Top 4 Reasons to Eat Liver for Fertility (Episode 647)

Full Transcript: Episode 647

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 647.

In today’s episode, I’m going to be diving into the top four reasons why we should be considering liver for fertility, egg quality, sperm quality, and preconception nutrition.

If you’re new to the podcast, I am Lisa Hendrickson-Jack, author of The Fifth Vital Sign, co-author of Real Food for Fertility. And I have been teaching women to chart their menstrual cycles using fertility awareness techniques and ultimately utilize the menstrual cycle as a vital sign for over 20 years.

I’m also the founder of the Fertility Awareness Institute, where we teach women’s health professionals to utilize the menstrual cycle as a true vital sign in practice. And ultimately, my message over the past 20 plus years has been that we should really be paying closer attention to the menstrual cycle because there is so much we can learn when we track it accurately.

As I mentioned, today I’m going to focus on liver for fertility. And what’s interesting is that these days there’s just so much information out there. It’s absolutely crazy. Everybody is an expert. And some of the craziest solutions for fertility I’ve seen lately, experts recommending that women drink pomegranate juice or beet juice to support egg quality. But what does the research have to say?

That is why we’re going to be focusing on liver. And we’re going to dive into what the research actually says about why we should be considering it for our fertility.

When you think about ways to support egg quality, liver probably isn’t what comes to mind at first. And when I say liver, I’m not talking about doing a liver detox or whatever. I’m talking about organ meats, like actually eating animal liver products.

Now, one of the reasons why liver is important to support egg quality is because of the role of vitamin A in egg development. It turns out that vitamin A is actually essential for egg development.

Within your ovary, you have many, many follicles. Inside each follicle is where you’ll find the egg. And each egg is actually surrounded by a cluster of support cells called cumulus cells. These cells deliver nutrients and signals to the egg through tiny channels.

And this is where vitamin A comes in. These cells take up vitamin A and convert it into its active form, which is retinoic acid. And this plays an essential role in the communication network and keeps everything essentially running smoothly. Put simply, vitamin A plays an essential role in follicular development.

One study published in Molecular Human Reproduction studied these specific cells, the cells that surround the egg. They took these cells from 77 women who were going through IVF, and they found that women with the highest levels of retinoic acid in these specific cumulus cells had the highest fertilization rates.

When they looked at the women specifically in the top group of egg fertilization, so 70 to 100% of the eggs from these women ended up fertilizing, these women had, on average, twice as much retinoic acid in the cells compared to the women in the bottom group of fertilization.

What this tells us is that vitamin A does play a crucial role. And naturally, liver is one of the best sources for preformed vitamin A.

But there’s more. The role of vitamin A in follicular development and egg quality has also been shown in animal studies. Now, what’s interesting about animal studies is often the researchers are able to set really specific conditions.

One study gave female rats a diet that was severely deficient in vitamin A. Now, I know we’re not rats, but we can still learn from animal studies. What was interesting is that these rats still managed to ovulate, but what happened is that their eggs broke down and degenerated before they could be fertilized.

That was with severe deficiency. With a milder deficiency, the eggs could fertilize and implant. But what would happen was many of those pregnancies were lost partway through. In animal studies, they call that fetal reabsorption.

What this shows us is that vitamin A does play an important role in egg quality.

Now, since I’m focused on the role of vitamin A in egg quality, I’m not even talking about the crucial role that vitamin A plays in fetal development. When we look at what happens in women who are deficient in vitamin A throughout pregnancy, there can be even more problematic outcomes. And that’s because vitamin A is essential for the proper development of the fetal heart, as well as our eyes, our ability to see, our ability to hear, and even fetal lung development.

The biggest takeaway here is that vitamin A plays an essential role in reproduction as well as egg quality.

I want to read you a quote from the researchers themselves. In summary, the relative vitamin A status of the female, both at the time of conception and throughout pregnancy, is a critical determinant in reproductive outcome, and deficiency can lead to either a complete failure of reproduction prior to implantation or fetal reabsorption or malformation. End quote.

But it doesn’t end there. Vitamin A also plays a crucial role in sperm quality.

Now, what’s interesting is that fertility issues are often considered to be women’s issues. But what’s crazy is that obviously your partner is half of the equation when it comes to fertility. And as I mentioned, liver is important for him too.

As women, even though we carry the babies and have all the visual evidence of pregnancy, obviously 50% of the genetic material comes from him. And when we look at infertility statistics, 50% of infertility cases are related in some way to male factor. And 30% of the time, it’s solely male factor.

So where does liver come into this conversation? Well, in one study published in Epidemiology, researchers examined the semen samples of 189 young men aged 18 to 22, and they looked at their diets.

What’s really interesting about the study is that they didn’t even report the findings specific to the liver part in the abstract. If you look up the study, you’re not even going to see it in the abstract. You have to look at the full text.

One of the reasons for this is it seems as though the researchers did have the preconceived notion that men who consumed organ meats would have lower sperm parameters. But instead, they found the opposite.

Compared with men who did not eat organ meats, and in this study, the organ meats were from beef, pork, or poultry, the men who consumed liver, in particular, had a 53% higher total sperm count, 41% higher sperm concentration, and even better.

Even the researchers weren’t sure what to do with the data. And like I said, they didn’t even put the information in the abstract. The results were so compelling that they could have literally titled the paper, Liver Consumption Supports Sperm Quality.

But I’ll share a quote from the study just to convey how the researchers took it. However, in contradiction to our hypothesis, we also found that organ meat intake was associated with higher total sperm count, sperm concentration, and motility.

Now, similar to the role of vitamin A in egg quality, vitamin A also plays an important role in sperm quality, to the point that there are research studies in progress for finding mechanisms to inhibit retinoic acid production in men as a form of contraception.

Similar to my example with egg quality and animal studies, when we look at animal studies that are measuring vitamin A intake and comparing it to sperm production as well as testosterone production, the link between vitamin A and sperm production is so significant that you can even think of it as being like an on or off switch.

For example, when male rats are fed a diet completely deficient in vitamin A, they stop making testosterone and sperm production basically goes to nil.

Needless to say, vitamin A plays an essential role in reproduction for both men and women, and an especially important role in sperm production. Thus, the recommendation for liver. But as always, there’s more.

Let’s talk about the role of folate and choline before conception. Most women know that they need folate, in particular before pregnancy, because we know about the link between folate deficiency and neural tube defects. Choline, on the other hand, is not discussed as frequently.

And interestingly, choline works alongside folate in the earliest stages of your baby’s development, including the closing of the neural tube, which occurs around four weeks after conception, often before many women know they’re pregnant, of course, unless they chart their cycles.

In one study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers compared the diets of 424 women whose pregnancies were affected by a neural tube defect to 440 women whose babies were born without birth defects. Each of these women reported what they ate in the three months before conception. And the women who ate the most choline had about half the odds of a neural tube defect compared with women who ate the least.

Now, to make things worse, most women don’t get anywhere near enough choline. A 2016 study found that only about 1.2% of women aged 19 to 30 and about 3% of women aged 31 to 50 even meet the recommended daily intake.

But you know where this is going. It turns out that liver is one of the best food sources of both folate and choline. With about 119 milligrams of choline per ounce, a 3.5 ounce serving of liver provides over 400 milligrams of choline, which is close to the daily requirement.

The last point I want to make is about iron. We’ve talked about vitamin A, we’ve talked about choline and folate. We haven’t even talked about B vitamins and zinc and the rich variety of nutrients found in liver. But I do want to focus on iron.

Iron is important to focus on because of how prevalent deficiencies are in pregnant women and, of course, in women of reproductive age. In one study of more than 44,000 pregnant women in Ontario, Canada, 53% were found to be iron deficient at least once during their pregnancy, which is huge. Basically half of the women that they looked at were deficient at least once during pregnancy.

Now, a second study looked at this, but they took an interesting angle. They followed 629 first-time mothers in Ireland who were not anemic in early pregnancy. These were women who, toward the beginning of that pregnancy, looked fine on paper. But by 33 weeks, 84% had ferritin levels below 30, placing them at risk of deficiency, even though most of them were taking a multivitamin with iron.

As a mom myself, having gone through pregnancy three separate times, I can attest that our iron needs rise sharply during pregnancy. And of course, building up these stores before pregnancy is essential, not just for the health of the baby, which of course is very important, but also for the health of the mom.

When I was looking at the Ontario study, what I found interesting was that the researchers concluded that it was basically impossible for women to attain optimal iron stores from food. But the irony is that that’s not even true at all. They didn’t even recommend or consider liver consumption as one of the ways to allow these women to build up their stores before pregnancy.

But the thing about liver is not only is it rich in iron, it’s rich in heme iron, which is easier for our bodies to absorb, as well as the cofactors that we need to actually use that iron. Cofactors such as copper, vitamin A, B12, and of course, folate.

If I take a quote from the researchers, they said, quote, pregnancy places a remarkable strain on maternal iron status, even in a high resource, generally iron supplemented population, end quote.

The researchers are identifying that this is an issue. But like I said, when I’m looking at the latest fertility advice by the so-called experts, they’re telling you to drink pomegranate juice and beet juice. They’re not telling you to eat one of the most nutrient-dense foods, rich with the key nutrients that you need to support not only your fertility, your egg quality, sperm quality, but also to support fetal development in pregnancy.

When we take this information together, I think there are quite a few takeaways that we can leave with. Certainly one of the takeaways is that we really should be learning more about liver and the nutrient density that it provides.

But I would say the second takeaway is that it’s really important to seek support for fertility and egg quality and sperm quality from evidence-based resources. It’s extremely concerning to me to see how much junk garbage information is out there when what women really need is to be set up for success.

Women, men, couples who are looking to conceive, looking to support fertility, really need to have information that they can trust. And this is certainly one of the reasons that whenever I’m sharing information with you, I like to go directly to the sources so that you can check it yourself and really see where this information is coming from. And this is, of course, one of the foundations of all the work that we do at the Fertility Awareness Institute to train our practitioners to utilize the menstrual cycle as a vital sign.

If today’s topic sparked your interest, you can certainly learn more about not only liver, but other foods that support fertility from an evidence-based perspective. You’ll find a lot more in Real Food for Fertility. And you can grab the first chapter for free over at realfoodforfertility.com.

And if you want to learn more about how you can incorporate menstrual cycle charting into your women’s health practice, I’ve created an incredible resource called How to Interpret Virtually Any Chart Your Client Throws at You. And you’ll find that over at fertilityfriday.com/chart.

With that said, I hope you have a wonderful week, weekend, whenever you’re tuning into the show. And of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.