Berkeley, California: Your diets rich in the vitamins known as folates can help preventing birth defects. That’s what a new study reported on Wednesday. The study articulated that vitamin folate diets may protect men against producing abnormal sperm and children with genetic abnormalities. Such diets when consumed by women also help to keep men's sperm normal.

The study by the team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that dietary folate helped lowering levels of sperm with the wrong number of chromosomes. The team of researchers involved in the study found that men who took folic acid supplements and who ate folate-rich foods such as leafy greens had fewer abnormal sperm.

Brenda Eskenazi, the lead author of the study, "We found a statistically significant association between high folate intake and lower sperm aneuploidy."

"There was increasing benefit with increasing intake, and men in the upper 25th percentile who had the highest intake of folate between 722-1150 micrograms, had 20 percent to 30 percent lower frequencies of several types of aneuploidy compared with men with a lower intake," Eskenazi said.

Published in the journal Human Reproduction, the study articulated that the men had fewer abnormal sperm in which a chromosome had been lost or gained, known as aneuploidy. It is estimated that up to 4% of sperm in a healthy man carry either too many or too few chromosomes - a condition known as aneuploidy. Sperm aneuploidy can cause failure to conceive, causes up to a third of miscarriages and causes children born with conditions such as Down's syndrome, Turner's syndrome and Klinefelter's syndrome.

According to the researchers, chemotherapy for cancer and exposure to pesticides can also damage sperm. Folic acid can prevent nerve damage in growing babies and is so important that it is added to flour, rice and other staples in many countries. However, they feel that larger studies were needed to confirm the findings.