Men Who Add Nuts To Their Diet Can Dramatically Improve Sperm Quality

TARRAGONA, Spain – For men, a healthy lifestyle is not only good for their well-being, but can also have an impact on their ability to have children. A good diet can affect the quality of a man’s semen, for better or for worse. Spanish researchers say adding nuts to the mix can play a key role in maintaining male fertility.

A team from Universitat Rovira i Virgili claims that consuming a mixture of nuts – such as almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts – can have a profound effect on the methylation of sperm DNA. This process refers to the natural changes in your DNA that do not actually alter the sequences of human DNA. DNA methylation frequently prevents certain genes from being expressed. This, for example, can prevent the genes that cause tumors from turning on and causing cancer.

The study authors examined 72 healthy, non-smoking men in the FERTINUTS trial led by Drs. Mónica Bulló and Albert Salas-Huetos. Forty-eight of the participants added a nut mix to their Western-style diet for 14 weeks. The other 24 men acted as a control group while the researchers monitored the quality of their sperm.

Nuts are beneficial for sperm count, viability and more

The results reveal that including nuts in a man’s diet dramatically improves sperm count, viability, motility, and morphology. The researchers note that methylation in 36 genomic regions linked to sperm DNA was significantly altered in participants eating nuts during the experiment. Almost all of these men (97.2%) exhibited hypermethylation in their sperm DNA regions.

This is the first time that a study has examined the effect of diet on sperm DNA function. It is also the first to show that nuts can be incorporated into a Western diet and have a positive impact on DNA methylation.

“This work demonstrates that there are certain sensitive regions of the sperm epigenome that respond to diet, and which can lead to changes in sperm and in its ability to fertilize,” says Salas-Huetos, first author of the study in an academic press release.

The study appears in the journal Andrology.