Chapter 13 - Precision Nutrition in Female Reproductive Health

Abstract

Nutritional and lifestyle-related factors, including overweight and obesity, nutrient deficiencies, smoking, excessive consumption of caffeine and alcohol, stress, chronic exposure to environmental pollutants, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia associated with excess calorie intake, poor diet quality, and a sedentary lifestyle can influence female reproductive health. These factors can affect female reproductive health by direct damage to ovarian function, or by indirectly interfering with the pituitary-hypothalamic reproductive axis. Two-thirds of American women and increasing numbers of women globally are overweight and obese. Obesity and overweight also are involved in the phenotypic expression of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), which is the most common reproductive disorder in women. Precision Nutrition through the integration of nutritional, genetic, epigenetic, metabolomic, microbiome, and environmental factors can improve our understanding of the role of diet and lifestyle in PCOS. PCOS favors abdominal fat deposition and altered energy utilization so that nutrition interacts with genetic predisposition through hyperandrogenism and insulin resistance. Precision Nutrition promises to improve the prevention and treatment of PCOS.