7 Things You’re Doing That Are Potentially Hurting Your Fertility (And 3 That Actually Help)
The fertility wellness industry is worth $2.7 billion. Most of it is selling you hope without evidence. Here is what the data actually shows.
She had spent $400 a month on supplements.
CoQ10. Myo-inositol. Ashwagandha. DHEA. Omega-3s. A “fertility blend” with 23 ingredients she could not pronounce. Her Instagram feed was a scroll of pastel-branded promises. Her medicine cabinet looked like a small pharmacy.
She was 34. She and her husband had been trying for 14 months. She had never had a single conversation with a doctor about her weight, his weight, their diet, or how much they were actually exercising. Nobody had told her that the soda she drank every afternoon was more studied than anything in her supplement stack.
She had done everything the internet told her to do. And almost none of it was supported by the kind of evidence that would survive a peer-reviewed journal.
The Gap Between Wellness Culture and Reproductive Science
The global fertility supplement market reached $2.7 billion in 2025 (1). It is projected to nearly double by 2034. An analysis of male fertility supplements found that only 22% of the 90 ingredients tested showed any evidence of affecting sperm health or birth rates. The average product effectiveness score was 1.66 out of 5.0 (2).
Meanwhile, interventions with strong evidence often cost nothing. Moderate exercise improves fecundability. A Mediterranean-style diet is linked to better embryo quality. Folic acid, at roughly seven cents a day, carries the strongest recommendation in all of reproductive medicine.
The fertility industry sells complexity when the evidence supports simplicity.
What We Actually Know About Fertility and Lifestyle
Research on lifestyle and fertility comes primarily from large prospective preconception cohort studies. These are not small supplement trials with surrogate endpoints. They are studies of thousands of real couples tracking real pregnancies over real time.
Two of the most important are the PRESTO study (Pregnancy Study Online, North America) and SnartForaeldre.dk (Denmark). Together, they have followed more than 15,000 couples trying to conceive (3, 4). A 2024 prospective cohort from Rotterdam studied more than 3,600 women and their partners from preconception through birth (5).
These studies measure fecundability: the probability of conceiving in a given menstrual cycle. It is one of the most reliable metrics we have for fertility research. A fecundability ratio (FR) below 1.0 means you are less likely to conceive per cycle compared to the reference group.
Here is what the data tells us about what actually matters.
This is where it gets specific. The 7 things that are hurting your fertility and the 3 that actually help are below.
