Nutrition, Fatness and Fertility: The Effect of Food Intake on Reproductive Ability

Abstract

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism (1) can be expanded to: “Tell me what you eat, and I will also tell you how well you reproduce.” Recent findings that the onset and maintenance of regular menstrual function in the human female are each dependent on the maintenance of a minimum weight for height, apparently representing a critical fat storage (2), imply that a particular body composition of relative fatness, (fat/lean ratio, or fat/body weight) may be an important determinant for human female reproductive ability (3–6)