Buffet for baby
Read a small news study today while running errands that claimed that British researchers had discovered what looks to be a correlation between eating breakfast and gender of child amongst women looking to conceive. Read for yourself if you desire.
Not the best sample size, high margin of error depending on people to be truthful in their reporting, and only a modest difference in percentages. Not only that, but lacking a "control" group, it makes it highly subjective as to interpretation of statistical significance.
What would interest me more would be if they could explain how this gender sorting might be accomplished, since gender is determined by the sperm that invades the ova. It doesn't seem likely that we're like sea turtles or crocodiles where our gender is fixed by what temperature we're baked at. The coding is locked from the outset.
So, does a high caloric diet affect vaginal secretions to become more favorable for the genetically lighter male swimmers and less so for the female wrigglers? Is there some heretofore unknown enzyme at play that shifts the protein coat on mature ova to favor one type over the other? Or is it simpler than that and the uterus just tends to slough off implanted male embryos at a higher rate than female unless a certain nutritional benchmark keeps getting met?
Or maybe they just want to justify stuffing pastries and rich foods down women's gullets.
Not the best sample size, high margin of error depending on people to be truthful in their reporting, and only a modest difference in percentages. Not only that, but lacking a "control" group, it makes it highly subjective as to interpretation of statistical significance.
What would interest me more would be if they could explain how this gender sorting might be accomplished, since gender is determined by the sperm that invades the ova. It doesn't seem likely that we're like sea turtles or crocodiles where our gender is fixed by what temperature we're baked at. The coding is locked from the outset.
So, does a high caloric diet affect vaginal secretions to become more favorable for the genetically lighter male swimmers and less so for the female wrigglers? Is there some heretofore unknown enzyme at play that shifts the protein coat on mature ova to favor one type over the other? Or is it simpler than that and the uterus just tends to slough off implanted male embryos at a higher rate than female unless a certain nutritional benchmark keeps getting met?
Or maybe they just want to justify stuffing pastries and rich foods down women's gullets.
posted by Lanius at 9:50 PM
1 Comments:
... Wow.
I'm stunned.
That seems to be some appalling pre-conceived "science" at action.
And, just to throw out the idea... the difference in ratio of male births to female in developed versus undeveloped countries couldn't have anything at all to do with a lot of societies in undeveloped countries favouring the birth of a boy child, and thus aborting female foetuses, not registering female births, or killing female babies, right?
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