PolkMoms.com

I started reading this article and was very skeptical and then I thought perhaps?.....

What do you ladies think, does this theory seem plausible to you?

Maybe eating bananas can make boys?

Article below...
http://www.theledger.com/article/20080424/NEWS/804240523/1039

I don't know if what you eat can "make" it a boy or girl, but I will say the cereal mention caught my eye.
I'm expecting now and I am eating cereal like it's nobody's business! In the morning, when I get home from work, before bed...it's ridiculous! I don't know for sure what the sex of the baby is yet, but since everything about this pregnancy has been the complete opposite of my daughter I tend to think it may be a boy. It will definitely be interesting to me if it is since I've eaten so much cereal!!

I don't think what you eat determines if you are having a boy or girl, but when I was expecting I had cereal with bananas every morning. Oh, I had a boy.

What we eat does not determine the gender of our baby. LOL That is so ridiculous. We all have different cravings while pregnant but I believe the gender has already been set at and even before conception.

I craved milk many times I remember with my first. I worked at Publix then in the meat dept and remember buying milk and keeping in the cooler, to drink during the day. I usually never drink milk except for sometimes eating cereal.
The things people come up with. lol

i craved fruit and cheese while pregnant. i really craved everything cheese flavored. i would come home from shopping and my mom would look at the things a bought and just laugh, and i told her if they sold cheese flavored cereal i would have bought that too. i had a girl!!!! and she love love loves cheese and fruit!!!

I think the article is trying to portray that what you eat can make your body more susceptible to attaching and carrying a certain sex child. Studies have shown that a lot of fertilized eggs do not attach. The theory, from what I understand, food you eat can make your body more favorable to attaching a certain sex embryo. If you eat one thing not favorable conditions to a girl, the girl could pass through or vice versa with a boy. I don't know if it is true, but thought it was interesting that someone came up with this theory

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-11/13/content_6249808.htm

Exerpt from article:

"Some like Akinyemi support the yam theory -- and point specifically to the reputedly high oestrogen content of agida, the local name for yam tubers.

"We eat a lot of okro leaf or Ilasa soup. We also consume a lot of agida. This diet influences multiple births," he said.

Others are not so sure.

"The real cause of the phenomenon has not been medically found," said Akin Odukogbe, a senior consultant gynaecologist with the University Teaching Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, the nearest big town.

"But people attribute the development to diet," he continued, adding that studies have shown that yam can make women produce more than one egg which can be fertilised."



http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/43765.php

Exerpt from the article:

"In the current study, when Dr. Steinman compared the twinning rates of women who ate a regular diet, vegetarian diet with dairy, and vegan diet, he found that the vegan women had twins at only one-fifth the rate of women who commonly do not exclude milk from their diets. "

http://www.rcog.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=541


(Here are some more sites showing the "food" connection.)

http://www.allbaby.com/babyinfo/multiples.htm

http://www.pregnancytoday.com/articles/general/trying-for-twins-4205

http://www.elizabethlyons.com/pressreleases.html

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http://www.rcog.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=541

Exerpt from the article:
The effect of periconceptional folic acid on reducing the incidence of both occurrence and recurrence of NTDs has been confirmed in quality randomised controlled trials.2,3

My thoughts:
And I mention this last one because we all know that what we eat, ingest, or the supplements we take when pregnant can affect the baby and are of considerable importance; why does it seem unreasonable that what we eat before pregnancy could in fact, predispose our bodies one way or another for one gender versus the other. It's only logical that the food we eat changes our internal system, and it's medically known that slight differences in the womb at the moment of conception can be supportive or non~supportive both for to conception & to gender determination.

I have a very interesting book called Chinese Natural Cures, and it is absolutely amazing how food can affect the body for better or worse, and how certain combinations of food can either be balanced or unbalancing to our systems, and can even predisposition one to certain conditions, and/or disease if the diet is unbalanced. It's really is not far~fetched at all, what we eat can definitely influence us in a myriad of ways, and I have little doubt that includes conception issues, gender determination by no means out of the realm, as well as the health of the pregnancy and fetus afterwards.

well, if my personal experience is any proof - the first article is fully of phooy.

I haven't ate a bananna in years. Before getting pregnant I never ate breakfast, I had an extremely low calorie intake, and skipped meals constantly.

Yet, I'm having TWO boys!

It seems as if there has to be some sort of scientific reasoning behind the gender of your baby - I just don't know that your food consumption is where to look for it.

WELL I CAN DEFINATELY SAY I DID NOT EAT HEALTHY WITH EITHER OF MY CHILDREN, WITH MY DD I DRANK YOO-HOOS AND RICE KRISPY TREATS ALL THE TIME, EVEN FOR BREAKFAST, I KNOW, HOW GROSS IS THAT.
WITH LITTLE MAN, I ATE BANANA SPLITS AT EVERY MEAL. AND AGAIN EVEN FOR BREAKFAST, ITS AMAZING THAT I WASN'T AS BIG AS A HOUSE, OR END UP WITH DIABETES.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS WITH ME AND PREGNANCY, BUT WHAT A WEIRD DIET,HUH?
I DO WISH I DID PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MYSELF WHEN I WAS PREGNANT, ESPECIALLY WITH LITTLE MAN, IF I HAD ONLY, RIGHT? YOU NEVER KNOW. I KNOW I WILL NOT HAVE ANYMORE CHILDREN, NOT AT THIS AGE, I WOULD PROBABLY DIE OF A HEARTATACHE IF THE DOCTORS SAID I WAS PREGNANT, BUT I CAN ONLY GIVE ADVICE TO PREGNANT MOTHERS EVERYWHERE, PAY ATTENTION, IT REALLY DOES EFFECT THE CHILD. SUPPLEMENTS, HEALTHY FOODS, NO GARBAGE, IF I KNEW THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW. HOW MANY TIMES HAVE WE EVER SAID THAT?

Never mattered what I ate

Congratulations Ashley, that must be twice the excitement.


I just wanted to add on here after reading more.

Don't feel bad 1 tired mom. I barely managed to eat with my first and last pregnancy. Everything made me sick, the crackers trick NEVER worked, in fact, nothing did. I'd eat, it would come back up, simple as that. And amazingly, it was with my middle daughter, who is autistic, I had the most normal pregnancy of all. I had the normal 3 mos. of morning sickness versus the 8 mos. of it like I did with my other two pregnancies. And after the first trimester, I ate as healthy as anyone could imagine. I craved vegetables and fruit, I ate well and was pretty balanced overall in choices because I could be, but I did crave those salt and vinegar chips from time to time, lol. Anyway, I couldn't have eaten any better with her, and just that I was able to keep food down had to be good, yet, she was the child who developed autism? Some things you just can't explain, and some things you just don't need to feel bad about. As humans, none of us can control everything, nor do we control half the things we think we do. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do the right things or make the right choices, but keep in mind, in the end, some things are still not ours to influence. And if we keep that in mind, we're actually on the right track.
And that's not always bad, life would be pretty boring if we could control it to that extent.

No, I don't believe what you eat is everything, there's no reason to feel guilty about that, I think during pregnancy a woman's body often gives clues as to what the pregnancy needs. Perhaps your son was needing potassium, in that case, the banana splits make perfect sense.

But, let me say, on the other hand, with what we don't know about the intricacies of our body's chemical makeup, I do think it's quite possible that what we eat could play its part.

I know one thing doctors are tell women trying to conceive these days, is if they're underweight, odds go down for them, even if it's as little as 5 lbs. underweight. Now I know some on here are saying, well, I did the opposite, no bananas, lol, and had boys anyway. Well, perhaps the conception was aided by other potassium rich fruit, and since there are others with even higher concentrations of it, perhaps so. Or perhaps, it really is individual, maybe some women already have a body chemistry rich in the right respects, and diet was less important to the process?
Who knows, perhaps it doesn't matter in the scheme of things what you eat beforehand; however, I will say this.

For women who are trying to get pregnant now, I would suggest eating right even before pregnancy, getting into an optimal healthy state beforehand, and taking pre~natal vitamins early, well before the pregnancy, or at least as early as possible.
Doctors do recommend these things. And from my own experience, I'll add, if you do end up finding that you have difficulty eating when pregnant, as I did with two of mine, I'm pretty sure the before shape of your body, could possibly be more important than we realize, especially if, like me, one ends up unable to eat correctly for parts of a pregnancy.

I know I was always thankful when the doctor would say the baby is getting what it needs, you are just getting less. (When I would ask him if my not being able to keep hardly any food down was bad for the baby.)

ok everyone, who knows what i'm going to have. lol
this pregnancy i'm craving cheese and crackers and orange juice. i have never drank so much orange juice in my life. the weired thing is i can not drink milk in the mornings this time around. if i have a cup of milk i feel yucky all day. lets see what these things make. lol

Well, greatfulcp, I don't know, but I will say this much, squeezing out an orange would have to be easier and better than squeezing out a watermelon, lol.

Seriously though, I've always heard that pregnancy cravings were telling you something your body and~or baby needed. So, I wouldn't fight it as long as it's not going to be truly adverse to your health.