HEALTHY DIETS AND SCIENCE: Women who eat less saturated fat have a smaller chance of becoming pregnant

The raison d'etre of this website is to provide you with hard scientific information which may help you make informed decisions in your quest for health (so far I have blogged concise summaries of over 1,500 scientific studies and have had three books published).

My research is mainly focused on the effects of cholesterol, saturated fat and statin drugs on health. If you know anyone who is worried about their cholesterol levels and heart disease, or has been told to take statin drugs you could send them a link to this website, and to my statin or cholesterol or heart disease books.

David Evans

Independent Health Researcher

Thursday, 24 February 2011

Women who eat less saturated fat have a smaller chance of becoming pregnant

This post includes a summary of a paper published in Fertility and Sterility 1990 Oct;54(4):632-7

Study title and authors:
High dietary fiber and low saturated fat intake among oligomenorrheic undergraduates.

Snow RC, Schneider JL, Barbieri RL.

Department of Population Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.

This paper can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2170167?dopt=Abstract

Oligomenorrhea is infrequent or light menstruation, with only four to nine periods in a year. Because they are ovulating less women with oligomenorrhea have a smaller chance of becoming pregnant.

This study evaluated the nutrient intake, in 35 eumenorrheic (normal menstruation), 11 mildly oligomenorrheic, and 10 oligomenorrheic nonathletic undergraduate women.

Oligomenorrheic women were found to consume significantly more dietary fiber, crude fiber, and polyunsaturated fat, and significantly less saturated fat than women with normal menstruation.

Snow concluded: "The data suggest that higher intake of fiber and lower intake of saturated fat may be associated with oligomenorrhea among otherwise healthy undergraduate nonathletic women".