I was on Twitter, the social media site that’s known for off-the-wall statements, and I stumbled upon a screen shot of an article claiming that eating grits is correlated to homosexuality. As this continued to circulate online, I did some investigating on my own to see where this theory even came from.
The article came from a site called The Daily Currant. On the site, it claims that Stanford University conducted a study several months ago displaying that men who consume grits “regularly” are 70% more likely to have gay children. The article then says that a study published in Nature Medicine titled The Prospective Cohort followed 15,000 people for approximately 30 years to “determine the influence of parental diet on the development of childhood illnesses”.
They found that fathers who ate grits had a much greater chance of having a gay child.
Edmund Bergler, the head researcher on the study, says, “We were shocked when we ran the data. But we controlled for every variable. We triple-checked every calculation. And it turned out that eating grits makes your kids gay.”
Their reasoning for this theory relies on homotonin, which apparently is a substance that can damage a man’s sperm. Scientists determined that during the process of making grits, homotonin is created. The hypothesis concludes with the thought that DNA defect is passed down to the child and causes homosexuality.
Well, luckily, I stumbled upon an article that exposed this page. It is indeed fictional, and the theory is made up even though social media continues to display this article. However, Edmund Bergler is not a made up person. According to http://badsatiretoday.com/eating-grits-linked-to-homosexuality/, Edmund Bergler was a psychoanalyst who created theories on homosexuality around the 1950s. He wrote a book called Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life that stated homosexuality was a disease that is in your head and can be cured.
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/gaygrits.asp also confirms that homotonin does not even exist and that it was made up for humor. So although the article was intended for comical purposes, someone scrolling on their timeline on Twitter or Facebook might read the article and think that there is some truth to it.
When I read this story, I knew it sounded strange. One, the relative conclusion of 70% isn’t reliable. 70% more compared to what? Second of all, the experiment itself made little sense. How would scientists conclude that these individuals (which were never even specified as only male, only female, or both) didn’t turn gay based on their environment, or even biologically as some people believe? Third, the study never touched base on how much grits were actually consumed within these 30 years. How do they know that 15,000 people really ate grits “regularly” (regularly was never defined) and did not lie or forget about their intake?
Hopefully people take the time to find out it is not a real theory so the page and false studies can stop circulating around.
Sources:
http://dailycurrant.com/2014/05/05/study-links-homosexuality-to-eating-grits/
http://badsatiretoday.com/eating-grits-linked-to-homosexuality/
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/gaygrits.asp
This topic caught my eye and I just had to read but half way through I started thinking more and more into your topic. Andrew always taught us that we want to do more experimental studies over observational but in this case you really can only do observational given ethics and personal rights and so forth and so on. While we can’t sit and say that correlation always equals causation, I must say that the correlation is extremely strong. We must also take what we have learned in class and understand that there are still outside factors and variables that can attribute to whether or not one can be classified as gay or not. We must also attack the question if we believe being gay is genetic or the person has a choice; but once again that is subject and may not be answered ever. Lastly , we must take a step back and look at the big picture and understand that not everyone who eats grits will be gay. Now before you look at my link and wonder why Im directing you to Facebook I must inform you that the comments are rather interesting and seems to be a bit of a social science within itself when people voice their opinions on grits correlation to being gay ..take a look https://www.facebook.com/dailycurrant/posts/658380404236362
I read your post because I thought the title sounded absolutely ridiculous. As I started reading this I automatically thought that if there was an actual correlation between these two variables this does not mean that eating grits actually caused the child to be gay. And we can never rule out chance. Then I thought if there is a correlation it may have been found as a result of the Texas sharp shooter problem. Searching for a correlation and they stumbled upon this one. With the statistic of “70% more likely to have gay children” as you mentioned, 70% more likely in comparison to what? This is a great example of a relative risk. If there were experiments done on this topic it would have had to be an observational study due to the fact that if scientists were to perform an experimental study it would be unethical. But I did find it humorous that this study was completely made it and of course it’s all over social media.