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    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
    Last edited by atomic sagebrush; December 21st, 2017 at 10:31 AM.
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  3. #2
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    I'm curious to learn more about what Atomic (or anyone else) thinks of the Dutch Study. I'm referring to the diet and timing girl sway study from 2010 that's available at this link: http://www.rbmojournal.com/article/S...549-3/fulltext They claimed that by following their protocol, your chances of having a daughter were 80%. This study was my intro to swaying, and it's always been stuck on my mind.

    I remember Atomic dismissed it, I think it was because the study posits that you can change the levels of sodium and calcium in your blood through diet but Atomic's research shows that this would be impossible. (The study also recommends 3 day cut-off timing, but in one of the last paragraphs they sneakily admit that the timing was self-reported and therefore likely to be inaccurate.)

    I had my "serum sodium content" levels tested earlier this year after eating low sodium for a few months. I compared those levels to the last time I had my sodium blood levels measured. Unfortunately the last measurement was from almost ten years ago - but my levels were a couple of points lower now than they had been when I was younger. Was that decrease caused by my sway diet or by aging? I don't know...

    So, I guess what I'm wondering is... is this study BS? Is it all just junk science in a pay-to-publish type journal? Is there any possibility of real, useful information in this study or should it be wholly dismissed?
    Last edited by Complex Emotions; October 19th, 2016 at 02:29 AM.

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  5. #3
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    First prob. with this study - 172 women start the study, then an additional 50 are added. Of this group of 222 women, only 21 (or 32, I'm not quite sure how they tallied that all up exactly) were able to complete the parameters that they set out for them. Of these 21 (or 32) women, 81%/16 of them (or 25 of them if we use the 32 number) had a girl. See the problem there?? Even IF we take all this at face value, a method of swaying that is not doable by the majority of couples is useless. 222 people and about 20 got a girl. The rest of them are SOL, basically. So I prefer to focus on a realistic, doable sway that is practical and achievable for everyone. Let's say that this gets us 65% success rates (it's actually better for people who do exercise, diet longer than 12 weeks and so on but we'll use our average here). Of the same 200 women, 130 would get girls. It makes NO sense to aim at some impossible technique if no one can do it. Even if it had 99% success rates that would be 32 people vs. 130. if no one can stick to it, it is useless. Additionally this has the "small sample size" question that plagues us where if only a handful of people had messed up and gotten opposites then the results would have been totally different. We hear about this study because the numbers stacked up their way but when we're talking about a study that actually contained 21 people, 16 of whom had daughters, and drawing some conclusion on that - that's kind of not what most researchers really look for in a "high percentage of confidence" study.

    Second prob. with this study - we know based on biological reality that mineral levels stay at homeostasis because they have to. There is a small range of normal and no one ever goes out of them unless they are very ill (dying!!) The variations they used in this study are miniscule and probably meaningless - our levels go up and down all the time naturally anyway. Plus, your body simply does things to compensate when we eat too much/not enough of certain minerals. We have had people do blood work before and after swaying on these type of diets and their blood levels on some things actually went UP even when not eating much, because their body started saving every scrap of the stuff they were eating and/or took it from their stores (blue swayers who are avoiding calcium, all your body ever does is take calcium from your bones and teeth, the levels in your body never really change from normal range.)

    Third prob. with this study - Even IF the diets and stuff are different in minerals, they are different in EVERYTHING and so no one truly knows if it is minerals or the differences in the diet as a whole. I've spoken with some women who have done this diet and while they are sworn to secrecy under threat of lawsuit if they discuss it, they have confirmed that it's actually very similar to the LE Diet. The French Gender Diet, when done properly by the book, is VERY much LE-friendly with limitations on protein, fat, and yes, even dairy foods are not free and unlimited (contrary to popular belief, you still have to fit in the potassium requirements for the day and thus have to limit your food intake considerably, even/especially dairy foods as they all have high levels of potassium in them.

    4th prob. with this study - Timing has been debunked about as much as it's possible for something TO be debunked. We know Dr. Shettles was totally wrong, what he thought were X and Y sperm were uncapacitated and capacitated ones. Studies using modern technology to pinpoint day of O found 50-50 boys and girls conceived every day of the cycle. There was just a study done back in May (I have the link on here somewhere, pressed for time right now) that went back over a lot of the old timing studies and when they calculated ovulation using 2016 knowhow found that the studies done back in the 70's that claimed to support timing actually did not when O day was correctly determined. So whatever is going on with this study, it's diet and number of attempts most likely (since timing, done correctly, is done with one attempt) and we're already doing that.

    5th prob. with this study - we have no way to know what the people really ate and what timing they really did. We only know what they told the researcher. That's the prob. we have with lots of studies and of course our own stats as well. Since we are seeing people's numbers actually go UP when strictly limiting sodium and calcium, it may even be that some of the people whose bloodwork was on the low side weren't even following the diet correctly. We just don't know. Humans aren't lab rats.

    6th prob. with this study - we have a study done by researchers at Oxford University that was NOT trying to sell a diet and timing method that costs $1200, and in fact was not even intentionally being done on gender ratio at all (they were studying diet and birth defects, and only after the study had been completed did they notice the oddity of the gender ratio being altered by diet) that shows higher nutrient intake across the boards was associated with more boys conceived. You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans | Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences This study was done in more than 700 women. So we have some highly reliable data from an excellent source with a good sample size, that seems to indicate when people eat more nutrients, they have more boys, and this includes calcium and magnesium.

    7th prob. (oops almost forgot this one) the other data in animal studies that is showing different % carbs and vegetable fat intake is swaying in a big way. If this study is true, and it's minerals and timing, why would studies done in % of carbs in a diet, and % of fat in a diet, also be seeming to sway? Unless it's more than one thing (which it almost certainly is, of course) and in that case they are overlooking a very important component of successful swaying diets (at least in animals) getting more % of your calories from carbs, and getting more of your protein and fat intake from vegetable sources rather than animal.
    Last edited by atomic sagebrush; October 19th, 2016 at 02:45 PM.
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    Wow - Thank you for going through these concerns point-by-point. I'm always astounded that you're able to be so prolific and in-depth with your responses!

    My understanding is that Gender Consult started this research by monitoring the blood mineral levels of 28 participants and then used the blood test results and baby gender results from these women as a reference to determine the guideline sodium and calcium blood serum levels. I think they looked at the blood levels of the women who had a girl and retroactively compared them to the levels of the women who had a boy and found that 91% of the women who had a girl had sodium levels 140 mmol/l or lower and "an increase in serum Ca2+ concentration of at least 0.1 mmol/l." So then they used those blood level guideline for the validation group of fifty women who tried to achieve those same blood levels through diet (and cut-off timing) and found that those who were successful achieved a 76% likelihood of a daughter. Those who were unsuccessful with the blood levels or the timing only had a 24% likelihood of a daughter.

    I think the confusion over the 21 vs 32 number is that there were 21 women in the validation group who had the right blood levels and claimed correct cut-off timing. So once you add the 11 women from the original reference group to the 21 women in the validation group there are 32 women total who had the right blood levels and claimed the timing cut-off. So yeah, only 32 women were able to meet the criteria out of 78 who followed through on the whole program. Yes, this is a small sample size.

    One thing that's always bothered me is that of the total 78 women, the birth results were 37 girls and 41 boys. Presumably ALL of the women who bothered to complete this very rigorous and expensive program were following the guidelines to the best of their ability, even if they didn't make it to the magical blood level cut-offs. So, wouldn't you think that overall the number of girls would be higher for the entire group? It really didn't turn out to be any better than average. In fact, those totals are actually WORSE than average, with only 47% girls born overall.

    You have a really good point about the issue with the swayers self reporting on diet and timing. The worst part of the whole article to me is this part:

    For compliance with timing of intercourse, this study had to rely on data provided by the subjects themselves. It is likely that some subjects have influenced the results by intentionally mis-classifying themselves as compliers so the effect of timing in fact may be greater than concluded.

    Um, yeah... Or maybe some of the subjects were inaccurate at pinpointing O?!? That's a pretty big issue. Especially considering the average age was 34 and these women still got pregnant within three cycles on average. Something doesn't add up about the 3 day cut-off timing there. Knowing what I know now, it's pretty easy for me to agree with you that it was probably one attempt that made the statistical difference here. There's NO WAY so many relatively older women would have conceived within three cycles if they'd actually used a 3 day cut-off.

    As for the low salt thing... I think you're on to something. They've made an interesting observation about which sodium and calcium blood levels were more likely to result in a daughter, but they haven't really proven that the women achieved these blood levels specifically through diet since the there's no way to know for sure how these women with the right blood levels were eating. Isn't it possible that some of the women with the wrong blood levels were following the diet correctly but their blood levels didn't match up anyway?!

    Did the women who you've talked to who were part of the study achieve the correct blood levels from following the diet?
    Last edited by Complex Emotions; October 20th, 2016 at 12:53 AM.

  8. #5
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    Yes, I know, I was just shorthanding it. I'm sure I got the numbers off a little, I dashed that off fast and I didn't want to go over the study with a fine tooth comb (I did this when it first came out). The fact is, 172 women came for help, 150 started the program, and then an additional 50 women joined the party. 32 got a baby of their desired gender. Point being, most of the people who started it, couldn't finish it. It's irrelevant why, because anyone who either a)can't stick to a diet to begin with or b) drops out along the way or c) does stick to the diet and then cannot get their blood tests to come up right is omitted from the study, that means that the method is useless to most of the people. I'm looking for something that EVERYONE can do and most people get girls doing it. I'm not looking for something that only superheroes can stick to and is sheer dumb luck about some people coming out "right" on blood tests while others who may have done just as much or even more, didn't, that method is useless.

    Since I know of several people who I truly believe did their level best to stick to the diet and then had their blood tests done before and after, including one who was actually a doctor herself, and actually had their levels RISE after limiting certain nutrients (both pink swayers whose sodium went up, and blue swayers whose calcium went up) I have very great skepticism about whether such a diet could even work to begin with (meaning I wonder if the people whose blood tests came out "right" were necessarily even doing the diet the best, or if this was an individual variation).

    I can't stress strongly enough, how tight a range of normal there is. We are talking a very tight range and doctors see this vary all the time just by virtue of people being a little bit dehydrated or whatever. That's why there is this range of normal - because it varies. Naturally. So I reject as implausible the idea that the levels of anyone in their blood****** necessarily reflect anything about whether a diet program is swaying. I ALWAYS have low potassium, it's just this weird quirk I have, to such extent that I sometimes have to take medicine for it - and I have 4 boys. If she really wanted to prove this, she would first just do blood tests of people TTC without diet and see if there was any correlation between blood levels of minerals and gender conceived (and that no one has done this yet, I find very surprising and one of the main reasons why I have such a tough time believing this works - because that is the FIRST thing I'd test and it would be unbelievably easy to do so.) Then, a second study to see if as a general rule, it's even possible to appreciably and predictably change them via diet since it may very well not be (would not even have to be in women who are TTC - it could be college students or anyone Again, super easy to test). Finally, a third study to see if diet and gender conceived are correlated even when mineral levels are not altered (ie vegetarians having more girls). These would be simple studies to do, but no one does them, instead they give us these weirdly convoluted studies where they're making up rules and adding timing in there and it just doesn't make any sense.

    Re the timing - I completely agree and while I cannot find it right now, I recently posted a study that was just done showing how hard it is to get pregnant with cutoffs, showing how in all these old timing studies, the people actually had calculated their O Day wrong and when it is fixed, how it totally debunks timing - even using the old data from the studies that supposedly proved timing worked.

    That's quite a conclusion to draw - that "since people may get timing wrong, this probably indicates that it works even BETTER LOL" I would think it's far more likely that since O-3 is only ONE day, that the odds are much more likely that people had DTD in one of the other days in the fertile window instead. 1 in 4 chance, the odds are pretty good if you don't know when you Oed exactly, your attempt may have been on 3 of 4 days.

    The women I talked to all quit the program because they thought it was too hard or because they didn't get pregnant in a reasonable time.
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    Quote Originally Posted by atomic sagebrush View Post
    That's quite a conclusion to draw - that "since people may get timing wrong, this probably indicates that it works even BETTER LOL"
    Seriously! That's the part of the report that really makes me question the whole study. The more obvious conclusion could certainly be "When you try to use a cut-off that makes you more likely to have only had one attempt during the fertile period, and if you only have one attempt you are more likely to conceive a girl."

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  11. #7
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    I don't hold that one against anyone though. That (the one attempt, I mean) is something that NO ONE even stopped to consider possibly swaying (myself very, very, very, extremely very much included) and it was only by tracking results by individual tactic that we discovered this.

    I would LOVE to talk to Dr. Shettles about all this. I really would!!
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  13. #8
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    Hey, I just edited this a little, it's a pretty good little essay, giving it a bump
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    hi atomic, I am pretty new here and still figuring out how to use this site (it is very confusing btw!). My question is, how can anything a woman does sway either way when it's the sperm that determines the gender? I bought the girl sway meal plan and it mentions somewhere how an equal amount of boys and girls are conceived at any time during the cycle, so is it early miscarriages that cause more boys or more girls to be born? Thank you!

  15. #10
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    Ask any questions you have and soon it will all fall into place. It's easier than it seems at first glance. There is honestly no good way to organize a site like this and I work very hard to direct you towards any info you need.

    We honestly don't know how it all works. We only know that based on scientific data, females have a big role to play in the gender of offspring. It may be that X/Y sperm are killed off in different environments (while this is claimed by other sites, I don't find this likely), it may be that X/Y sperm have an advantage given by the egg (plausible), it may be that X/Y sperm are kept dormant in certain conditions (I find this the most likely) or some combination or some other thing entirely.

    I have the first part of this two part essay series here: http://genderdreaming.com/forum/sway...12-8-17-a.html and this has some more info that you may find helpful here, particularly about the miscarriage subject. http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...ypothesis.html
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