If you're trying for a baby and can't stand the taste of licorice – now's the time to breathe a sigh of relief. However, if you're partial to a handful of licorice allsorts (or several), we've got some bad news.
A new study out of the University of Illinois claims that licorice is all sorts of bad for a woman's fertility, and the damage it causes could be huge.

The study found that a compound in licorice called isoliquiritigenin (or 'iso' for short) messes with sex hormones in a woman's ovaries, lowering estrogen levels.

The primary reason for this was found to be that it reduces your body's level of aromatase – an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen – by at least 50 percent … and as you can probably guess, excess testosterone is not doing hopeful mamas any favours.

What's really scary is that this interference may potentially be enough to cause a woman to become infertile.

One of the study's authors, Professor Jodi Flaws confirms, "In general, when you start to have lower hormone levels, you could start to have problems with reproduction … I would say, though, that a 50-plus percent drop in aromatase in humans would be a serious problem for fertility and for other things."

She also says a decline in estrogen could potentially hurt a wide range of female bodily functions.

"Because estrogen is also important for healthy brains, healthy bones, a healthy cardiovascular system, if the levels are depleted for too long, you could have problems with those systems … We haven't shown that to be the case. That's just a possibility."

This article was republished with permission from Kidspot.