Sperm count is higher with heart-healthy diet

Young men who eat a heart-healthy diet may have better quality sperm than their peers who dine mostly on junk food, a small study suggests.

The American Heart Association recommends the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension or DASH diet, or a Mediterranean-style diet to help prevent cardiovascular disease. Both diets emphasize cooking with vegetable oils, eating nuts, fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and poultry, and limiting red meat and added sugars and salt.

In the study of 209 male college students, ages 18 to 23, the young men who most closely followed a DASH diet had total sperm counts 65% higher than those whose eating habits bore little resemblance to a DASH diet.

Eating patterns that stuck more closely to a DASH diet were also associated with a 74% higher total motile sperm count, a measure of the amount of moving sperm, and 31% more sperm with a normal size and shape, which are the sperm most likely to fertilize an egg.

“Even in young, healthy men with overall good semen quality, we still see an association between a healthier diet and better semen quality,” said Audrey Gaskins, a researcher at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.

“Young men are not invincible to the consequences of a poor diet,” Gaskins, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

For the study, Ana Cutillas-Tolin of the University of Murcia School of Medicine in Spain and her colleagues used food questionnaires to see how much the participants consumed of the main foods that make up heart-healthy diets like the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet. The study can’t prove whether or how diet impacts semen quality in young men. Beyond its small size, another limitation of the study is that researchers relied on men to accurately report their eating habits.