How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby

Author:Landrum B. Shettles [B. Shettles, Landrum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78617-3
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

The Diet Sex-Selection Method

Claims have been made that diet can be manipulated to determine the sex of offspring. These claims, in fact, were the subject of a 1982 book called The Preconception Gender Diet by Sally Langendoen, R.N., and William Proctor. Of course, there is nothing new about such claims; the idea that diet can influence gender has been around for centuries. What is new is that this diet theory appears at least to have some scientific underpinning. In short, there may be something to it. But read on before you get too excited.

The new work is based on the research of Dr. Joseph Stolkowski of Paris and Dr. Jacques Lorrain of Montreal. Dr. Stolkowski noted that, in the 1930s, Dr. Curt Herbst of Germany had discovered that the sex of marine worms could be influenced by mineral manipulations. He decided to see if the same thing might be true in higher animal forms, and reported that it was. Diets high in salt, he claimed, resulted in significantly more bulls than heifers. Dr. Lorrain subsequently entered into a collaboration with Dr. Stolkowski, to see if diet could similarly influence human sex ratios.

The first results of this collaboration were reported in the International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics in 1980. The two doctors put 281 women who wanted children of specific sexes on two different diets. The “girl diet” is high in calcium and low in salt and potassium. The “boy diet” is high in salt and potassium and low in calcium and magnesium. Husbands were told to go on the same diets as their wives—mainly in order to lend psychological support and help ensure that the wives didn’t “fall off” the diets. The couples were instructed to stay on the diets for a month to six weeks before attempting to conceive. If they had not conceived within six months, they were told to discontinue the diets. Some 21 women dropped out of the study because they couldn’t tolerate the diets or had negative reactions to them or because they lapsed and became pregnant before they had given the diets an adequate chance. The doctors reported that of the 260 women who stuck with the diets, approximately 80 percent conceived children of the desired sex.

No convincing hypothesis has yet been put forward to explain why this method works, if in fact it does. Researchers have speculated on a number of possible modes of action. Possibly the diets affect the secretions within the female reproductive tract in such a way that, depending on which diet is used, either X or Y sperm are better able to move through those secretions. Or perhaps the manipulation of the minerals in the diets affects the membrane of the egg, making it easier for one or the other type of sperm to penetrate. Perhaps the diets affect the female immune system, selectively favoring one type of sperm over the other, again depending on which diet is used. And possibly the diets affect the sperm cells, too, since the husbands also adhere to the diets.

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