Will diet and nutrition shorten the menstrual cycle?

There is no absolute yes or no to this question. Diet and nutrition may indeed lead to shortened menstrual cycles, but most of them only occur under the premise of extreme diet. Ordinary dietary fluctuations will basically not have a significant impact on the menstrual cycle.

A little girl I met a while ago who just graduated, in order to wear a suspender belt in time for the summer, she ate homemade fat-reducing meals for two and a half months. Her daily calories were reduced to less than 1,000 calories. She only dared to eat a small half of a corn as a staple food, and the total of meat, eggs, and milk was less than 2. Two, her cycle had been stable at about 31 days, but it shortened to 24 days for two consecutive months. When she came to the aunt, she still had back pain and couldn't stand up. When she checked her sex hormones, she found that the luteinizing hormone was low and the luteal corpus function was insufficient. To put it bluntly, the corpus luteum, which is supposed to support the endometrium for 14 days after ovulation, is like a "little egg yolk" that provides nutrition to the endometrium. When the nutrition is not enough, it will not grow strong at all, and will shrink before the time is up. The progesterone will fall off quickly, and the endometrium will of course be peeled off in advance.

Many clinical colleagues do not agree that diet is the main cause of shortened cycles. After all, the hypothalamus-pituitary-ovary axis, the core axis that regulates menstruation, has a strong buffering capacity. Even if you eat heavy oil and spicy hot pot for a week, or occasionally eat vegetarian for a few days, as long as the overall nutritional intake can cover the basal metabolism, the gonadal axis will basically not be affected. I myself have met many girls who usually eat very casually and like to drink milk tea and eat fried skewers. Their cycles are always very stable when they have a regular schedule. On the contrary, those who stare at the scale every day, count calories, and are always very nervous are more likely to have cycle fluctuations.

There is still a debate in the academic circles about the impact of phytoestrogens. Many people say that drinking soy milk and eating kudzu root powder every day will shorten the cycle. I myself have met two girls who are particularly sensitive to soy isoflavones. They drank two large cups of freshly ground concentrated soy milk every day for a month, and their cycles were indeed shortened. The duration is 3-4 days shorter, and the duration slowly returns to the original duration after stopping drinking. However, more people drink a cup of soy milk for breakfast every day, and have nothing to do with it for several years. The individual differences are so large that it is impossible to draw a unified conclusion. So far, there are no large-sample studies that can confirm this relationship.

Oh, by the way, don’t jump in blindly after seeing this. The normal menstrual cycle has a floating space of 21-35 days. It is normal to occasionally have it two or three days earlier than usual. Don’t blame yourself for eating too much or eating too little recently. I met a girl two weeks ago who stopped eating all the eggs and milk she was eating because she came to visit her aunt on the 27th day of the month, 3 days earlier than before. She was afraid that she was taking too much protein, which was completely unnecessary.

If two or three consecutive cycles are really shorter than 21 days, don’t be busy adjusting your diet first. Go to the gynecologist for a hormone check and B-ultrasound to rule out organic problems such as decreased ovarian function and endometrial polyps. Then look back to see if you have experienced extreme dieting or long-term carbon and oil deprivation recently. After all, if it is a pathological problem, adjusting your diet alone will not have any effect.