutrition!

In the rest of this chapter we cover the supplements that act to prevent miscarriage and protect your baby from common birth defects. If you take no others, these are the supplements you'll want to take for three to six months before getting pregnant to build up healthy levels. We recommend working with a holistic physician well before pregnancy to make sure your hormone levels are correct.

Essential Vitamins

The basis of any good supplement regimen begins, of course, with the basic vitamins: A, B, C, D, E, and K.

Vitamin A

Full-form vitamin A (mostly retinyl palmitate) is an ester (a compound formed by the reaction between an acid and an alcohol) that's converted into the alcohol retinol in the small intestine. Your body uses retinol for good vision, gene transcription, and immune function. Vitamin A is also a part of fertility and embryo development. It is yellow and fat-soluble. One of the unique properties of retinyl groups like vitamin A is their ability to absorb light. That's why vitamin A is so important for proper eye function. A deficiency in vitamin A can result in night blindness (the inability to see in low-light conditions). An ongoing deficiency can lead to full blindness.

Vitamin A plays a big role in early fetal development. Giving your baby vitamin A supplements after birth won't compensate for a shortage of vitamin A during critical development stages in the womb. Yellow, orange, and green fruits and vegetables are very rich in vitamin A. Examples of yellow and orange sources are sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, cantaloupe, apricots, papaya, mangoes, and winter squash. Green sources are broccoli and broccoli leaves, kale, spinach, leafy vegetables, collard greens, and peas. Butter from grass-fed cows and free-range eggs are good sources, as well as the livers of cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys.

Even if you're eating plenty of vitamin A, you can still be deficient in it. That's because vitamin A has to mix with normal dietary fats and zinc to become useful inside your body. Our diet is rich in the fats you need for this. Beef shanks, cashews, almonds, and peas are good sources of zinc, but we recommend taking a good zinc supplement, too.

Vitamin A's Complication

There's a complication with vitamin A that's important to understand: it's easy to have too much, and too much of it spells trouble for both mother and baby. Since vitamin A is fat-soluble, it's hard for your body to eliminate it. Water-soluble vitamins like B and C don't pose this problem (anything water-soluble is easily eliminated). Toxicity from other fat-soluble vitamins (D, E, and K) happens far less often than vitamin A toxicity. It's estimated that more than 75 percent of people in developed nations get too much pre-formed vitamin A.

Vitamin A toxicity causes nausea, jaundice, loss of appetite, blurry vision, drowsiness, and related disorders. If a pregnant woman has too much vitamin A, it's very harmful for her baby: too much vitamin A can disrupt brain cell activity. During organogenesis (the formation of the baby's organs), a fetus is even more susceptible to harm from vitamin A toxicity. Since vitamin A toxicity symptoms are very similar to routine symptoms during pregnancy, it's important to get your vitamin A level checked.

Too much vitamin A is doubly dangerous, because vitamin A competes with vitamin D inside the body. Too much vitamin A deprives the body of D, which is critically important for fetal development. Excess vitamin A has been linked to osteoporosis for this very reason: it blocks D from working with calcium to support proper bone growth and maintenance. At the other extreme, however—if you don't get enough vitamin A—vitamin D will “use up” your vitamin A. A further complication in the relationship is that vitamins A and D actually work together in some tasks that are critical for your baby's development. For instance, A helps D to bind with DNA to promote optimal gene translation.

A Simple Answer for a Complex Situation

This all sounds quite complicated, and it is. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to getting this right: you'll get vitamin A toxicity only if you eat too much
fully formed
vitamin A. This is not likely to happen unless you take too much of a vitamin A supplement or you eat very excessive amounts of liver or liver oils (like cod liver oil).

The food sources of vitamin A listed above actually don't contain much fully formed A; they contain vitamin A
provitamins
, which the body uses to build fully formed vitamins. In this case, the provitamins are carotenoids, which include beta carotene. Your body can use carotenoids to make fully formed retinoid vitamin A only when it needs vitamin A. Eating too many carotenoids is not toxic to you or your baby, although you can develop a yellow-orange skin discoloration if you really eat a lot. If you eat plenty of yellow, orange, and green vegetables with a decent amount of good dietary fats and zinc, your body will make the perfect amount of vitamin A all by itself!

Balancing vitamins A and D is simple if you follow these guidelines:

• Eat green, orange, and yellow vegetables to get the building blocks for vitamin A.
  
• If your D level is low, supplement with D3 until your level is optimal.
  
• Don't take fully formed A supplements unless you know you're deficient in vitamin A, and don't eat too much liver or liver oils.
  

Vitamin B

B vitamins work together and should always be taken together. For this reason, almost all B vitamin supplements come as a B-complex. A good B-complex supplement will consist of the following: B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B5 (pantothenic acid), B6 (pyridoxine), B7 (biotin), B9 (folate
not
folic acid), and B12 (methylcobalamin or hydroxocobalamin), along with para-amino benzoic acid (PABA). For preventing neural tube defects, vitamins B5, B9, and B12 are the champions.

B5: Pantothenic Acid

Pantothenic acid, or B5, is used to change sugars and fats into energy, and it also plays a role in protein metabolism. B5 facilitates the creation of cholesterol steroids and fatty acids and helps the body use choline and PABA to sustain proper adrenal function and regulation, better enabling the body to withstand stress. It also aids in the creation and growth of antibodies for immune protection.