Pumping Iron

If you hope to get pregnant any time soon, you might want to increase your intake of iron from veggies, grains, and supplements, a new study from Harvard suggests. Using information from the Nurses' Health Study II (the large, ongoing study of women aged 24 to 42 sponsored by the National Institutes of Health), researchers analyzed nutrition and fertility data of 18,555 subjects who tried to become pregnant between 1991 and 1999. Specifically, they looked at ovulation infertility--meaning an inability to become pregnant due to poor or no ovulation--and iron intake. women with the highest intake of nonheme iron (which comes fro nonanimal sources such as spinach, legumes, or vitamin supplements)--on average, 76mg per day--had a 40 percent lower risk of ovulatory infertility compared with women with the lowest intake. (The RDA for iron in women is 18g, and 27 during pregnancy.) Intake of heme iron did not have this effect. "It's not clear right now how iron affects ovulation," says study author Jorge Chavarro, MD, ScD, research fellow in the department of nutrition at Harvard's School of Public Health, "although some studies suggest that it is important for the development of the egg prior to ovulation."
from Elle, February 2007.