Going Veggie Gives A Girl

by Tamara Wilhite
(Bedford, TX)

Bouncing big girl

My husband and I had tried to conceive for about a year before starting fertility treatments. As a result of the new, high power health kick in the effort to get pregnant, I jumped into a very healthy diet. Lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, very little red meat, some lean meat, lots of healthy dairy, and a lot of vegetarian meat substitutes. After the second round of fertility drugs, I started getting nauseous.

Within a day or two, I started throwing up a couple times a day. "Honey, you need to see the doctor about this. It looks like a serious stomach bug." I had a follow up with the OBGYN the next day.
"Do you want the good news or the bad news?" the doctor asked me.
"Uh, bad news."

"The bad news is, this stomach bug will last nine months. The good news is, you're pregnant." He also stated that this severe of morning sickness had a 70% correlation to being pregnant with a girl. The sonogram 4 months later confirmed that fact.

I later found that vegetarian diets and high soy diets create an increased conception rate of girls.



From the BBC, "They found that while the national average in Britain is 106 boys born to every 100 girls, for vegetarian mothers the ratio was just 85 boys to 100 girls."

Here is the BBC article.

We were not specifically trying to have a girl, but are quite happy with the child we had.

The other advantage of the nearly vegetarian diet was that it reduced the severity of the morning sickness. (Red meat and fish triggered the symptoms, so it actually would have been worse if I had steak and tuna every night.)