A healthy lifestyle is not just important for women trying to conceive. The way men live affects the quality of their sperm in a bunch of ways. And that affects your chances both of being able to conceive and having a healthy child – at birth and throughout their life.
So what lifestyle factors are important to your fertility? Here are their five top tips for sperm health:
Aim for a healthy weight – eat well and be active.
Quit the smokes – ask your GP for help.
Cut back on the beers – drink in moderation.
Avoid nasty chemicals – limit exposure.
Don’t leave it too late – age affects sperm too.
Healthy weight, healthy sperm
There’s no getting around it – being overweight is going to have a big impact on your fertility. It lowers your sperm count, which means there are fewer than 15 million sperm per milliliter of your semen (20 million per milliliter is a much healthier count). Being overweight also reduces your sperm’s swimming skills. Both of these things decrease the chances of one of them fertilising your partner’s egg.
There’s more. Being overweight means that you produce greater numbers of abnormally shaped sperm. Aside from sperm quality control, being overweight reduces your production of testosterone, which can make it harder for you to get an erection. And, even if you do, the functioning of the genes that you pass on to your baby can be changed by your being overweight, which can affect the health of your baby at birth, and throughout their life.
Eating a balanced and nutritious diet and getting regular physical activity is the key – not only to improved chances of conception, but to your health and that of your baby.
