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March 21 2011 by Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD![Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD]()
in PCOS / Fertility
in PCOS / Fertility Check out this interview from last year’s Low Carb Cruise to the Bahamas: Can a low carb diet increase your fertility?
If you want to hear more from dr Michael D. Fox he will be a speaker on this year’s Low Carb Cruise. It leaves from Ft Lauderdale, FL, on May 1st for a six day cruise with stops at Key West, Grand Cayman and Jamaica. Should you decide not to go you can still read about it here, and perhaps get a few more interviews.
And don't blame your wife :P, good fat probably increase fertality (and all aspects around) for both men and women.
I'm a case in point. After all the standard treatments (Clomiphene for way too long, diagnostics, and eventually two IVF's I finally conceived our first child). Fast forward 8 years and I started low carbing for health reasons and to my utter suprise I got pregnant all by myself. This was 10 years ago, when the notion of reducing carbs to address the newly recognized metabolic syndrome underlying PCOS was considered very "cutting edge" science.
I take issue with two things Dr. Fox said, however. The first is that "lean PCO" is a variant. I think that if someone would do some good long term studies, they would find that there is a continuum and many women who start out with PCOS who are lean will become obese over time. Blaming PCOS on obesity is backwards. I believe PCOS (or at least the underlying insulin resistance) causes obesity rather than obesity causing PCOS, in most cases at least (I do recognize that severe obesity can also cause PCOS-like symptoms).
But many doctors believe the opposite and therefore blame the patient for the condition ("you have fertility issues because you are obese"). Personally, my PCO symptoms were very bad when I weighed 112 lbs, and were not any worse at 212. Furthermore, as I assume Dr. Fox and his colleages will see in their practice, mere weight loss doesn't always correct the metabolic syndrome, but reducing carbohydrate consumption positively alters the hormone ratios before even much weight loss has occurred. I had my first (EVER) ovulatory cycle within 1 month of beginning a low carb diet, when my weightloss was only about 5lbs--weight loss alone was not enough to explain the change in hormones unless you count the dramatic shift in insulin metabolism from cutting carbs.
The second thing is the notion that PCOS patients should eat virtually "no carbs" but he does recommend that they eat vegetables. I hope he was just shorthanding the treatment approach for the purpose of the interview. Otherwise, hello--it's impossible to eat vegetables without SOME carbs, but it is possible to eat vegetables with very limited carbs. Rather than tell people "no carbs", I hope that in their fertility practice they spell out realistic guidelines for exactly how many carbs their patients may have and where those carbs should come from--otherwise, their patients are going to either feel like failures every time they eat a piece of spinach or they are going to have difficulty adhering to a way of eating without firm and realistic guidelines.
I'm sure Dr. Fox's practice does give their patients clearer guidelines, but I wanted to clarify this for anyone with PCOS who may be seeking to try a low carb diet for themselves but who lacks the guidance of a knowledgeable and enlightened physician like Dr. Fox.