Posts Tagged ‘atkins diet and pregnancy’

The Atkins diet does it affect fertility?

All you need to know about this diet and its consequences.

“It’s less likely that female mice fed a high protein diet before conception produce live offspring, and scientists at the meeting expressed the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology made a few weeks ago in Berlin.

The information indicates that a high protein diet is not recommended while you are trying to conceive, “says David Gardner, Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, who led the study.

Supporters of the Atkins regime diets high in protein and low in carbohydrates with the hopes of reducing some kilos. At one point, fans of the program may be consuming a diet containing up to 25 percent protein, about 10 percent more than what people normally eat.

Gardner’s team to their mice fed diets from 22 to 14 proteins for a month, and then allowed to mate. The researchers transferred the 174 embryos resulting in the wombs of surrogate mothers in order to prove specifically how it affects the maternal diet before conception to the health of the embryo.

Only 65 percent of the embryos in the group fed a high protein diet was developed in fetuses compared with 81 percent in the group fed a standard protein.

It also proved more likely to animal embryos conceived by “high protein” were aborted spontaneously later in pregnancy: 16 percent of fetuses “high protein” were aborted, compared with only 1 percent of the group with a standard diet.

“Rodents and humans are very different,” says Catherine Collins, spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, therefore, is difficult to extrapolate from mouse to man. But it is possible that high protein diets have long-term effects on fertility, says Collins.

Opponents of the Atkins diet ensure that the nutritional program may cause metabolic problems, mood disorders and gout. Gardner believes that high protein diets may affect fertility by altering the genetic profile of the developing embryo.

While protein is broken down, increasing levels of ammonia. Females with high protein diets have three times more ammonium in their reproductive tracts than animals on normal diets. In turn, this could affect genetic imprinting, the process by which cells activate and deactivate specific copies of genes from parents.

As expected, more than 60 percent of the embryos of mothers “high protein” show imprinting defects compared with 30 percent of the embryos of the group of mothers with a standard diet. A growth-related gene, called H19, was adversely affected. This could explain the poor growth of the embryos, says Gardner.