Boosting Fertility with Vitamin B6
When trying to get pregnant, it’s important to ingest enough foods that properly nourish your body with vitamin B. And Vitamin B6 is actually one of the most important in the set of B vitamins, as it helps regulate your hormones. Being deficient in B6 can cause irregular menstrual cycles, a progesterone imbalance, as well as poor egg and sperm development. B6 can also help lengthen the luteal phase of your cycle.How much do you need?
Recommended daily amounts are between 100 and 200mg’s per day. Earlier in the year I actually started charting my daily meals on SparkPeople.com and realized my daily intake was falling quite short of 100mg’s. To boost your intake with food, include more whole grains, legumes, eggs, and meat in your diet. And try and stay away from processed foods as much as you can, since almost 90% of vitamin B6 can be lost during processing.
Supplements can also be a good idea, and most women who are actively trying to conceive should be on a great whole foods/raw pre-natal vitamin already. But the amount of B6 in them are not enough to increase your fertility, sometimes only giving you a few milligrams a day. The FDA recommended amount in a multi-vitamin is only 2.5 mg’s! Personally, I’ve been taking a B complex vitamin (B vitamins should be taken together for better absorption) along with my pre-natal vitamin. It’s recommended to start taking an additional 25-50 mg’s per day and increase it after a few months if you’re still having problems. (taking to much can cause health issues as well, so be sure to talk to your doctor or midwife about it!)
How you lose it
- Smoking
- Drinking caffeinated beverages
- Taking chemical hormones, (i.e. The Pill)
- Eating to much protein
- Eating white flour and refined bread products
- Eating to much sugar, and you may think you don’t eat many sweets, but simple sugars are in most processed foods!
Your body actually uses it’s stores of vitamin B6 to rid itself of toxic chemicals from smoking and The Pill, as well as extra caffeine, protein, and sugar. Even if you don’t smoke (or hang around anyone who does) and you’re not taking hormones, with this information you would most likely be well advised to limit or cut out all caffeinated beverages and refined sugars.
And while increasing your daily intake of Vitamin B, please note that it could take at least a couple months to really notice a difference.
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About donielle
Donielle is an amateur herbalist and natural momma to two littles (with another babe in heaven) after dealing with infertility. She has a passion for nourishing nutrition, natural living, and spreading the word on how food truly affects our health. Her blog Naturally Knocked Up focuses on fertility and reproductive health and her book on natural fertility will be available in June 2012. She also runs a local blog (Grand Rapids Natural Living) and is active the local community in order to provide the area with resources and information for natural families.
White flour can decrease B vitamins, too. (Sue Gregg/Emilie Barnes have a good overview on this in one of their books.)
Great post!
Thanks!
Michele
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Ahh, that’s right! Now that you say something I remember reading that a few months ago.
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OK I totally thought that picture in the corner was a cinnamon sugar doughnut with chocolate dripping onto it! Hello! Upon closer inspection I see that I must have just been hungry!!!!
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I know this is an old post, but I wanted to leave this information here for anyone else who stops by to learn about B6. Donielle, I followed your example and entered my diet into SparkPeople’s nutrition calculator. At first, I was thrilled to see that I scored a 254, which was even higher than their recommended range of 100 – 200. Once I investigated further, though, I discovered that SparkPeople’s 100 to 200 range means 100% to 200% *of the recommended daily value,* which is only 2.0 mg. So my great diet full of B6-rich foods (dulse and sweet potatoes were some of the highest-scoring, even higher than legumes and meat) was only getting me to around 5 mg daily of B6. After more reading, it appears that it’s impossible to get 100 mg of B6 from food sources alone. That’s really too bad. My luteal phase is quite short and I was hoping to get the B6 boost from food.
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