Understanding the Fertility Factor Hypothesis

This is an atomic sagebrush Library EXCLUSIVE! You can’t read this essay anywhere else. But if you have questions on blood glucose or any other aspect of natural gender selection (swaying) you can find me at my home website Gender Dreaming!!!

We’ve talked about the Trivers Willard Hypothesis and about blood glucose levels. But these things don’t really speak to the HOW of swaying. What is the mechanism by which maternal condition and blood sugar levels might sway?

I have a theory about that, which I call the atomic sagebrush “Fertility Factor Hypothesis”.

Historically, pregnancy and childbirth have been very risky propositions. Even with all the wonders of modern technology, more than 800 women die in childbirth every day. Even a miscarriage can cost us our lives and frequently did up until the last century. Undertaking a pregnancy when we’re in anything less than excellent health is dangerous – not only to ourselves, but to our already-existing children, who not so long ago often did not survive without their mothers. Getting pregnant at an inopportune time could mean the end of your genetic line entirely.

Genes are weirdly smart things; they exist to be passed down. That is their sole purpose. Our bodies are like big robots that exist for no other reason than to facilitate passing genes down to future generations. Everything we do – all those activities and accomplishments that feel so important to us, it’s all a means to the end of handing down those genes in one way or another. Nothing in our bodies happens for no reason – our genes are driving us and the reason they’re driving us in certain ways to do certain things is so we good little robots can transport them safely into the future. So they want us to get pregnant, but only at points in time that they have a good chance of being handed down, and not die out forever – because if we die without offspring, our genes are gone forever.

Thus our bodies have natural birth control mechanisms to prevent pregnancy during times when it would be a bad idea for us to become pregnant – when food is scarce, when our weight drops or we’re carrying too much of it, when we’re having to fight hard to stay alive, when there’s turmoil surrounding us. They aren’t perfectly effective mechanisms, but they do work fairly well. Let me say it again because there’s a lot of confusion with this – these mechanisms ARE NOT perfectly effective – they work about as well as anything else in the body does – which is to say, not infallibly. Some babies will still be conceived during bad times as a result. But overall, these birth control mechanisms make pregnancy less likely – in some cases much less likely, bordering on impossible – during times when a woman’s body perceives it is unable to sustain a pregnancy and/or raise a child safely to adulthood.

I believe the Fertility Factor is what lies at the heart of gender swaying. I believe that in hard times women get less fertile – not immediately, not like flipping a switch, but gradually, like turning the volume knob on a stereo. As an entire tribe, group, city, nation gets less fertile (across the entire population – such as in times of famine or war, when food is scarce) a higher percentage of girls are conceived, but fewer women get pregnant overall at any given time, and the gender ratio stays at about 50-50. This neat trick explains why we don’t see predominantly girls born in poorer countries.

The question most people have when they hear this notion is this: In that case, atomic, why aren’t more boys born in rich countries? And that is a super intriguing question. Because if we can’t answer that question, then we have to throw this model onto the compost pile because it doesn’t add up. Even though we can explain away the gender ratio in poorer countries and during hard times as remaining at 50-50, we have to be able to explain why in good times, we’re not inundated with boys.

But I believe we have the answer. The answer is PCOS.

PCOS is the shorthand version of polycystic ovarian syndrome. PCOS is a fertility disorder that anywhere from 75-100% of all women would eventually develop if their lifestyle supported it strongly enough. If that sounds confusing think of it this way – some of us are highly genetically predisposed to PCOS, others barely at all, but most do have the tendency within us to a greater or lesser extent. Like being overweight, we would all become overweight if our lifestyle supported it, but for some of us it’s a lot easier to get there than it is for others.

Unlike fertility challenges that stem from being undernourished, PCOS is not linked to poor maternal condition, but actually excellent condition – too much food, too much body fat, too many calories – particularly from carbohydrates. This causes blood sugar to skyrocket, testosterone to rise, progesterone to drop (since testosterone is made of the same raw materials progesterone is, if your body starts making an excess of testosterone, it often has nothing left to make progesterone with), egg quality plummets, and the menstrual cycle starts going crazy. Ovulation is delayed for weeks, months, in some cases not occurring at all without medical intervention. The luteal phase can become too short to allow implantation to occur. PCOSers also have a much higher rate of miscarriage and is linked with other medical conditions that also cause fetal death – thyroid problems and gestational diabetes in particular.

Strangely, it seems, being in “too good” a condition can affect fertility just as negatively as being in poor condition can, just via different mechanisms (perhaps even more so, because people appear able to bounce back much faster from low calorie intake than they can from PCOS). We also believe more boys are conceived to those with PCOS.

So imagine if you will, fertility existing on a continuum. On the one end are people who cannot conceive due to being too thin, having too low a caloric intake or fat intake, exercising too much – this is called hypothalamic amenorrhea or HA. On the other end of the continuum are people who cannot conceive due to having severe PCOS. The rest of us, in the middle, are more set for boys or girls depending on where in the continuum we fall – worsening condition, more girls, better condition approaching the development of mild PCOS, more boys. Over the entire population, mathematically this works out to keep gender ratio about 50-50.

Whenever I talk about “lower fertility swaying pink” a lot of people chime in to say “nu-uh, because I have all these fertility problems and I have boys”. Then I ask “do you have PCOS?” and the answer is often yes (and even when it isn’t, I almost always find they have underlying PCO-tendencies and symptoms they didn’t know about such as irregular periods and short luteal phases, trouble losing weight, or a history of gestational diabetes). So when we say “lower fertility sways pink” we mean hypothalamic amenorrhea – where you have spotty ovulation, short or long cycles, and trouble conceiving because your hormones are LOW. NOT PCOS-related fertility issues which are caused by HIGH levels of hormones (particularly testosterone) and tend to be associated with more boys conceived.

So what do we do with all this? If you’re in this boat and you have PCOS or tendencies that direction, and you want a girl, should you just throw your hands up in the air and admit defeat?

NO! And best of all, we don’t need to do ANYTHING any different. I do not want you to go out and start taking a bunch of herbs. I don’t want you spending hours doing research online about PCOS and how to undo it. I’ve already done all that for you.

All you need to do is follow the alternate “Slow Burn” style of the LE Diet, lose a bit of weight and exercise. For most people, this will be enough to move them out of the PCOS category. This will not hurt your sway any as we actually get better results with it. (this does not mean that everyone should be on it, though.) A few people – a small minority – who have more than 30 lbs to spare and/or have moderate to severe PCOS, may want to add in a dietary supplement called myoinositol and possibly a little cinnamon (Ceylon only, NOT cassia). BEFORE you start these things, please touch base with me at Gender Dreaming, so we can decide together if these things are right for you. I have seen far too many people medicating themselves with myoinositol and cinnamon because they heard somewhere “they sway pink” when they did not have PCOS and they ended up stopping ovulation, and in a couple instances even passing out from low blood sugar. Cinnamon is used only by about 5% of all swayers, and it comes in a microscopic dose, so PLEASE do not take cinnamon without discussing it with me first.

One more thing – when I talk about fertility and the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis, I occasionally get questions about the assumption underlying TWH, that more boys than girls are lost in utero. The idea that about 140-160 boys are conceived and then more are lost to miscarriage due to their fragility, leading to a gender ratio of about 105 boys for every 100 girls born, has always been the widespread belief by evolutionary biologists and most data has supported the claim. Yet recently there were a couple studies that claimed to find the opposite – that more girls were lost. People read this and start worrying that the entire underpinning of Trivers Willard and the Fertility Factor Hypothesis can’t be true if more girls than boys are lost.

Rest easy. I’ve read the studies that claim more girls are lost. They can’t prove that is the case because a) there are significantly more studies showing more boys are lost than girls and b) no one can tell how many males are lost in natural conceptions, earlier on before it’s possible to test a lost fetus for gender. Not to mention the studies themselves were testing people who had undergone IVF conceptions and not naturally-conceived pregnancies and c) we know for a fact that IVF females develop more slowly than IVF males and this may change the outcome considerably over what occurs in natural conceptions. I very strongly suspect based on previous research and the underlying common sense of the Trivers Willard Hypothesis, that a preponderance of males are lost via chemical and very early loss and it’s simply that the female babies can hang on a little longer before being lost, because they actually ARE tougher.

But the good news is it doesn’t matter anyway. We know swaying works because we have the results to prove it, and our results are actually HIGHEST in our pink swayers with PCOS who are are following the “Slow Burn” Diet. So even if the idea that boys are more fragile than girls is wrong, gender swaying WORKS!

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