The recipe for twins (sorry, vegans) 1

Attention female vegans (and no, I'm not soliciting romance, thanks): If you're dreaming of birthing twins, you may want to read this.

Women who eat a vegan diet -- a strict vegetarian diet that excludes all animal products including milk -- are one-fifth as likely as other women to have twins, a U.S. researcher reported on Saturday.

But despite what some headline-writers suggest ("Vegan diet lowers odds of having twins" and "Meat-Eaters More Likely to Have Twins?"), neither meat-eating nor even necessarily veganness seem to be the key.

The reason [for the vegan twin-birth difference] may be hormones given to cattle to boost their milk and meat production, said Dr. Gary Steinman, an obstetrician specializing in multiple-birth pregnancies at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York.

So if you vegans want to increase the likelihood of twins without disrupting your diet, seems you could maybe skip the dairy and just go right for the growth hormones. Yum.

Todd Hymas Samkara is Grist’s assistant editor.

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  1. wendy Posted 8:54 pm
    23 May 2006

    rBGH and twinsYes. Stay away from milk unless you're a friend of the farmer, know he doesn't use rBGH, and can buy his milk right off the farm. Even organic milk, I'm sorry to say, can contain these genetically modified growth hormones, because of a loophole in the organic standards which allows (usually BIG) farmers to bring conventionally raised calves into their herds. There is no reason to believe that a calf whose mother was given rBGH is "clean", the stuff persists, and causes some strange things to happen in the offspring.

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