Happy first week of spring (?) . I'm still wearing my scarf over here...

Here's an article on a popular site, Babyzone, on food and fertility. It pretty much says many of the same things I've been harping about in earlier columns, about things like the importance of zinc, magnesium, and other trace minerals that our overprocessed diets mean we might not get enough of, so at the very least, taking a good multivitamin isn't a bad idea for "insurance.''

Plus, I'm happy to... more

When I first look at this little vial of, basically, purple glitter, I was a bit taken aback. Half the fun of buying makeup (if my memory serves me correctly) was getting it in a fun little cake, plus a cool compact contained thing that fit in your hand, and an applicator that looked like a teeny weeny paintbrush, enough to bring out one's inner Picasso.

Of course, go into your local drugstore and take a peek at the 1000000000 ingredients that you can't pronounce plus that many of the colors that are used are made from coal tar...and even thr stuff that doesn't have coal tar... more

I must ask, what was Barry Bonds thinking? According to a new book, San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds was not only taking steroids, human growth hormone (which can have the scary side effect of also making your organs grow), PLUS some drug veterinarians use to beef up, well, beef...but even more astonishingly, Bonds was also taking the fertility drug Clomid.

Hm, maybe I should have filed this under "Celebrity Fertility." Actually "Insanity" would probably be a better category. I already have issues with taking a drug that forces your ovaries (those cyst producing factories) to go into Lucy-in-the-bon-bon-factory overdrive and ripen dozens of eggs at once... more

My MAN FERTILITY sidekick (i.e., my husband) was helping me test run some shaving products because most commercial preparations have chemicals like parabens (which act as xenobiotics, artificial estrogens, hormones) that are bad for fertility, and they have a lot of other things like chemical foaming agents and artificial fragrances that are just bad for you, period.

So we found some stuff that smelled great, worked, great, ta-dah! I was all set to reveal it here on these pages, but then I noticed that one of the ingredients was St. John's wort extract (albeit, organic). The... more

Aha, there was recently an article in the very mainstream PARADE Magazine about how food can affect your genes. In the future, they think, researchers will be able to just put a drop of your blood on some computer chip and will be able to figure out what diseases you are susceptible to, and suggest nutritional tips from there.

I had been talking about with cancer, that "bad" environmental triggers can cause mutations that can result in cancer, while "good" environmental triggers can be protective. While this sci-fi DNA chip will be able to pinpoint specific... more

Herbs work on the body through the same channels as drugs. In fact, many drugs are just purified botanicals. Of course, some herbs are stronger than others; eating a ton of basil is unlikely to affect your fertility, but eating a bunch of bella donna or foxglove (where digitalis comes from)is likely to kill you.

However, let's start with the herb, marijuana. While it's been known for awhile that smoking doesn't do sperm any favors, there are some studies out now that suggest marijuana, while it may have other medicinal uses, has a distinctly detrimental effect... more

Finding your path among the zillions of fertility websites isn't easy. I've done a little research to find what I think are among the best ones (of course this list is not exhaustive--there's many more sites out there than I could ever look at...):

www.resolve.org: RESOLVE provides support for couples with fertility problems, they alsohave a physician referral service. www.endometriosisassn.org: a nonprofit organization that offers education and support for endometriosis sufferers--also... more

The reason I am using pearls to illustrate this, is that ovarian cysts (including the developing eggs, mind you) can look like pearls. And like pearls, there's a certain amount of inflammation involved.

I was doing research for a novel, totally unrelated, but I was reading a medical journal about PCOS where a bunch of obstetricians were debating whether to treat PCOS at all, since it is the ovary's job, basically, to produce cysts. They were pondering that perhaps the medical profession is a bit too excited about another chance to do surgery.

Again, it is thought that up... more

(a lot of my father's patients seemed to think it cute to give him cactus-related things--get it, needles?--so hence the picture)

Friends and acquaintances have been asking about how to find a good acupuncturist, especially as they see how much better I look after seeing Dr. Jiao. The good thing about where I live is that it's small, and the university community is even smaller--everyone knows where the best place is to get sweet Portuguese bread, that there is a great noodle place in one of the nearby strip malls, and we pass the name of this possibly 80-year-old man who is... more

Photo credits: Jessica Wynne for The New York Times.

Caption: Shelby Siems, 44, with her son, Christopher, 2, has a boyfriend but is expecting another son from the same donor who fathered Christopher.

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a cover story called "Looking for Mr. Good Sperm"--which is about the how mating and procreation rituals have evolved (devolved?) from internet dating and mate shopping... more