Nourishing Fertility: Essential Nutrition for Preconception Health

Preconception Nutrition

What you eat in the months leading up to pregnancy can be as important as what you eat during pregnancy.

This applies to both women and men.

That’s because egg and sperm development begin months before conception, and nutrition can either support or harm your reproductive health.

For women, it takes 3 to 4 months for an egg to fully mature before ovulation. During this time, the body is building the cellular environment that will nourish and protect the egg.

Nutrients like folate, omega-3s, antioxidants, and B vitamins play a vital role in supporting DNA integrity, hormone balance, and mitochondrial function in the developing egg.

For men, sperm regeneration takes about 70–90 days. The quality of sperm, including motility, shape, count, epigenetics, and DNA health, is directly influenced by nutrition, toxin exposure, and lifestyle habits during this window. Key nutrients like zinc, selenium, CoQ10, vitamin C, and amino acids are essential for strong, healthy sperm.

In other words, your nutritional status today is shaping your fertility 3 months from now. Supporting egg and sperm health through targeted, nutrient-rich foods and smart supplementation lays the foundation for conception and for a healthier pregnancy and baby.

If you're thinking about starting or growing your family, or you are facing fertility challenges, your diet and nutrient status should be a key focus for both of you. Nutrition is foundational to fertility success and the future health of your child.

Your Nutritional Blueprint Is Your Baby’s Blueprint

What you eat before and during pregnancy plays a powerful role in your baby’s earliest development, helping to build everything from tiny cells to vital organs.

But it goes even deeper than that.

Your nutrition also helps shape how your baby’s genes are expressed through epigenetics, influencing things like immune strength, brain development, metabolism, and even their risk for certain diseases later in life. It's amazing how much impact food can have, right from the very beginning.

This is known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD), a well-researched concept linking a parent's health before and during pregnancy to long-term outcomes in children.

In the 1980s, research linked birth weight to cardiovascular risk later in life. Since then, research has made links between a mother’s nutrition status and diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, cognition, and cancer in her children.

These connections are explained by epigenetics, or how your genes are expressed. And nutrition is a critical piece that affects the expression of genes. While parents pass genetics onto their children, epigenetic expression from both parents is also passed down from one generation to the next.

And remember: this applies to both parents.

Here’s how: A mother's and father's nutritional status and toxic burden influence egg and sperm quality, DNA integrity, and the messages passed along to future generations.

In this article, we’ll explore why preconception nutrition is such a vital part of your fertility journey and how the choices you make now can set the stage for a healthy pregnancy and baby.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

How nutrition is connected to rising fertility challenges
The ways your diet can support—or disrupt—reproductive health in both men and women
Practical nutrition tips to help prepare your body for pregnancy
A preconception checklist to guide your next steps with confidence and clarity

How Nutrition is Linked to Fertility Challenges

An estimated 10 to 18 percent of couples have challenges getting pregnant, and this number is on the rise. We are learning more every day about how environmental factors contribute to subfertility, including exposure to plastics, PFAS, heavy metals, mold, and more.

Yet, this is rarely discussed in traditional medicine.

When you combine these hard to avoid exposures with stress, lack of sleep, and a not-so-optimal diet, the body can put the brakes on reproduction.

For example, a diet low in antioxidants found in colorful plant foods can increase oxidative stress, affecting fertility. Oxidative stress occurs when there are more free radical compounds destroying the body than antioxidants that protect cells.

Free radicals are something your body naturally produces, but they can also build up from things like pollution, poor diet, stress, alcohol, smoking, or even everyday toxin exposure. When there aren’t enough antioxidants from foods like colorful fruits and veggies to keep them in check, oxidative stress takes over, which can impact fertility by damaging egg and sperm cells.

Sperm are extremely susceptible to oxidative stress, which can damage the DNA that sperm carry, reduce sperm motility, and increase the risk of miscarriage. Oxidative stress is one of the proposed possibilities to explain idiopathic subfertility in men.

Eggs are also vulnerable. Oxidative stress can disrupt the delicate environment needed for eggs to mature properly, damage their DNA, and impair mitochondrial function, which is critical for energy production and embryo development. Over time, this can lead to reduced egg quality, lower chances of fertilization, and a higher risk of chromosomal abnormalities.

When it comes to boosting fertility and laying the foundation for a healthy baby,nutrient-rich whole foods are essential for both men and women.

Fertility-Boosting Foods: Paleo-Friendly Nutrients for Egg, Sperm, and Hormone Health

When it comes to fertility, the nutrients you get from foods and supplements are more than just “good for you”; they’re the raw materials your body uses to create and protect healthy eggs and sperm, regulate hormones, and prepare for a healthy pregnancy.

The following are fertility-supporting, paleo-friendly foods that omit common inflammatory triggers like gluten and dairy, so you’re fueling your body in a way that supports hormone balance, lowers inflammation, and promotes optimal reproductive health.

Balance hormones – Omega-3s, zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, and choline work together to keep estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and insulin in harmony for optimal fertility.

Food sources: wild-caught salmon (in moderation due to high mercury), sardines, pumpkin seeds, oysters, grass-fed beef, leafy greens, almonds, pastured eggs (especially yolks for choline), and nutritional yeast (gluten-free).

Boost egg and sperm quality – Antioxidants like vitamins C, E, and selenium protect reproductive cells from oxidative damage, while CoQ10, folate, L-carnitine, and choline support mitochondrial function, DNA integrity, and early embryo development.

Food sources: citrus fruits, kiwi, berries, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, organ meats (like beef liver for concentrated choline), dark leafy greens, asparagus, grass-fed red meat, and pastured eggs.

Support ovulation and menstrual health – Iron, vitamin D, complex carbohydrates, and choline help maintain regular ovulation and a healthy menstrual cycle.

Food sources: grass-fed beef, spinach, wild-caught salmon, pasture-raised eggs, sweet potatoes, quinoa (if tolerated), and root vegetables.

Promote uterine and endometrial health – Fiber, vitamin A, choline, and anti-inflammatory compounds create a receptive environment for implantation and early pregnancy development.

Food sources: carrots, sweet potatoes, leafy greens, pastured eggs, berries, flaxseeds, chia seeds, and extra-virgin olive oil.

Improve semen health – Vitamin C, zinc, selenium, arginine, and choline are critical for sperm count, motility, morphology, DNA integrity, and proper cell membrane structure.

Food sources: citrus fruits, bell peppers, oysters, pumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts, turkey, chicken, watermelon, and pastured eggs.

Influence epigenetic expression – The vitamins, minerals, choline, and phytonutrients in these whole, unprocessed foods help regulate how genes are “switched on or off” in developing eggs and sperm, affecting your baby’s long-term health.

Food sources: a wide variety of colorful fruits and vegetables, fresh herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, high-quality proteins, and choline-rich foods like eggs and organ meats.

Note: Choline plays a vital role in preconception health for both men and women. For women, it supports hormone balance, liver detoxification, and healthy methylation—all key for preparing the body to conceive and creating a nourishing environment for a developing baby.

For men, choline helps maintain healthy sperm membrane integrity, protects sperm DNA from oxidative stress, and supports methylation patterns that can positively influence a future child’s health.

Once pregnant, choline is critical for your baby’s brain development, memory, and neural tube formation, as well as healthy placenta function.

While foods like egg yolks, liver, salmon, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli provide some choline, it’s challenging to meet the recommended daily amount (at least 450 mg during pregnancy) from food alone. Most people fall short, even with a nutrient-rich diet, which is why adding a high-quality choline supplement is critical.

Overall, though, when you nourish your body with high-quality foods with targeted nutrients, you support your reproductive cells in both partners, increasing the chances of conception and supporting the health of the next generation.

In other words, what you put on your plate now can directly influence your ability to conceive and your baby’s long-term health.

How Processed Foods Can Harm Reproductive Health

In contrast, ultra-processed foods like packaged snacks, sugary cereals, refined grains, fast food, and artificially sweetened beverages are linked to inflammation, blood sugar imbalances, insulin resistance, and nutrient depletion.

Studies show that diets high in processed foods are associated with longer time to conception, increased risk of miscarriage, and poorer outcomes in assisted reproductive treatments.

For both men and women, diets loaded with processed foods can impair the quality of eggs and sperm, increase oxidative stress, and interfere with the epigenetic messages passed on to the next generation.

In Women:

Processed foods can impair egg quality by increasing oxidative stress and depleting the body of key nutrients like folate, B12, choline, and antioxidants—nutrients that are essential for healthy ovulation, DNA stability, and mitochondrial function within the egg. They also contribute to inflammation and hormonal imbalance, making it harder to conceive and maintain a healthy pregnancy.

In Men:

A poor diet can compromise sperm count, motility, and morphology—three critical factors in male fertility. Processed foods also lead to increased production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can damage the DNA inside sperm cells, reducing their ability to fertilize an egg or contribute to healthy embryo development.

Epigenetic Impact:

Perhaps most importantly, poor nutrition can negatively influence epigenetic expression—the way genes are turned on or off in both egg and sperm. These epigenetic "marks" are passed to the developing embryo and can shape a child’s long-term risk for chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even behavioral or cognitive disorders.

In other words, the nutritional choices you make today don’t just affect your own body; they carry biological messages that can influence your child’s health for decades to come.

This should feel empowering. You can make a real difference in your baby’s health. When you consume a nutrient-dense, whole food diet, you are taking steps that can help improve fertility outcomes, and you are helping to "turn on" protective gene expression that supports healthy development and resilience in the next generation.

But preparation for a baby also takes time. Depending on your health and current and past lifestyle, it can take anywhere from three to twenty-four months to reverse, replenish, and rebuild your nutrient status.

If you don’t have a functional medicine doctor, consider becoming a patient or enrolling in the Every Baby Well® Preconception Fertility Program.

How To Use Food to Help Optimize Fertility And Prepare The Body For Pregnancy

Research supports that diets rich in vegetables, fruits, high-quality proteins, and healthy fats are linked to shorter time to conception, improved IVF outcomes, and lower risk of pregnancy complications.

Here is your preconception checklist for preparing the body for pregnancy by building up nutrition stores and supporting favorable epigenetics:

1. Eat Whole Foods

Choose foods in their most natural, unprocessed form.

Focus on including:

Colorful organic vegetables and fruits – blueberries, strawberries, citrus, bell peppers, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and leafy greens like kale, arugula, collards, and dandelion greens for antioxidants and phytonutrients.
Healthy fats – extra-virgin olive oil, avocado, coconut oil, nuts (almonds, walnuts, macadamias), seeds (chia, flax, pumpkin, sunflower), and fatty fish (wild-caught salmon, sardines, mackerel- in moderation due to high mercury content) to support hormone production.
Grass-fed, pasture-raised proteins – beef, lamb, bison, poultry, and wild-caught (opt for low mercury) fish for amino acids that build reproductive tissues.

Complex carbohydrates – root vegetables like sweet potatoes, parsnips, and carrots, plus gluten-free grains such as rice (occasionally, if tolerated). Avoid inflammatory grains like wheat, barley, and rye.

Eating whole foods isn’t just about avoiding junk, it’s also about giving your body and your future baby, the best nutritional foundation possible. My recipe library is a great place to start for optimal fertility nutrition.

2. Include Specific Fertility Foods

The following are nutrient-dense, paleo-friendly foods provide the critical fats, vitamins, and minerals to help support your fertility and pregnancy (always avoid foods you’re allergic or sensitive to):

Dark leafy greens – kale, arugula, collards, dandelion greens
Pastured eggs – whole eggs and yolks for choline, B vitamins, and healthy fats
Grass-fed or regenerative red meat – beef, lamb, bison, for iron, zinc, and amino acids
Low-mercury fish – sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and wild salmon for omega-3s
Shellfish – oysters (cooked), shrimp, scallops for zinc, selenium, and iodine
Organic nuts and seeds – almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, chia, flax for healthy fats and micronutrients
Colorful vegetables and fruits – blueberries, strawberries, cabbage, oranges, sweet potatoes, beets, butternut squash, white onions, yellow peppers, Brussels sprouts for antioxidants and fiber

3. Why Avoiding Inflammatory Foods Matters for Fertility

When you are preparing your body for pregnancy, what you leave off your plate can be just as important as what you put on it.

Common inflammatory foods like gluten-containing grains (wheat, barley, rye), animal dairy, refined sugars, and heavily processed oils can disrupt hormones, irritate your gut lining, and contribute to systemic inflammation.

These foods can also trigger immune responses that can interfere with ovulation, sperm production, implantation, and even early embryo development. Chronic low-grade inflammation can increase oxidative stress, which damages egg and sperm DNA and impacts the quality of reproductive cells.

By removing these inflammatory triggers and focusing on nutrient-rich, whole, paleo-friendly foods (with occasional rice if tolerated), you’re giving your body the best chance to:

Balance hormones naturally
Support a healthy gut microbiome for optimal nutrient absorption
Reduce oxidative stress on reproductive cells
Create a stable, anti-inflammatory environment for conception and early pregnancy

This approach not only improves fertility in the short term but also supports the long-term health of your future child by positively influencing epigenetic expression—the way genes are turned on or off in egg and sperm before conception.

3. Lower Your Exposure to Toxins in Food

Reducing the toxic load on your body before pregnancy can improve egg and sperm quality, support hormone balance, and create a healthier environment for conception and baby’s development. Here’s how:

Eat organic to decrease pesticide and herbicide exposures, which can disrupt hormones and impact reproductive health.
Eliminate GMO foods, which are often heavily sprayed with herbicides like glyphosate—a chemical linked to gut microbiome disruption, inflammation, and possible effects on fertility and fetal development. Choosing organic also helps you avoid most GMO crops.
Eliminate alcohol to protect liver health, hormone balance, and nutrient status.
Filter your drinking and cooking water to remove chlorine, heavy metals, PFAS (“forever chemicals”), and other contaminants.
Eliminate plastic – choose glass or stainless steel food storage containers and never heat food in plastic to avoid endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA and phthalates.

4. Support Detoxification with specific foods and supplements—Before Pregnancy

Your body naturally detoxifies every day, but optimizing this process before conception helps reduce the burden of toxins passed to your baby.

Support detox through:

Cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, arugula)
Other colorful fruits and veggies
Adequate hydration with filtered water
Supportive detox supplements start with Liposomal Glutathione, Zeolite Clay, and antioxidants.

Note: Active detox protocols should not be done during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

The preconception time is a good time to focus on supporting the body’s natural detoxification processes, but please note that pregnancy and breastfeeding are not the time to push detoxification.

5. Start a high-quality, comprehensive preconception supplement.

Even with a nutrient-rich diet, most people still have gaps, whether from soil nutrient depletion or individual needs for higher levels of certain vitamins and minerals.

A well-formulated supplement helps fill those gaps and ensures your body has what it needs to support fertility and a healthy pregnancy.

Supplements to Support Preconception for Both Men and Women

When it comes to preparing for pregnancy, supplements can play a powerful role in filling nutritional gaps, supporting detox pathways, and creating an optimal environment for conception.

Here’s a look at my go-to foundational formulas for women and men in the preconception phase.

For women, include Women’s Wellness + Fertility Force.

How It Supports Fertility & Preconception Health

Provides foundational nutrition – A comprehensive blend of bioavailable vitamins and minerals ensures essential nutrients for egg quality, hormone regulation, and reproductive function.
Supports detoxification & liver health – Milk thistle, artichoke, dandelion root, and turmeric aid liver function, promoting the elimination of toxins and excess hormones that can impact fertility.
Enhances antioxidant protection – Resveratrol, turmeric, and garlic reduce oxidative stress, protecting egg and cellular integrity while supporting a healthy inflammatory response.
Boosts essential fatty acids for reproductive health – EPA, DHA, and DPA omega-3s from high-quality fish oil improve hormonal balance, egg quality, and uterine health, while also supporting fetal brain development.
Strengthens gut health & microbiome – Nutrients like turmeric and garlic promote a healthy gut, which plays a critical role in nutrient absorption, hormone metabolism, and immune function—key factors in fertility and pregnancy wellness.

Men’s Wellness + Fertility Force is designed to address the core cellular, nutritional, and environmental factors that influence sperm health and fertility.

How It Supports Fertility & Preconception Health:

Boosts Cellular Energy: Sperm require high energy for motility. Acetyl L-Carnitine, Alpha Lipoic Acid, and NAC fuel mitochondria to produce ATP, enhancing sperm movement and function.
Strengthens Immune Function:NAC and resveratrol support immune balance and protection of sperm cells from harmful invaders.
Protects Against Oxidative Stress:Antioxidants like Alpha Lipoic Acid, resveratrol, and green tea extract safeguard sperm DNA, mitochondria, and membranes from free radical damage.
Supports Detoxification: Broccoli seed extract and NAC enhance the body’s ability to remove environmental toxins and endocrine disruptors that can impair sperm quality.
Provides Targeted Nutrition: A complete blend of vitamins and minerals supports sperm morphology, motility, and DNA integrity for optimal reproductive health.

Click here to learn more about preconception supplements.

Whether you're actively trying to conceive or parenthood feels like a distant idea, it's never too early, or too late, to nourish your body with intention. Every step you take toward better nutrition is an investment not just in your fertility, but in the long-term health of your future child.

Instead of waiting until other options have failed, let nutrition be the foundation. It’s a powerful, proactive step you can take starting today, with love, purpose, and hope for the future.

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