There are many indicators and studies that warn of the loss of semen quality in Spanish men in recent decades. Fertility specialists explain that men's risk of requiring treatment to become fathers has grown by 9% in the last twenty years, and sperm banks assure that they have to reject more and more donors due to low semen quality.
Andrologists assure that the deterioration of sperm quality has a lot to do with lifestyles. Now a study carried out by researchers from the Rovira i Virgili University contributes to confirming these statements by having found a relationship between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and semen characteristics.
The researchers carried out a cross-sectional analysis of data from 200 healthy men between 18 and 40 years old, residing in Catalonia and enrolled in the Led-Fertyl study (Lifestyle and environmental determinants of seminogram and other parameters related to male fertility) between February 2021 and April 2023. For several weeks they responded to questionnaires and interviews to identify their sociodemographic profile, eating habits, lifestyle and medical history, in addition to collecting and analyzing biological samples of blood, urine and semen.
Dietary patterns were analyzed based on the frequency of consumption of a total of 142 foods. And they detected that, once other factors such as age, educational level, economic level, physical activity practice, whether they smoked or not were adjusted, the participants with a higher consumption of ultra-processed foods were those with a worse sperm count, a lower concentration and less motility thereof.
"We observed clear differences between those who ate the most and those who ate the least ultra-processed foods; specifically, we saw that men who received around 30% of their daily energy intake in the form of ultra-processed foods were the ones who had the greatest alterations in their sperm," summarizes Cristina Valle-Hita, predoctoral researcher in the Human Nutrition unit of the URV and first author of the study.
Year after year, scientific evidence is accumulating on the relationship between the consumption of ultra-processed foods and various chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension or cancer because these products are characterized by their poor nutritional quality and the presence of sugar, salt. fats and additives. However, these types of foods play a crucial role in the diet of many consumers, especially among young people.
Soft drinks, cookies, pastries, bagged chips and other snacks, hamburgers, frozen pre-cooked products such as nuggets, pizzas, sauces and dressings, noodles or noodles... are widely accepted for their ease of preparation, price and flavor. But the results of the research led by Valle-Hita indicate that the habitual consumption of this type of product is bad news for the reproductive health of the population.
However, the researcher points out that during the study they also observed that these damages can be reversed if the diet is changed, because replacing the intake of ultra-processed foods with others that are little or not processed at all could have a beneficial effect on semen quality parameters.
"If these results are replicated in future epidemiological studies with different long-term designs, these new findings could provide valuable information to update or even design preventive and interventional programs to address infertility among men of reproductive age," the researchers point out in their report, published in the scientific journal Human Reproduction Open.
In this sense, Valle-Hita points out that his study remains open to try to replicate the results with the population of other autonomous communities and other countries.
