Old wives tales about sex

Folklore down the millennia has suggested everything from the weather to the ardour of lovemaking and eating shellfish play a role in whether a woman will give birth to a boy or a girl. Pregnancy diet can affect baby's sex, study says. Dr Fiona Mathews of Exeter University says that the new study does support some old wives' tales about what to eat. Eating salty food and bananas "bananas for a boy" is linked with males, and lots of calcium and desserts should help to conceive a daughter, according to folk wisdom. Dr Mathews says there is "tremendous interest" in the popular literature in the link between dietary mineral and gender and this did, at last, seem to have some support. When it comes to salt, the study does provide some support "bacon for boys", as some put it and also for high potassium food, such as bananas.

Back in the olden times, before we had important sexual teaching tools like Our Bodies, Ourselves or GIFs of James Deen, people pretty much just had to guess about how sex works. And, of course, we mostly guessed wrong. I mean, can you blame us? The actual facts of human conception sound like something someone came up with while trying to play Dark Side of the Moon backwards; how could anyone have guessed that? But even though we are now decades deep into actually understanding the science of sex , the legacy of those long-ago bad guesses about how sex works still lingers, in the form of sexual myths. Sex myths — also known as " old wives' tales ," "stuff everyone knows," or "facts I learned on Reddit" — aren't generally connected to the facts, but we hear so much of them growing up especially when we're young and don't have access to the real facts about sex that it's often hard to clear them completely out of our heads, and impossible to clear completely out of the culture.

We take a look at some of the most popular ways of guessing the gender of your impending arrival. A common pregnancy symptom is headaches, but apparently this relates specifically to carrying boys. This could also have something to do with growing another human inside you, back ache, stomach pain, etc, etc, etc. Disclaimer: May also happen to mothers of girls.

Old wives' tales are little more than super-circulated rumors. Never proven to be true, they're sayings and adages that generations of women have passed down to one another regarding family health "Eating carrots improves your vision" , safe parenting "Wait an hour after eating before swimming" , and -- most popularly -- pregnancy. Whether you're trying to guess your own baby's gender or looking for shower games for a friend, read on for the top ways women have guessed: boy or girl? Pay attention to which way you lay down in bed tonight.