Teen Weight Affect Male Fertility Later in Life?
I had recently read an interesting piece in the health section about how teen males and females who either battle weight problems that relate to being underweight or overweight - so obesity, and underweight kids, may actually have more problems later in life than those that maintain a healthy weight throughout their lives and do not have the “yo yo” phenomenon, or have not had problems with too little weight or too much weight on their bones in their teen years. Men’s health and women’s health has significantly impacted fertility in the past, and believe me, a huge part of health is the body fat you carry, as well as how slim you are and your food choices.
The studies apparently were conducted on men and women from Finland. This study is significant and believable because it tracked the subjects through much of their life, into adulthood, so it knew of all health factors in the men and women it tested, since a very early age, so that is significant, statistically speaking.
Men and women who had been obese as teens had significantly lower amounts of children than men and women who were of a normal weight, and men and women who were underweight in their teens still had exhibited less fertility than their normal-weighted counterparts, but not nearly the gap that we see in the obese teens that had a lot less children and therefore, conclusively, were substantially less fertile than those maintaining a normal weight throughout their teens.
The relationship between the weight issue as teens and the fertility issue in men and women has a lot to do with what’s called the BMI, or Body Mass Index, which essentially measures how much body fat a person has, or how much of their body is represented by fat. The teen women who had a very low BMI as teens had interruptions or irregularities in their menstrual cycles because of essentially not enough nutrition, and the teen wome and men with obesity in the teens may have had hormonal influences, throwing their hormones off since their blood sugar most likely was affected by the obesity.
