For Boomers: Healthful Diet = Healthy Sperm

Leaving aside the issue of how many boomers really want to launch another generation of little ones, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have found that the more vitamin C, E, folate and zinc eaten by men over 44, the healthier their sperm. The correlation was not found in younger men. A UC Berkeley news release reports that the researchers knew that the older a man is, the more likely he is to have sperm damage, and that older men are less fertile and are predicted to have more chromosomally defective pregnancies and a higher proportion of offspring with genetic defects. What they didn’t know was how to boost the fitness of the sperm of older men. Now they do. The researchers, who studied the vitamin intake of about 80 men between 20 and 80 years old with an average age of 44, found that men older than 44 who consumed the most vitamin C had 20 percent less sperm DNA damage compared to men older than 44 who consumed the least vitamin C. The same was true for vitamin E, zinc, and folate. Read more from UC Berkeley. Read the study here.