A diet rich in ice cream and high-fat products such as whole milk appears to benefit women attempting to become pregnant, according to a study in a leading European medical journal.
But experts warn it doesn't mean they should break out the Ben and Jerry's just yet.
The study published Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction was based on work by Harvard researchers who found a link between infertility caused by lack of ovulation, and a low-fat diet.
Women who ate two or more low-fat dairy products a day were nearly twice as likely to have trouble conceiving because of lack of ovulation, known as anovulatory infertility, compared to women who ate less than one serving of low-fat dairy products per week.
And women who ate at least one serving of fatty dairy food per day were 27 per cent less likely to have this problem, according to the Nurses Health Study at the Harvard School of Public Health.
"In this cohort of healthy women, we found that intake of low fat dairy foods were associated with a greater risk of anovulatory infertility, whereas intake of high-fat dairy foods was associated with a lower risk of this condition," the report states.
When they looked at specific foods, the researchers found that women who ate ice cream two or more times a week had a 38 per cent lower risk of infertility than women who consumed ice cream less than once a week.
However, even the researchers themselves say the results shouldn't trigger a lifestyle change in women trying to become pregnant.
The results are largely anecdotal, the researchers state, and are based on reports of what women said they ate over a long period of time, as opposed to rigorous scientific experimentation
"The idea is not to go crazy and start to have ice cream three times a day," said Dr. Jorge Chavarro, the lead author and a research fellow at Harvard.
"But it is certainly possible to have a healthy diet with low saturated fat intake by having one serving of high-fat dairy a day," Chavarro told The Associated Press.
Because there is so little research into the link between low-fat dairy consumption and anovulatory infertility, more work needs to be done to confirm or overturn the results, he added.
The current Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends three or more daily servings of low-fat milk or other dairy products for adults - a recommendation that could actually be detrimental to women trying to become pregnant, Chavarro was quoted as saying on the Science Journal website.
The guidelines "may well be deleterious for women planning to become pregnant as it would give them an 85 per cent higher risk of anovulatory infertility according to our findings," Chavarro said.
Others urged caution, saying the results sounded too good to be true and probably were. Another Nurses Health Study also found that menopause hormones could ward off heart disease. Doctors believed the research for several years until another study later disproved the findings, AP reported.
Another factor to consider when digesting the findings of the study is the fact that the results don't even apply to most cases of infertility.
Lack of ovulation is only responsible for one-third of all infertility.
Some experts also questioned the fact that the study found no link between dairy products and infertility in general. The link only became apparent when researchers separated non-ovulating women who ate yogurt and other low-fat dairy products, from those who ate more high-fat dairy products.
Though the results were adjusted to factor in weight and lifestyle, critics suggest weight extremes could be responsible for the results as being too thin, or too heavy, increases the risk of infertility, Dr. William Gibbons, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, told AP.
