Ready for Baby? (How About Your Sperm?)

Holding off for a day on the Surgeon General story to instead talk about something that has interested me since I watched a presentation on how men's choices can affect sperm health. We ladies load up on folic acid and other staples of a healthy diet to prep for getting pregnant but tend not to expect the same from our men, even though the guys are providing half of the, um, material.
It turns out that sperm DNA is vulnerable to defects, some of which may come from dietary deficiencies or exposure to toxins. But for various reasons, some of them cultural, "much of this information never makes it to men." Men don't visit ob-gyns yearly like women do, for one thing, and there also seems to be a false perception that the male reproductive system is "simple" and "straightforward" and that defective sperm don't tend to make it all the way to the egg. Some of these same perceptions make research funding difficult to acquire, according to some scholars, so the science on male reproductive health is sparse.
Here's what we do know: Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange gave birth to a high amount of children with spina bifida, leading to questions about pesticide exposure. Men who received chemotherapy for testicular cancer temporarily produced defective sperm (perhaps not surprising given the toll chemo takes on the body). Older men's sperm is more likely to cause dwarfism. And most recently, as I previously covered, a Berkeley study found that men who ate little folate--yes, that same B-vitamin so important to women--produced more sperm with the wrong number of chromosomes, which could cause miscarriages and birth defects.