Nutritionists and researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston set out to try and discover whether dairy foods in general had any effect of fertility on humans, as there was "pretty strong evidence" that an excess of lactose in animals could have a negative effect on the ability of females to conceive. Everyone was surprised to find that the same result was not found in humans. The records, taken from 1991-1999, of nearly 19,000 women from the ages of 24-42 were examined.
It turned out that they found that women who ate two or more servings of low-fat/non-fat dairy foods and no whole fat dairy had an 85% higher risk of becoming infertile. Eating one serving of whole fat dairy per day significantly reduced the odds of developing infertility. The type of infertility most commonly found in this study was anovulatory, a failure to produce eggs. One possible reason for this result is that low fat dairy foods tend to have more lactose in them than full fat products, but scientists say that more research is needed before anything can firmly be concluded. And they do "not recommend that women trying to conceive use this as an excuse to eat "buckets and buckets of ice cream."
