Fast food could make it more difficult for women to get pregnant

A study published Friday in the journal Human Reproduction found when analyzing the diets of nearly 5,600 women for one month. The paper saw that a diet low in fruit yet high in fast food made it difficult for some women to become pregnant within a year or at all.

"We recommend that women who want to become pregnant should align their dietary intakes towards national dietary recommendations for pregnancy," first author Jessica Grieger said in a statement. "Our data shows that frequent consumption of fast foods delays time to pregnancy."

In the review, the team from University Adelaide in Australia discovered that women who eat an alarming amount of fast food - four or more times per week - were 16% more likely to suffer infertility (defined as not being able to conceive after a year of trying). On average, the bad foods contributed to an additional month of difficulty.

They also saw that women who ate fruit three or more times a day increased their odds of getting pregnant while those who ate little to none increased their infertility risk by 12%.

But factors like age - arguably the most important variable in fertility - don't seem to be accounted for.

"It's much harder for older women to get pregnant," obstetrics and gynecology professor at NYU Langone Health Fertility Center, Dr. James Grifo, told the Daily News. "You start declining in your late 20s but from 30 to 40, sucess rates are cut in half. So, if you've got a 38-year-old 'healthy' woman against a 28-year-old McDonald's eater, you're not comparing apples to apples."

The study stressed that data on the potential father's diet was not collected and the definition of fast food could be subjective - both are factors that may have skewed the results. For their purposes, the team said that "fast food" meant only what patrons could order at a typical chain restaurant. Also, people tend to bend the truth about what they eat.

"For any dietary intake assessment, one needs to use some caution regarding whether participant recall is an accurate reflection of dietary intake," Grieger said. "However, given that many women do not change their diet from pre-pregnancy to during pregnancy, we believe that the women's recall of their diet one month prior to pregnancy is likely to be reasonably accurate."

Healthy diets are beneficial to a person's overall health in every facet of her life but since the relationship between nutrition and fertility is vastly unknown, indulging in the occasional cheat meal shouldn't necessarily be forbidden.

"If you'd like to eat a fast food meal once in a while," Grifo told The News, "you don't have to feel bad and be ashamed if you're not yet pregnant."