A new study on male fertility has found that health nuts can be an almond for their nuts.
The quality of semen depends not only on genetics, but also on environmental, lifestyle and especially dietary factors, which scientists have only recently begun to understand.
Now, nutrition researchers have for the first time demonstrated the effects of specific foods on sperm quality in humans – in this case, tree nuts, i.e. almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts. They found that healthy people on a “Western-style diet”, usually red meat, processed foods and high in sugar, who ate those nuts, enjoyed almost immediate benefits from the genetic profile of their seeds.
This new research is built on previous findings focusing on improving overall sperm count, including motility and counting for regular nut eaters. However, researchers from the University of Utah and Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, took a step further in a 2018 study to investigate the molecular process behind how nut consumption can change sperm quality in the short term – a process called methylation.
Their randomized clinical trial included a group of 72 healthy, non-smoking, young participants, of whom 48 were asked to integrate 60 grams (more than just 2 ounces) into their diet daily for one day, while the remaining 24 continued. Their typical lifestyle and western diet.
At the end of the period, people on a nut-heavy diet showed 36 genomic regions of their sperm DNA, which were “significantly different methylated” compared to the control group. Of those regions, .2 97.3% were considered “hypermethylated”.
In short, just a handful of almonds a day can help keep the reproductive document away.
Researchers say their work, now published in the journal Andrology, is the first hard evidence that eating almonds has immediate benefits for many men, especially in the United States.
“This work demonstrates that sperm have some sensitive regions of the epigenome that respond to diet, and that can alter semen and lead to its ability to fertilize,” said Albert Salas-Hutos, lead author of the university’s press release.
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