By Dr. Robert Kiltz
Fertility (or lack thereof) is generally a reflection of your overall health. As my colleagues and I like to say, “Healthy bodies are fertile bodies.” Whether you’re interested in getting pregnant or just improving your general health as you kick off a new year, focusing on what you eat is a great place to start.
Most people are unaware or ignore the fact that what we choose to eat plays a critical role in how we feel and how our bodies perform, hence the old adage, “You are what you eat.” I was certainly one of them, but the past ten years have been eye-opening when it comes to the link between food, inflammation, fertility, and feeling my best.
Here is an excerpt from the book Keto for Fertility Cookbook, which was co-written with keto-cooking and nutrition expert Maria Emmerich. In it, you’ll find empowering information and delicious recipes drawn from Maria’s gastronomical talents, shared knowledge, and Dr. Kiltz’s clinical fertility practice. Together they will show you why and how a diet of low to no carbs, moderate-protein, and high-fat is the foundation of fertility and building better health.
Dr. Kiltz’s Story
If you’re like me, at first, you might be skeptical about the link between diet and fertility. Admittedly, I haven’t always been a believer in the power of food to hurt and to heal. In my medical training, the body was reduced to mechanical parts that pokes, pills, and procedures could manipulate. In the case of fertility, this meant focusing on the hormones critical to conceiving a baby. In my years of med school and into my early career, the diet was rarely discussed and certainly never seen as having any bearing on fertility. I arrived in my profession armed only with the mainstream medical tools of the day–surgeries, injections, IUI, and IVF treatments. All too often, the mainstream medications and procedures were failing. I started to feel that the mainstream Western approach to treatment was missing something essential.
Then around ten years ago, I began witnessing a new trend where patients who had previously tried and failed to get pregnant with every combination of Western and Eastern medicine suddenly began to conceive.
The calls started coming in from patients who had been to multiple doctors and multiple fertility clinics–people who I had entirely stopped treating. Months later, they’d tell me they were pregnant. Then they’d call again to tell me that they had given birth to healthy babies. What all these miraculous births had in common was that the parents were practicing an eating plan known as Paleo–the “caveman diet.” While Paleo is a pretty mainstream term these days, it was only beginning to gain steam when this was taking place (pre-2010), and myself hadn’t heard of it.
These early observations of my patients’ success motivated me to step back and learn everything I could about this seemingly miraculous cure for infertility. I read voraciously while experimenting with the diet on myself. I traveled deep into the low-carb diet world and soon found my way to the high-fat, moderate protein, low-to-no-carb ketogenic, and carnivore diets.
Soon I began prescribing variations of high fat, low carb diets and took note of the outcomes for those patients. Amazingly, the more carbs people cut back on, including so-called “healthy” vegetables and fruit, and the more animal fats people added to their diet, the better the outcomes.
The calls started coming in from patients who had been to multiple doctors and multiple fertility clinics–people who I had entirely stopped treating. Months later, they’d tell me they were pregnant. Then they’d call again to tell me that they had given birth to healthy babies. What all these miraculous births had in common was that the parents were practicing an eating plan known as Paleo–the “caveman diet.” While Paleo is a pretty mainstream term these days, it was only beginning to gain steam when this was taking place (pre-2010), and myself hadn’t heard of it.
These early observations of my patients’ success motivated me to step back and learn everything I could about this seemingly miraculous cure for infertility. I read voraciously while experimenting with the diet on myself. I traveled deep into the low-carb diet world and soon found my way to the high-fat, moderate protein, low-to-no-carb ketogenic, and carnivore diets.
Soon I began prescribing variations of high fat, low carb diets and took note of the outcomes for those patients. Amazingly, the more carbs people cut back on, including so-called “healthy” vegetables and fruit, and the more animal fats people added to their diet, the better the outcomes.
I have also seen the standard American diet lead to chronic low-grade inflammation, something that I, along with other leading fertility experts, am realizing is the root cause of so many “unexplained” cases. Open tubes, normal ovulation, healthy sperm, but no babies! In medicine, we call these unexplainable conditions “idiopathic,” a word derived from the Greek idios “one’s own,” and pathos “suffering.” Calling a disease idiopathic basically means we’ve thrown in the towel. Instead of trying to treat or even properly understand the cause, we just focus on the symptoms.
An HFLC diet improves fertility through three overarching mechanisms:
-By reducing inflammation
-Improving hormone function
-Providing essential and hard-to-get nutrients
Inflammation
In the HFLC diet world, we hear a lot about reducing inflammation. But before we jump into how HFLC reduces inflammation, let’s get acquainted with what inflammation is and what it has to do with your fertility. In broad strokes, inflammation is a natural response to infection or injury.
When our body’s immune response is functioning properly, inflammation is temporary. It turns on when we need it and off again once we are healed. Inflammation evolved as an essential process for our survival in the absence of modern medications like antibiotics. But when it doesn’t turn off, inflammation simmers at a chronic level, damaging healthy cells instead of healing damaged cells.
This cycle of chronic inflammation is one of the main reasons why treatments like antibiotics, steroids, aspirin, heparin, along with immune modulators like intralipids, and IVIG, are often used in conjunction with fertility treatments. They’re all aimed at controlling and reducing inflammatory immune responses.
While drugs like aspirin, heparin, intralipids, and IVIG have their place in a fertility clinic due to their ability to help suppress and modulate the immune system, a properly constructed fertility diet can naturally reduce inflammation while helping you reset your immune system in a sustainable way that makes drugs irrelevant. I often say, “My goal is to put doctors like me out of business.” An HFLC diet is the most powerful way for you to take your fertility into your own hands.
Foods to Enjoy All the Time
One of the challenges of eating HFLC is that it doesn’t only mean switching to eating mostly fat; it also means shedding a false belief system about nutrition that we’ve lived with since we were children. While at the same time, HFLC calls on us to kick our emotional and biological addiction to sugar. I know it’s not easy. It takes personal motivation, and it takes help. That’s why Maria and I wrote this book. For me, the beauty of an HFLC diet is in how it simplifies our entire relationship to food, freeing up tremendous amounts of time and energy that we can put towards all aspects of our lives, not only the things we eat. Our aim is to get you comfortable with HFLC living ASAP while helping you maintain consistency. One of my favorite parts of an HFLC lifestyle is that I can eat healthfully and be satisfied too. There is no need to starve or feel like you’re sacrificing your culinary pleasure. We’re not cutting calories, just changing their sources from junk food to superfood. Nothing brings me greater joy than gathering with friends and family, sharing about our lives, and bringing laughter while enjoying food that shows we care about ourselves just as much as we care about each other. So let’s start with the exciting part—the foods you can eat freely, without restrictions or concerns.
