Understanding Scientific Studies for Swayers Updated 12-8-17
There’s little more frustrating to a dedicated swayer than when you have your sway plan pretty well in hand and then someone posts a link to a study or article that seems to fly in the face of your sway plan. Equally discouraging is when you look for data to back up your sway plan and realize it’s really pretty sparse, or ask a question and all atomic has to say is “We don’t know!”
Let’s take a closer look about where these studies come from and what they mean, and hopefully shed some light on why no one needs to EVER panic or despair over a single study.
1)Why are there so few studies done on gender swaying?
It’s a maddening truth; very few studies are done on gender ratio (and the ones that are out there, are often less awesome than we would like.) Altho I couldn’t find a hard number online, there simply aren’t enough medical researchers to go around. Think of it this way…in order to be a medical researcher, you have to hold a doctorate (requiring a decade or more of study and a huge financial investment in one’s eduation), and medical researchers must study every aspect of medicine out there – cancer, heart disease…gender ratio is really pretty far down the list of priorities for most, not only because gender ratio seems a minor concern to many people and many people find desire for an offspring of a particular gender distasteful, but also because there’s very little money to be made at it (see number 2 below)
Of the studies that are done, many are done by graduate students working towards their doctorate (they’re often the only ones who have the time and inclination to study something that is a bit outside the main.) Often, their more qualified academic supervisor will tack their name on the front of the study before publication to give the study more credibility. While there’s nothing wrong with this in theory, there have been times I’ve read a study where the data was sound and intriguing, but the conclusion was farfetched or downright misleading. (Example – the study that looked at gender ratio through family trees and hypothesized that there is a gene that makes more X or Y sperm, when other science strongly indicates that isn’t true and could never be true. That was a student’s thesis paper…not that it makes it useless, just that to my way of thinking, it carries less weight than a study done by a fully qualified researcher with a lifetime of experience. Boy Or Girl? It's In The Father's Genes)
So basically, we’re dealing with a very limited pool to begin with (few medical researchers), a large body of data to study (the entire pantheon of medicine/biology), and gender ratio is very far down the list of priorities for most researchers (and can even reflect badly upon them should they pursue it.)
2) Who is funding these studies and why?
Further complicating matters, most scientific studies are funded by pharmaceutical companies that stand to make billions of dollars in profits from drug sales (on average, a single drug company makes profits of $9-13 billion dollars a year) and focus their energies on things that can make them money – the creation of new drugs. While governments and universities do fund studies, the cost of a single, well designed study can be upwards of $12 million dollars and take years to carry out, and are often limited to political hot-potatoes like breast cancer and AIDS that have strong political lobbies backing them up.
Not only does gender swaying lack a political lobby, there are millions of people who believe the very idea to be repellent, harkening back to the age of eugenics. Gender selection is illegal in many countries. Thus, it’s highly unlikely that we can expect any reliable studies from the people who are the best at them – drug companies, government research facilities, and research universities.
We do benefit from the castoffs of the big money fertility business, but their interests lie in getting couples pregnant and that’s where they make their money, not in determining the hows and whys boys and girls are conceived. Fertility clinics in many countries could never use that information anyway because gender selection is illegal and thus they have no interest in pursuing the issue.
The cold, hard truth is that we don’t have enough information and we may NEVER have enough information because there’s no real money to be made here. People may say “If gender swaying were real, someone would have figured it out a long time ago because they’d make a fortune at it” but that really isn’t the case. If diet and lifestyle is the key, no one will ever make $9 billion dollars of profit a year from peddling a diet and exercise book, even if it was a bestseller. And the entire issue is so fraught with political and historical baggage, that many wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. We’re on our own here. So we have to become experts at picking the wheat from the chaff and discerning good studies from bad ones.
3)Why are some studies better than others and how can we tell?
There are a few criteria that help to determine a good study from a bad one.
--It must be done in humans. Yes, we do occasionally have access to intriguing studies done in other animals but at the end of the day, mice, cows, sows, hinds, wild horses, and especially, especially sea sponges, marine worms, etc. are NOT humans and have drastically different dietary needs and even more importantly, drastically different reproductive cycles than any other creature on the face of the globe. Humans are the only animal that is constantly fertile and has “hidden ovulation” (historically speaking, and actually up to a very few years ago) where neither male nor female even KNOWS when she’s coming into heat (ovulating). Even with modern technology it’s difficult to pinpoint O!
Also, humans, by virtue of having fewer offspring over the course of a lifetime than most other animals, actually have the most motivation for being able to alter gender ratio of their offspring in some fashion to increase odds of survival and handing down genes. If you only GET one offspring, it really behooves you to be able to “pick” the gender of offspring with the best odds of survival and reproduction. I strongly suspect that humans may be the most susceptible to swaying for this very reason. If you’re a female dog having a litter of 10 puppies every year, you can afford to play around with having some boys and some girls. If you’re a human being whose entire genetic burden rests on the shoulders of one offspring over the course of a lifetime, you better do whatever it takes to ensure that offspring has the absolute best chance of getting a mate.
Editorial note - It is really quite ludicrous to assume that because you can make marine worms (who have millions of offspring, release millions of eggs and sperm over the course of a lifetime, are able to change their genders depending on external environment, and do not even fertilize eggs in the female’s body) have more boys or girls if you dump some sodium or calcium in their tanks, that this can in any way be extrapolated to mammals, and especially to humans. I BEG you, do not base a sway on any study done in any animal lower on the food chain than mice.
--A study should include as few variables as possible. Example – you can’t study timing by giving people who want girls, Clomid and telling them to DTD 3 days before ovulation, and performing IUI on O day for people who want boys, and then make any claim that timing sways at all. You cannot ADD variables to an experiment, it negates or at least confuses the results.
As complex as gender swaying is, it may be impossible to fully separate cause from effect that way. We’d need to take a thousand genetically identical women who ate identical diets throughout their entire life before switching to a sway diet, and impregnate them all from one batch of sperm (and hope that the guy we got it from, was not predisposed to father more of one gender than another.) We may NEVER be able to fully know every aspect of gender ratio and that means that eliminating conflicting variables in studies is even MORE important because there are already so many variables that are utterly beyond our control.
--Everyone taking part in a trial has to be informed about it and consent. This is a rule designed to prevent abuse on the part of the researcher, which sadly happened quite a bit during the 20th century even up to the 1960’s (Google “Tuskeegee Experiment”). The downside of this very valuable and important rule is, when people know what the outcome of a study is “supposed” to be, they may alter their behavior, may remember things inaccurately, and may even fudge data to prevent the researchers from getting mad at them if they didn’t follow the rules of the study. Also, the people who are willing to participate in said study may be self-selected in some way that might alter the results…example, the Dutch study. It’s not the best science to take a group of people who are highly motivated to have a child of a particular gender and tell them to eat certain foods and just TRUST that they aren’t going to do other gender swaying methods at the same time. They’re so highly motivated to have a baby of their DG that they might do anything, even break the rules of the study itself to get that baby.
Plus, never underestimate the power of the human mind and the placebo effect. It’s been proven that if a person believes strongly enough that a drug will work for them, they may feel better after taking it even if the pill is nothing other than sugar. Gender swaying may even have a sort of a reverse placebo effect for pink swayers in particular, due to the idea of swaycession raising testosterone levels - some people who might have gotten pink, may end up getting blue due to their T levels (or whatever personality factor is actually swaying, because it very well may have nothing to do with testosterone!) skyrocketing as they launch .
As a result of all these factors, we actually may find that we get better data from studies that were not even DONE on gender ratio, but instead were studying a different topic entirely and were done in the population as a whole, not a tiny subset of people who are suffering from strong gender desire. (luckily, we do have some studies like that.)
--It needs to be well-powered (i.e. include many people, and the more people, the more reliable the results) A study done on O+12 that involved 33 people, only 2 of whom even conceived on the day after O (possibly) proves NOTHING.
--It needs to use the most reliable methods and technology. Many studies done prior to the last decade relied upon bad science and outdated technology, such as timing studies where ovulation was never even pinpointed or women were told to simply BD on CD 14, when we know that ovulation can vary dramatically between women and even in the same woman from month to month. Another example is “quinacrine staining” to tell the difference between X and Y sperm. It doesn’t work, and any study that uses this method, is worthless and should be disregarded.
Also, always keep in mind that the methods of study themselves may affect the outcome…Microsort IS the best method we have of differentiating X and Y sperm, but it may be that the Microsort process affects the sperm in some way that may change their behavior or qualities.
--It has to have an appropriate design (randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded). Patients need to be randomly placed into different treatment groups and neither they nor the medical staff attending them should know whether they are receiving the placebo or the treatment. Let’s emphasize that – NEITHER patient NOR researcher should know if they are receiving placebo or treatment. A study where researchers tell people to eat a certain diet to conceive a baby girl or boy and they BOTH know going in what the desired results are, violates this precept big time, and should be viewed cautiously.
That sounds impossible to get around where swaying is concerned, but I believe the best study on gender ratio and diet that we have so far, was done by Fiona Matthews and her assistants at Oxford. She wasn’t studying gender ratio, she was studying birth defects, and so she and her researchers, and the participants in the study, had no motivation to fudge results consciously or subconsciously. Only after the fact did they notice that women who consumed the most nutrients had the most boys, and those who consumed the least nutrients had the most girls. I think the Oxford study is worth 50 FGD/Dutch studies for this very reason. The Nurses’ Study II is also a good study (done on diet and how it affects fertility), but unfortunately there isn’t any data on gender outcomes that I am aware of.
Randomized means that you have to take people from the population as a whole to ensure that any variables sort of average out over the population. A study done solely on women with PCOS or anorexia, while they may be helpful in many ways, can’t really tell us much about people without PCOS or anorexia, because they probably have different hormonal profiles and may respond to diet in different ways. A study done on infertile couples might yield very different results than one done on fertile couples. A study done on diet in women who’ve already had 2-3-4-5 boys/girls already, is less valuable than a study done on the population at random, because it may be those women are predisposed to conceive a certain gender, or may be statistically “due” to conceive the other. This is not make or break and in fact studies done on select groups can actually be informative, but we just can’t assume that they will always apply to us personally.
--It should be long enough to supply meaningful conclusions. In an ideal world, we’d take a million couples and monitor their diets and lifestyles over their reproductive lives, but of course this isn’t doable. I WOULD love to see a study done on couples who swayed more than one time, however. Are these results flukes, one time shots, or is there really something consistent going on??
--Studies done by a single researcher or group of researchers who are highly motivated to produce a certain result (William James, Drs. Stolkowski and Papa, the Dutch study people, and yes, even atomic's theories) should always be viewed with some skepticism. The way studies are designed, it is standard practice to avoid mention of any data that conflicts with the hypothesis of the study and only mention studies that support the hypothesis. Scientists know this and take it into account, but for those of us who are not scientists, it can be extremely misleading. It’s also human nature to want to present your case as compellingly as you can.
--The outcome of any study should be able to be repeated by independent researchers. Timing has been utterly debunked because independent researchers could not repeat Dr. Shettles’ results and in fact found the opposite on several occasions, so it’s logical to conclude that timing doesn’t sway at all and Dr. Shettles’ results were either flukes or must be explained in other ways. Similarly, when independent researchers tried to repeat Stolkowski’s results in sows, they couldn’t do it.
Be aware, though, that it’s not unusual to have studies done by different researchers that point in all different directions. Heart disease is studied way, way more than gender ratio, in larger, better designed studies the likes of which we can only dream of, and yet they STILL get all kinds of different results pointing in different ways. Is an extremely low fat vegetarian diet best for heart disease? Mediterranean? Atkins? The data is inconclusive. Just within the last month or two, we’ve had studies that seemed to indicate exercise may actually make heart disease worse for some people, and that the so-called “good” cholesterol may not be good after all. Please don’t despair or give up on swaying because of conflicting results, that’s just par for the course.
4)Given all that, how can we really know anything about gender swaying at all? Are all studies worthless?
NO. There are some tricks we can use to help discern good data from bad data.
--Accidental data. We get some of our best data entirely by accident, from researchers studying entirely different topics. The Oxford Study and the Nurses’ Study II discussed above, are examples of this. Some of our best data is a byproduct of fertility research. It’s not perfect of course, but much of this info is leagues better than the FGD/Dutch studies and the timing stuff, because it comes from large, doubleblind studies (neither researcher or participant was looking for a particular outcome) and therefore is untainted by either intense gender desire on the part of the participants or bias on the part of the researchers.
Also, we can often use bad data to uncover good data. With the timing studies that used Clomid vs. IUI, since timing has been debunked repeatedly, when we remove timing as a possible variable, we’re left with the probability that Clomid sways pink and IUI sways blue.
--Trends from other studies. We can look for similarities between studies and see if there are any trends. Several studies have demonstrated that myriad things that are detrimental to sperm, sway pink. Things as dissimilar as riding a bicycle, jogging, pesticide exposure, exposure to radiation, heavy metals, various chemicals, anesthetics, and smoking, have all been shown to lower sperm count, reduce sperm quality, and lower the gender ratio (more girls conceived.) Consequently, we can feel quite safe in assuming that things that are harmful to sperm while in a man’s body and lower sperm count prior to ejaculation, tend to sway pink.
With a bit less confidence, we can extrapolate that trend further and assume that things that lower sperm count and are detrimental to sperm even after it’s left a man’s body will still sway pink. Can we KNOW this to be true, not with the data we have, but we can still feel pretty good about assuming that it is and emulating those conditions to the best of our ability.
--Cause and effect. Even though we don’t know all the particulars of HOW gender swaying works, we do have a pretty good handle on WHY. Thanks to the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis and the data we have that shows quite clearly that baby boys need more nutrients from the moment of conception, through pregnancy, breastfeeding, and in fact their entire lives, we can operate under the assumption that a lower nutrient maternal diet prior to conception leads to more girls conceived and vice versa. Quite a few studies support this as well in both humans and other mammals. We don’t really need to totally understand the mechanisms at play, (maybe it’s testosterone, maybe it’s blood sugar, maybe declining fertility, maybe it’s something we haven’t even begun to guess at or all these things working in concert plus some others we haven't even guessed at yet.) We just need to emulate the conditions and alter our diets in the direction of less for girls, more for boys. Mother Nature will take care of the rest.
Conversely, timing as a method of gender swaying makes so little sense that it’s highly unlikely to be true. If your body didn’t have enough nutrients to sustain a boy pregnancy on Thursday, then there’s no way you had enough nutrients to sustain him on Saturday. It would be foolish for the human body to conceive a baby of a certain gender (an enterprise which until very recently, killed many women in the process) based on something so arbitrary as the day of the week you had sex on.
--Biological plausibility. When we look at swaying studies, if some aspect of the study does not add up with the fundamental workings of the human body, then the outcome of the study is meaningless and there has to be some other explanation for the results. We know that it’s impossible for cal-mag-sod-pot levels to vary beyond a very narrow range (except in cases of severe illness or malnutrition so severe you would have made yourself ill to the brink of death) and your body has mechanisms that work to keep the electrolytes within that range...if you eat too much calcium, your body excretes it, and if you eat too little, your body robs your bones and teeth to get it. We also know that X and Y sperm do not have different electrical charges and cannot be attracted by “ions” in the cervical mucus. As a result, the French Gender Diet simply cannot be swaying because of the levels of electrolytes in your blood OR because ions in your CM attract X and Y sperm differently, no matter what the FGD book claims. The diet may very well sway but it’s NOT because of the electrolytes.
pH is another example – yes, there are studies that indicate low pH in the vagina may cause more girls to be conceived, but it’s biologically impossible that X sperm “love” low pH and Y sperm “love” high pH. ALL sperm thrive in pH that is in the 7’s, which is why semen pH and CM at ovulation is in that range. The fluids produced uterus, Fallopian tubes, and even the fluid that emerges with the egg at ovulation, all has pH in the 7’s. This pH idea would be extremely easy for fertility doctors to test for and use and the idea has been touted for decades so they've all heard of it. If there was ANYTHING to it, they’d simply put an egg in low pH solution and dump some sperm in for a girl and vice versa and voila, cheap gender determination that would make them a quick fortune. But they don’t. Fertility clinics have to use Microsort or PGD for gender determination because pH does NOT attract X and Y sperm differently. Low pH kills sperm. Very high pH kills sperm. Medium pH is ideal for sperm, both X and Y, and thus biological plausibility dictates that whatever pH does (and it may well sway in vivo conditions), it’s not by attracting one sperm vs. another.
--Real-world observations. While “anecdotal” evidence is often poo-poohed by the scientific establishment, the actual definition of the word “anecdote” is simply a case study that hasn’t been published yet. We are ALL case studies and our experiences and observations are just as meaningful and valuable as those of any researcher (and perhaps more so because we have not been indoctrinated with the establishment viewpoint.) The data we are amassing on this site is invaluable for the benefit of everyone and I really encourage everyone to chime in and share their sways, what worked for them, what didn’t seem to work, things they’ve randomly noticed, and so on. Don't be shy! Lurkers, you're welcome here and please post!! Even if I disagree with you I want to hear from you!
We may not always be (or ever be) 100% right, but if we don’t try, we’ll never even get close. Every major scientific breakthrough originated from someone who randomly noticed a pattern and started to wonder about it. We have hundreds of minds and lifetimes of experience, here working in concert to draw from.
Remember, no one is going to do this for us – there’s not enough money to be made to offset the costs of the studies, and the interest level just isn’t there. It’s up to us to cut through the BS and sift through the garbage looking for the swaying gold!!
Please check out the followup to this essay here http://genderdreaming.com/forum/sway...tml#post960941
