www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996085
com news service Women on a high-protein diet, including those following the Atkins regime and some sportswomen, could be significantly reducing their chances of conceiving, a study involving animals suggests. It remains to be proven if human fertility is also affected by a protein-rich diet, says David Gardner of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Englewood, who led the study. "But to err on the side of caution, I'd suggest women who want to conceive get off a high-protein diet," he says. Eating protein-rich food increases levels of a metabolic byproduct, ammonium, in the female reproductive tract of mice and cows, and ammonium is known to slow development of mouse embryos. So Gardner and his colleagues wondered if high levels of ammonium would affect normal reproduction. "Tons of meat" They fed female mice a normal diet of 14% protein, or 25% protein for four weeks before mating. Embryos from females on the high-protein diet implanted only 65% of the time, versus 81% for the normal diet. And only 84% of the high-protein embryos developed to 15 days, compared with 99% of the normal embryos.
European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology "It's always hard to extrapolate from animals," says Randy Jirtle of the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, whose team studies the effect of diet on embryos. "But from this data it doesn't look like a good thing for everyone to eat tons and tons of meat." However, Jeff Volek from the University of Connecticut says that blood levels of ammonium do not seem to increase in people on the Atkins diet, so levels in the female reproductive tract probably do not either. Gardner thinks this should be reassuring for people who adhere to the rules of the diet, but he also points out that many people might eat even higher levels of protein, and the effect of this on ammonium levels is not known. The research was presented at the 20th annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Berlin, Germany.
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