the pH pickle

Updated 1/18/25

pH is second only to timing as an unquestioned “truth” of swaying. But is it, really? Let’s take a look at pH and see how and IF it even makes a difference.

Biologically, pH serves a very valuable purpose in the human vagina. Many harmful microorganisms prefer alkaline environments and low pH makes it more difficult for them to survive. The naturally low vaginal pH of 4.5-5 is a gateway mechanism that exists during most of the cycle to keep harmful invaders at bay, by killing nasty microbes before they can make their way up inside your uterus where they could cause a serious infection.

The problem is, sperm don’t like low pH either. NEITHER X nor Y sperm like low pH (less than 6); in fact it renders them immobile, if not dead. In one study, it was shown that when a woman’s pH was less than 6, she had no motile sperm in her cervix in the postcoital test.

WHAT?? Read it again ladies – pH of less than 6 = NO motile sperm in the cervix. Not X, not Y. X sperm DO NOT love low pH. NO sperm love low pH. Low pH kills sperm. That is why the natural pH of semen is in the 7’s – that’s what sperm prefer and thrive in. And sperm don’t like super high pH any better than low pH. Y sperm do not thrive in pH in the 9 range.

So if our normal vaginal pH is in the 4-5 range, but sperm prefer pH in the 7’s, how do we get pregnant at all? As we approach ovulation, we experience a gradual rise in estrogen that triggers not only ovulation itself, but also causes our our cervical crypts, the endometrial glands in the uterus, and special cells in the Fallopian tubes that grow every month for no other purpose than to make alkaline fluids, to produce fluids that are higher in pH. This higher pH EWCM and the similar fluids inside our uterus and Fallopian tubes is ALWAYS between 6.5 and 8. Even the fluid that is released along with the egg at ovulation is high in pH. Regardless of what some swaying sites claim, there is no acidic fluid in the female reproductive tract where sperm meets egg. ONLY in the vagina is pH ever low.

As our cervix opens up at ovulation, this alkaline EWCM flows down and out into our vagina, raising vaginal pH to enable sperm to survive. This CM creates a little high pH path for the sperm to swim in to reach the safety of the alkaline cervix, uterus, and Fallopian tubes. When our husbands ejaculate, their semen is essentially a life raft of alkalinity that keeps sperm alive until they can find their way onto that EWCM path. Raising pH is a gamble that our bodies temporarily take around ovulation – we risk temporarily increasing the chance of infection in order to make it possible for sperm to survive to make it to the egg.

When Dr. Shettles came along, he did not have the technology to be able to go up inside a woman’s body and reliably test for pH. If you’ll recall – and if you don’t recall, please read this essay to learn about Dr. Shettles’ BIG mistake! – Dr. Shettles wrongly believed that X sperm were big and slow and lived a long time, while Y sperm were small and fast and died quickly. Based on this erroneous conclusion, he decided that X sperm were impervious to damage. He looked back at some old information involving a veterinarian that claimed to get more boy horses than girl horses conceived by using baking soda douches. But it just isn’t true. Dr. Shettles was WRONG. Both X and Y sperm like a mildly alkaline environment. They both thrive in it. All low pH does is kill off sperm! And nowadays, horse breeders use technological advances instead of douches to get their desired sex, because the douches never worked for them, either.

The underlying assumption of pH and swaying has always been, women who conceive girls naturally have a low pH and women who conceive boys naturally have a high pH. It is claimed that this affects X and Y survivability and motility differently somehow, and that’s why some of us have boys and others have girls. But this simply cannot be true. If ALL sperm thrive in pH of the 7’s, if sperm actually become immobile at pH less than 6 or above 9 and DIE, and our female bodies are designed to provide a nice midrange, slightly-but-not-too alkaline pH at ovulation, HOW can it be true that X sperm “love” low pH or super high pH? How could it be that all the girls on the planet were born to women who just so happened to have low pH because they ate a lot of cranberries and vice versa?

IT CAN’T BE TRUE.

Just for giggles, let’s assume that the traditional sway info is 100% right – we’ll pretend that X sperm love low pH and Y sperm love high pH. What would happen if we shot a big bunch of low pH goop into our vagina at ovulation? If the pH of the cervix, uterus, Fallopian tubes, and even follicular fluid is in the 7’s, and X sperm ~really~ loved low pH, wouldn’t the X sperm simply stay in the low pH of the vagina? Wouldn’t the Y sperm flee the scene in terror as quickly as it could and head TOWARDS the egg if it was more alkaline up there? Remember, your pH up inside the uterus and tubes will always be higher than that in your vagina, because your uterus and tubes actually grow special cells that make alkaline fluids around ovulation. And if you were swaying blue, EW or BSF/BSD, with pH in the high 8’s-9’s…if high pH swayed, why would a Y sperm ever leave that environment to go into a LOWER pH? Wouldn’t it just sit there happily basking in the high pH while the X moved on to more acidic pastures?

Some claim that this pH diffuses up into your entire reproductive tract, all the way up to the egg (and there are studies and patents out there, done as so many swaying studies are, by the “I.M. Sellingsomething University of Vaguely Scientific Sounding Gibberish, Timbuktu Campus” that allegedly prove this) but this premise is equally nonsensical. If the pH of the vagina could diffuse up into your uterus and Fallopian tubes, then our naturally low vaginal pH would diffuse upwards and LOWER our internal pH at ovulation. But instead, the alkaline fluids being created up inside of all of us – again, the uterus and tubes grow special cells every month that have NO other purpose but to make alkaline fluids!! – assisted by gravity, flow down and into the vagina and raise vaginal pH!

At ovulation, every square millimeter of our cervical crypts, uterine endometrium, the cells in our Fallopian tubes are busy churning out fluids with pH in the 7’s. These alkaline fluids are flowing down and out, often in copious amounts – or as one of my clients once described it, “birthing a jellyfish”. Even if there was some slight diffusion into the cervix, that doesn’t mean that diffusion will amount to anything up at the egg, where it really counts. The cervix is designed to keep things that aren’t supposed to be there, OUT. The vagina is very similar to the human mouth – if you swish your mouth with baking soda water and then spit it out, and tested your mouth’s pH, it would be higher temporarily and it may even be higher in the upper portions of your esophagus thanks to diffusion. But it would not change the pH of your stomach acid – in your reproductive tract, this would be akin to the Fallopian tubes where sperm meets egg. Diffusion isn’t magic, it gets weaker the farther away you get, and it gets diluted by whatever other fluids it meets along the way.

Perhaps a better example, since it involves gravity like EWCM does, is one of those horrible colds where your nose runs and runs. Does it really make sense that if you put a moistened fingertip of baking soda inside your nostrils, that will do ANYTHING to change the pH up inside your sinuses? No, because your body is making so much mucus that it just keeps flowing down and out, not up and in.

pH has also been said to sway via “ions”, but the problem is that X and Y sperm have been shown not to have different electrical charges in recent studies. Therefore they cannot be differentially attracted by ions in cervical mucus or by any electrical pull of the egg. Plus, acids themselves contain POSITIVE ions, not negative ones – so if someone could explain how bombarding yourself with negative ions “because X sperm prefer negative ions” (source: InGender’s FAQ) and then using acids that are chock full of positive hydronium ions – that’s what acids ARE, liquids with positive hydronium ions – makes any sense whatsoever, that would be great. I’m not a chemist and I freely admit I could be wrong but according to my research, it just doesn’t seem to add up.

Practically speaking, if any of the ion/electrical charge jazz was true, there would be no need for Microsort – Microsort is a procedure where X and Y sperm are differentiated by using dyes and then a technician adds a tiny droplet of liquid to each individual sperm that contains an electrical charge. Then the charged sperm are separated by electrostatic plates. If X and Y sperm had different electrical charges to begin with, there would be no need for this complicated process, technicians could just separate them with the electrostatic plates! We HAVE the technology to separate out X and Y sperm via electric charge (and Microsort is still used in animals, though isn’t approved in Europe or US for human beings because pregnancy rates were abysmal). But Microsort does not work unless electric charges are ADDED to the sperm. Why would the techs have to add electrical charges if X and Y sperm already had them? Answer – because X and Y sperm DO NOT have different electrical charges!! If pH is supposed to sway because of ions, science simply does not support it.

Along these same lines, if pH really swayed in any way at all, it would have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by now. It would be so easy to prove using modern technology!! As one of the best known sway tactics there is – a tactic that’s actually been around longer than timing, and I can guarantee you that most if not all reproductive endocrinologists have heard of it – if pH caused Y sperm’s “tails to freeze” or whatever this half-baked theory claims, then RE’s would have figured out a way to simply dump an egg and some sperm in an acidic or alkaline environment for a cheap method of gender swaying. They would LOVE to be able to do this, because they’d make a fortune at it. But they don’t, because it doesn’t work! If it worked they would be doing it already!

At this point, someone invariably chimes in with “Maybe so, atomic, but Dr. Ericsson uses pH in his sperm spinning methods and those are scientifically proven!” Decades ago, there was seemingly some success for gender selection with Dr. Ericsson and others using “albumin gradients”, swim up/modified swim up, and sperm spinning, but some major problems have arisen with the Ericsson method.

First of all, no other researcher has managed to replicate Dr. Ericsson’s methods independently – never a good sign for any scientific claim. Secondly, Dr. Ericsson himself admits that even after all the albumin and spinning business, the sperm are STILL 50-50 X and Y, but claims that these sperm then go onto produce more boys or girls, according to how they’re spun. Thirdly, see the paragraph above. If pH ~really~ swayed in any strong, undeniable way (as in, using Acijel or lime douche as a magic bullet for pink, or BSF/BSD for blue), then WHY would Dr. Ericsson have to use all the “albumin gradients” and swim up/modified swim up and sperm spinning to get it a weak 70% results at best (that no other researcher can repeat). If true, we don’t know why it is – if it’s pH, spinning, or some other thing all together; perhaps albumin gradients triggering different rates of capacitation for X or Y sperm. We get as good or better results with swaying via diet and lifestyle changes alone (70% or better) than Ericcson does with all his tricks in the lab!

The next question people have is “But atomic, then what am I testing with my pH sticks?” People do start swaying and then see the number on their pH stick change, and I have a couple explanations for that. Firstly, a lot of people on InGender (a site where people test pH a lot) did not understand that pH naturally fluctuates throughout the month. When I was a forum mod on the IG site, I saw tons of pink swayers who were thrilled that their pH immediately dropped to 4.5 (after starting their sway on CD 1, because that’s when people tend to start their sway; as it happens that’s also when pH is naturally on the low side). The same people began freaking out when their pH went up at ovulation. They truly believed their pH was 4.5 because they were taking cranberry and not because it’s naturally low when you’re not fertile.

For blue swayers, if you start off testing pH at the beginning of the cycle or the end of a previous cycle, and then test during the fertile window, it will appear your pH has risen – but it very well may have gone up every other cycle of your life, only you weren’t testing to see it! This included all the times you conceived girls! pH ONLY counts in the fertile window, because that’s the only time sperm can survive long enough to reach the egg, so any reports of low pH are meaningless unless we know for a fact that the reading was pH within the fertile window.

Thus at least some of the pH claims made online, both by swayers posting individually and by swaying sites as a whole, are inaccurate and misleading because we don’t know when these people were testing pH. Or how they were testing – pH from the lower part of the vagina will naturally be lower than pH from nearer your cervix. Two different readings on two different sticks may indicate nothing other than different testing techniques. Not to mention that if you use a fingertip full of Acijel or baking soda and then test your pH right after, of course your pH will seem very low or high, accordingly. But all you’re testing is the pH of Acijel/baking soda – you’re not even necessarily testing your EWCM pH! And of course, even perfectly tested CM pH taken during the fertile window tells you nothing about what is going on up inside where sperm meets egg.

Secondly, if you naturally have a lot of EWCM at ovulation and you dry it up via diet, supps, and antihistamines (pink swayers), OR if you typically have very little EWCM and then increase it via diet, supps, and guaifenesin (blue swayers), then NATURALLY your pH will appear different. This unfortunately does not mean that the actual pH of your internal CM where sperm meets egg has changed at all, just that there is less of it or more of it available vaginally for you to test. Since EWCM is what makes your pH go up at ovulation, having less or more (or thinner and watery vs. thicker and drier) than you normally do, will appear as an increase in CM pH even though your CM pH may be identical to what it’s been every other month of your entire existence. I personally believe that much of what is reported as rises and falls in CM pH is nothing other than more or less EWCM or CM that has taken on a more or less fertile consistency.

Thirdly, it is IMPOSSIBLE to alter your blood pH with diet. If your blood pH goes outside a very narrow range, you DIE. Here’s a full explanation: The Acid/Alkaline Theory of Disease Is Nonsense The idea that you can alter your body’s pH through diet is completely untrue. Regardless of the pH of the foods you ingest, the second they hit your stomach acid (which has a very low pH of 1-2) they dissolve into a low pH slurry that is then neutralized in your duodenum by alkaline fluids before moving on to your intestines. This happens regardless of what you ate.

You can seemingly alter the pH of your saliva or urine temporarily, but that is irrelevant for swaying. Do NOT test pH using saliva or urine, they are meaningless. It ~may~ be that you can alter the pH of your CM from diet although I’m not convinced of that because CM has nothing to do with the digestive tract whatsoever. And contrary to popular belief, pH tests have never been shown to predict gender conceived. In one study done in mice, mice fed an acid or alkaline diet, whose urine pH changed accordingly, did not have any different gender ratios of offspring.

I find it much more likely that swaying via diet affects the amount and consistency of CM and that the presence or absence of EWCM in the vagina is the only thing that actually changes. For example – drinking a lot of lemon water for blue keeps you well hydrated and being well hydrated helps your body make EWCM, in addition to replacing some less healthy options such as diet sodas that some blue swayers may have drunk in excess when they conceived their daughters. Conversely, because the LE Diet helps to lower estrogen, and less estrogen means drier and scanty CM, the LE Diet can dry up CM and seemingly lower pH. This doesn’t mean that pH is doing anything at all – it is likely just piggybacking on the EWCM or lack thereof.

After hearing all this evidence against pH for Natural Gender Selection, many people ask, “If all this is true, atomic, then why do you keep pH in the sway at all?” Two reasons – most importantly that people like pH, they believe in pH, and feel like they need to include pH or their sway will fail. I am certainly not the font of all earthly knowledge and if people want to keep pH in the mix, who am I to try and stop them? It is your sway, your way.

I have tried very hard to find the safest and best pH techniques that are safe for health, for fertility, and for swaying, and I feel that I can offer a great compromise between what people want and what I believe is best supported by the data – even if I don’t happen to believe in every element myself. For pink swayers, RepHresh(this hasn’t worked), baby aspirin (this hasn’t worked), antihistamine (this hasn’t worked), diet; for blue swayers, Preseed or Conceive Plus, and fish oil, grapefruit juice, Robi/Muci (guaifenesin), and diet. Blue swayers, the data for you is much cloudier than it is for pink swayers and I can’t definitively say that these things do or don’t work – but I CAN say that diet and exercise are the most effective for both pink and for blue.

Secondly, I actually DO think pH can sway. Not in the way that the traditional sway gurus claim – not because X “love” low pH and Y “love” high pH or because of ions or any other magic bullets, but because low pH kills sperm, and fewer sperm surviving to reach the egg seems to sway pink for reasons we don’t understand. High pH, on the other hand, may help sperm to stay alive in a hostile vaginal environment until it can make it into the safety of the cervix and beyond. (Update: As of 1-18-25, 15 years+ after I started seriously researching swaying, I have seen little to no benefit with pH in a sway, particularly for pink swayers. Use the methods if you want to, but it does not seem to be adding anything, and the pH approach cuts odds of conception severely.)

Some of the blue sway tactics that I believe to be sperm-hostile (such as egg white and baking soda douche/finger) the body is quite forgiving of, firstly because the sky high pH of BSF/BSD kind of average out with the low pH of the vagina to a more reasonable level, and secondly because when you insert anything odd into your vagina, it can trigger a reaction where your body produces alkaline mucus to try and wash the offending substance away so you actually end up triggering a big burst of mucus of normal alkalinity that gets rid of the super high pH stuff. So blue swayers, even though I still vastly prefer Preseed, if you’re already pregnant and you used BSD/BSF, please don’t panic, you still have a great chance at blue. Please be aware that I do not recommend egg whites for Natural Gender Selection, because I believe the risk of uterine infection to be too high. I also have reason to believe that egg whites may cause or contribute to miscarriage because of this risk. NO EGG WHITE!

One last thing – if you are a big believer in pH and still want to include it in your sway, that is FINE. This is not swaying atomic’s way, it is swaying YOUR way. I have an essay on how to test pH on my Substack for those who choose to go that route.

I know sometimes when I go around debunking these things people get frustrated. You guys want to know what actually sways, if all this stuff doesn’t. But we don’t have the ability to figure that out. To really unravel the mysteries of gender ratio we have to rely on scientists and researchers to put it all together. In the meantime, we can use logic and reason and the science that already exists, to rule out the things that are simply not adding up!

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