October 16, 2013 — Men who ate at least one or two servings a week of white fish such as tilapia, cod, or halibut had improved sperm quality compared with those who ate none. Interestingly, eating two or three servings a week of fattier fish such as salmon and tuna was linked to a 34 percent higher sperm count —s o it may pay to eat a variety of fish, which, yes, will also protect a man’s heart.
Getting about an hour a day of exercise could lead to higher sperm counts and reduce infertility, new research suggests, and weight-lifting appears to be particularly helpful. On the dietary front, men may want to avoid hot dogs and eat more fish to improve their sperm quality. But they don’t need to worry too much about drinking caffeinated coffee or alcohol in moderation.
Those intriguing new findings were announced this week by Harvard School of Public Health researchers at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual meeting in Boston. They’re based on lifestyle surveys and sperm samples collected from about 150 men evaluated for infertility at the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center over the past six years; the exercise study was not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, which means we should give it a bit of extra scrutiny.
What’s more, the researchers could only make statistical associations and couldn’t prove that exercise or dietary habits directly affected sperm production.
That said, men struggling with infertility might want to consider trying some common sense lifestyle approaches to see whether they work to improve their sperm count and quality, said Jorge Chavarro, an assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, who was a co-author on all of the new studies.
Many of these changes, he added, coincide with recommendations made by the American Heart Association to lower a man’s risk of heart disease.
Read the full story at The Boston Globe