Want Babies? Eat Organic Produce

For couples struggling with infertility issues, the list of probable causes can be long, running the whole gamut from genetics to age to sexually transmitted diseases. Now there’s one more to add to the list, at least in the case of men: their diet of conventionally produced fruits and veggies.

A new study shows that men who eat conventionally-grown produce with higher levels of pesticide residues — like peppers, spinach, strawberries, apples, and pears — have lower sperm counts and percentages of normally-formed sperm than those who eat produce with lower pesticide residues. (Check out my earlier report about the variations in pesticide exposure risk from conventional produce.)

Photo by Suzie’s Farm The study found that that men who ate the highest amount of fruit and vegetables with high levels of pesticide residue had a 49 percent lower sperm count than men who consumed the least amount.

The study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the first ever to investigate the connection between exposure to pesticide residues from produce consumption and the quality of men’s semen. Previous studies have shown that occupational exposure to pesticides might have an effect on semen quality of farmers and farmworkers, but until now, there has been little investigation of the effects of pesticides in men’s diet.

The Harvard researchers found that that men who ate the highest amount of fruit and vegetables with high levels of pesticide residue had a 49 percent lower sperm count and a 32 percent lower percentage of normally formed sperm than men who consumed the least amount. Their report was published online last week in Human Reproduction, one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals.

The researchers’ findings are based on an analysis of 338 semen samples from 155 men, ages 18 to 55, attending a fertility center between 2007-2012. The men were divided into four groups, ranging from those who ate the greatest amount of fruit and vegetables high in pesticides residues (1.5 servings or more a day) to those who ate the least amount (less than half a serving a day). They also looked at men who ate fruit and vegetables with low-to-moderate pesticide residues.

The fruit and vegetables were categorized as being high, moderate or low in pesticide residues based on data from the annual United States Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program.

The study found that the men with the highest intake of pesticide-heavy fruit and vegetables had an average total sperm count of 86 million sperm per ejaculate compared to men eating the least who had an average of 171 million sperm per ejaculate — a 49 percent difference. The percentage of normally formed sperm was an average of 7.5 percent in the men who were least exposed to pesticide residues and 5.1 percent in the men with the highest exposure.

“These findings suggest that exposure to pesticides used in agricultural production through diet may be sufficient to affect spermatogenesis [sperm production] in humans,” the researchers write in their paper.

“But this doesn’t mean that men should stop or reduce eating fruit and vegetables,” says Jorge Chavarro, assistant professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the school and one of the authors of the report. In fact, the researchers found that men who consumed the most fruit and vegetables with low pesticide residues tended to have higher percentage of normally shaped sperm.

What this suggests, Chavarro says, is that “implementing strategies specifically targeted at avoiding pesticide residues, such as consuming organically-grown produce or avoiding produce known to have large amounts of residues, may be the way to go.”

The researchers also emphasized the need for further research. “Studies of men presenting to fertility clinics like this one do over-represent men with semen quality problems,” Chavarro says. “Because of this, it is not possible to know whether our findings can be generalized to men in the general population. In particular, it is difficult to get an accurate picture of how large the effect in the general population might be.”

However, as Dr Hagai Levine and Professor Shanna Swan, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, write in an editorial accompanying the report: “Despite the relatively small sample size and exposure assessment limitations, the paper makes a convincing case that dietary exposure to pesticides can adversely impact semen quality. While this finding will need to be replicated in other settings and populations, it carries important health implications.”

Indeed, just in the United States, about 10 percent of women (6.1 million) ages 15 to 44 have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about one-third of these cases are due to male fertility problems.

As the editorial writers point out — poor semen quality “is the leading cause of unsuccessful attempts to achieve pregnancy and one of the most common medical problems among young men… t is sensitive to environmental exposures, including endocrine disrupting chemicals, heat and life-style factors, such as diet.”