While this study sounds too good to be true, experts say “take this finding with a scoop of skepticism”. MSNBC is reporting that a diet rich in ice cream and other high-fat dairy foods may lower the risk of one type of infertility.
The findings are bound to get attention because they are from the well-known Nurses Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health and were published Wednesday in the European journal Human Reproduction.
Researchers found that women who ate two or more low-fat dairy products a day were nearly twice as likely to have trouble conceiving because of lack of ovulation than women who ate less than one serving of such foods a week.
Conversely, women who ate at least one fatty dairy food a day were 27 percent less likely to have this problem.
Even the researchers say women should not make too much of these results, which are based on reports of what women said they ate over many years — not a rigorous, scientific experiment where specific dietary factors could be studied in isolation.
“The idea is not to go crazy and start to have ice cream three times a day,” said the lead author, Dr. Jorge Chavarro, a research fellow at Harvard. “But it is certainly possible to have a healthy diet with low saturated fat intake by having one serving of high-fat dairy a day.”
Women who want a baby will try almost anything…even eating ice cream to get pregnant!
If women do eat more high-fat dairy foods to try to boost their odds of conceiving, it would be important to cut calories elsewhere to avoid gaining weight, doctors said. They also should switch back to low-fat dairy foods once the baby is born, to limit saturated fats.
