Fasting at Ramadan leads to less males born

http://cid.bcrp.gob.pe/biblio/Papers...bre/w14428.pdf

I find it a very confusing paper, the statistics and methods used are very intricate and scientific... at places they are mentioning a 6% reduction in male births, at other places a 25% reduction or an 18% reduction. I am not really sure what statistic to take out of it, but it does definitely show that fasting leads to a lowered rate of male births. They mention a study by Matthews that showed a decrease in male birth, I suspect this may be the Oxford study as they say that 133 foods were studied and only breakfast cereal was shown to be positively correlated with more male births. They hypothesize it is all to do with glucose levels, and that breakfast eating (in the Matthews study) increased glucose levels.

They also mention at some point that many days of fasting had a cumulative reduction on reducing the blood glucose of pregnant women... ie the more days they had fasted the lower their blood sugars are.

I am a little bit concerned by some of the health implications mentioned for foetuses. Most of it is talking about negative implications of fasting whilst pregnant (not before pregnant) but it does mention in small print as a footnote at one point that fasting at 3 - 4 weeks of pregnancy (ie before we find out we are pregnant, whilst we are in 2ww and trying to keep blood sugars low) can possibly harm the neural development of an embryo.

AS - I have been meaning to ask for ages - do you have any sort of hypothesis as to HOW MUCH you think the LE and low blood sugars etc could be likely to sway our outcomes? I get very down when I see stats reported in some studies such that it sways gender ratios but by small amounts such as 6% etc. Its a lot of work for a measly 6%. Do you believe that what we are doing could sway our chances by as much as 25% or more? Or is there just no way to really say?

I can't get this downloaded (my computer is telling me it will take 45 minutes??) but I've read an analysis of it before in a review paper. Thanks for posting it, I'd love to have every study posted on the site but I don't have time!

To answer your questions, firstly, the LE diet is NOT fasting. The LE Diet is designed to be in line with the recommendations of reproductive endocrinologists as a safe amount of caloric intake for women who are going HT and need to lose weight while doing so. The protein and fat intake of the LE Diet are NORMAL and are the amounts suggested by Web MD and WHO as ideal for health and LE Diet is actually much more nutrient-rich than the daily diet of many women in some parts of the world and throughout history. I have never told anyone to fast during pregnancy nor would I, and I also have tried frequently to deter people from fasting prior to pregnancy and also urge everyone to eat 1500-1800 cals a day and not ever go any lower than 1200. So please don't worry about any health implications.

Obviously I cannot say what our % will be at this point. My hypothesis is, since we are seeing about 80% coming from studies done on FGD and the Dutch study also got about 80% success, we can hope for 80% success rates over the course of time. (which is actually SPECTACULAR because some of us with 3-4-5 of one gender may be more "set" to produce that gender than the average person is, so our odds may not even be 50-50 to begin with.)

Naturally, I hope for better than 80%; however, I am not certain we'll ever get better than 80% because I'm not sure Mother Nature WANTS us to get better than 80% and it may not be possible - but then again, maybe it is. Plus, I can't control everything people do and at least some of the opposites we've gotten, people have not always done exactly what I personally would have had them do - not to mention "swaycession" which can undo some of the good that (pink) swaying does.

The reason why these studies find only small % is because they're studying ONE aspect of diet. Just the fasting from sunup to sundown, ok, that's great and would def. sway pink, but if a person was taking a prenatal, eating a ton of protein, BD in boy frequency patterns, using Preseed, etc then they're doing a lot of things that can sway blue. Swaying in the sense of, you do one thing and are then guaranteed a baby of a certain gender, just cannot be true and we've all seen enough opposites to prove that. Swaying is more of a balancing act, like scales, where you can do boy and girl friendly things and even have one side weighted more than another but still have many chances to conceive an opposite.

When I went into swaying, I went in with the belief/knowledge that my odds of pink were NOT 50-50 to begin with. Some of us are already set 80-20 in the OTHER direction and so I felt like, if I could even get to just 50-50, I'd take the flip of a coin at that point. If I could get 6% beyond 50-50, I'd be thrilled!!! Now it may well be that I just got lucky, my odds never changed from 80-20 and I would have gotten a girl 2 out of 10 times anyway - but it is very interesting that my coin flip came up pink the one time I lost weight before conception and wasn't taking vitamins and none of the times when I was.

Thanks so much for your answer Atomic, everything you have said makes a lot of sense. The stats the LE diet is getting is tremendously exciting, I think you've cracked it! I am not sure why it is not downloading well for you on your computer, it downloaded instantly on mine... I am a techno gumby though so I am not really sure what the problem could be sorry. If you do get a chance to read the full thing I think it would be worth it, it is really interesting and a very long, detailed report. The reason I was worrying about fasting is they define it as "meal skipping" and I was wondering if the breakfast skipping (leading to a 12 - 16 hour fast for a lot of people I guess) could be a problem. Thanks again for the answer and all that you do. I cant WAIT to start my sway, so excited about my chances of getting my little girl now that I have found this website, and what a miracle it would be in my life to get my long sought after little girl.... nothing could make me happier.