Who are Fertility Nutrition Specialists?

RUNNING HEAD: FERTILITY NUTRITION SPECIALISTS

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FERTILITY NUTRITION SPECIALISTS

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Fertility Nutrition Specialists

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Fertility Nutrition Specialists are nutrition experts that help couples adapt to healthy lifestyles that supports and protects them from unexpected hiccups of pregnancies through education programs and strategies on ways in which food optimizes health with regards to conception and pregnancy to improve fertility. Good nutrition lays a healthy foundation for fertility (Chavarro, 2008). Fertility nutritionists help couples to manage their weight by encouraging them to eat correct diets as well as try being within certain healthy weight ranges. They help develop eating program by taking into account both partner’s lifestyles to ensure both the mother and the infant are receiving adequate levels of nutrients as well as to incorporate the best nutritional regimes (Helm, 2007). For couples trying to conceive, fertility Nutrition Specialists may help you adjust your eating habits by recommending you take or avoid taking some kind of foods to increases your chances of conceiving and improve the health of your husband’s sperms.
Roles and Responsibilities
· Providing wellness advice- Fertility Nutrition Specialists have a duty of ensuring that couples understand their responsibilities in consumption of healthy diet and maintenance of healthy body when it comes to fertility, conception, pregnancy and child birth. Their main role is to provide guidance and recommendations on dietary changes towards healthy conception and provide couples with tools to monitor themselves.
· Developing customer tailored nutritional programs for both partners according to their specific needs.

· Managing individual client’s nutrition care by educating them on individual nutrition needs, ways of preparing foods and accessing the right foods and developing appropriate menus and diets.
· Helping clients understand the relationship between the body and nutrition.
· Collection, organization and assessing of individual nutritional and health status.

· Conducting laboratory tests, physical assessments, anthropomorphic measurements, lifestyle and nutrition analysis to assess individual patient’s nutritional optimization and dietary needs.

· Guiding patients through activities such as therapeutic massage, yoga and nutrition counseling

· Working with other doctors, acupuncturists, yoga instructors and massage therapists to help couples (Balen, 2014).

Education

Different states have formal certification and licensing requirements for nutritionists. However, many of them have a minimum entry level of a bachelor’s degree in nutrition, health or other related fields such as food service or dietetics. Fertility nutritionists should have adequate knowledge about reproduction and female health and should be certified while most have knowledge on obstetrics and gynecology.
Contributions to the Society
Fertility nutrition has played an important role in creating awareness among couples on various factors that may affect their ability to conceive and have health babies. Statistics indicate that in America, approximately six million women are faced with infertility each year (Chavarro, 2008). It provides insights on dietary changes and healthy lifestyles to improve women’s chances of getting pregnant and men’s ability of producing healthy sperms. It gives highlights on the importance of folic acids, iron and Vitamin D in DNA replication and maturing of egg after ovulation. Fertility nutrition helps individuals understand the importance of exercise and weight loss as important and powerful strategies in improving fertility rates. Due to increased numbers of infertility cases, many well paid physicians including reproductive endocrinologists, urologists and obstetric gynecologists have specialized in this area to help patients handle reproductive difficulties (Balen, 2014). Infertility is expensive to manage because of huge amounts of money spent on nutritional programs and lifestyle changes.
Adverse Effects Facing Fertility Nutritionist
Despite them being an important aspect of promoting fertility, fertility nutritionist during the course of their work may be faced with different challenges. They too are human beings and listening to so many couples lamenting about their inabilities to have children may have some adverse psychological effects on them and he or she may start to sympathize with the client jeopardizing their relationships. They are also at risk of exposure to harmful toxins from chemicals due to the extensive laboratory researches (Helm, 2007).
References

Balen, A. H. (2014). Infertility in practice. CRC Press.

Chavarro, J., Willett, W., & Skerrett, P. J. (2008). The fertility diet: Groundbreaking research reveals natural ways to boost ovulation & improve your chances of getting pregnant. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Helm, K. K. (2007). Nutrition therapy: Advanced counseling skills. B. M. Klawitter (Ed.). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.