Hi again! Personal update - weight, 131, pH4.5. I haven’t had a pH reading higher than 4.5 since my last posting. DH and I have begun TTC, though I don’t know how regularly I am ovulating. I’ve only had one menstrual cycle since I had my son. My milk supply has been excellent despite continuing to lose weight. My son has recently become much more interested in solid foods, so I am planning on cutting back somewhat with nursing and hopefully ovulation will begin again.
I have based much of my research on the information discovered in a recent study out of Oxford, and I thought since I’m referring to it constantly, I had better spell out in depth exactly what the researchers discovered.
The study was spearheaded by Dr. Fiona Mathews (how interesting that only women seem to be studying this!!) of the University of Exeter, Oxford. 740 women in the UK were asked to keep food diaries of everything they ate in the months before conception and also during their pregnancies. The researchers then tallied up the statistical information and analyzed it to see if any trends emerged between diet and baby’s gender.
What they found was actually quite amazing. They found that mothers who took in the most calories of the highest quality and variety foods were the most likely to have boys, and mothers who took in the least calories and the least nutritious foods were the most likely to have girls. There was a whopping 24% more boys born to the mothers with the highest caloric intake as opposed to the lowest!! And they also found that diet during pregnancy had no effect on the outcome - it was the mother’s diet in the months leading up to conception that mattered…in other words, we can definitely make changes in our diet to sway.
Mothers of boys had a caloric intake, on average, of 2,413 calories a day. They also took in a wider array and greater amount of nutrients of all sorts, in particular, calcium, potassium, Vitamins C, E, and B12 (B12 is particularly interesting to me, because strict vegans often are deficient in B12 and have to take supplemental B12 to prevent serious health issues. Another reason vegetarians might have more daughters.) Boy moms ate more good fats and more protein. They ate a higher sodium diet. Eating breakfast cereal was also strongly linked with having sons - the researchers surmised that more breakfast cereal meant more likely to eat breakfast and therefore concluded that eating breakfast led to more boys being conceived. But I think it also might have to do with the fact that breakfast cereals are also highly fortified.
Mothers of girls had a caloric intake, on average, of 2,283 calories a day. They ate less protein, less variety of nutrients, less fat, less sodium, and less protein than the boy moms did. The researchers found no correlation between caffeine intake and baby’s gender.
The interesting thing is that the boy-friendly diet noted by the Oxford researchers would definitely tend to raise testosterone levels, and eating breakfast and more protein and fat would keep blood sugar levels up for longer periods of time - apparently backing up both Grant’s and Cameron’s theories.
One other interesting study recently brought to my attention gives us even more information about how diet might effect gender. It was done in mice, but there is a reason why researchers use rodents for lab experiments, oftentimes what holds true for rodents is fairly close to what holds true for humans as well. Researchers at the University of Missouri (again, mostly women, interestingly enough) took two groups of mice and fed one group a diet that was very high in saturated fat (the kind found in animal products). The second group was fed a diet low in fat but high in sugar and carbohydrate.
The diets were identical in terms of protein, unsaturated fat, and mineral content - the only thing different was whether the majority of calories were coming from saturated fats or carbohydrates (although the high fat diet did have more calories than the other diet did) Both groups of mice had been fed Purina Mouse Chow prior to being put onto the special diet, and the mice came from the same genetic pool, to try and eliminate as many variables as possible.
The mice were equally fertile and had lots of litters, but there were far more males born to the high saturated fat group, and far more females born to the high carb group. And interestingly, the older the mice got, the more the difference - the older boy moms had even more boys and the older girl moms had even more girls.
That meshes exactly with what I have found out regarding diet and swaying, and is actually amazingly close to the kind of diet I ended up following to lose weight while keeping my milk supply up. And both studies illuminate the potential reasons why women of all body types have children of both genders. It may have much more to do with the kinds of calories you’re consuming and your overall nutrient intake than it does your body type.
Wishing everyone the best of luck in their swaying adventures!