Spoiler: If you didn’t already know, eating carbs will not ruin your life or as may be otherwise postulated, make you gay.
A few weeks ago the good people at the Royal Canadian Institute of Science were kind enough to have me work on a small and sweet project with them (A new web series called “Some Questionable News” that comes out May 6th, 2021). We went over a few neuroscience-related headlines and poked fun at their clickbaity nature, and the sometimes very glossy way about which the science is written.
Among the stories we discussed was an incredible piece from Pink News, “Bizarre ‘study’ claims eating too many chicken nuggets can turn you gay”. It’s begging to be talked about in a satirical way. This story was great. It was to the point and focussed on the topic at hand without getting too wayward about where the science could be going. Of course, conveniently, this “science” was going nowhere. From here on out, I will be using quotation marks a lot because… well, you’ll see.
The “author” of the “science” discussed in the article, Rita, is a real person and she alleges to have “an M.P.S. degree in Clinical Psychology from Albanian University”. Rita has either missed every class, some major curriculum shifts need to happen in central Europe, or she’s severely trolling us.
Reader, I’m quite interested in getting down to the nitty-gritty of the brain science of it all, but as for the general claim, Pink News covered it well. Of course, there is no link between eating carbs (or any of the other BS things Rita mentions) and sexual orientation. Aside from the obvious, Rita’s work is self-published—a huge red flag, because it means there was no peer review. However, she may have run into some trouble actually getting it in front of any self-respecting journal editor.
In addition, a lot of the sources Rita cites are anecdotal and non-scientific. So it’s basically just gossip and rumours she is weaponizing into pseudoscientific queerphobic drivel. Oh, and, I’ve decided it’s not trolling because the bibliography is LONG, and there are a whack-load of other seriously dangerous “studies” she has on her website in this same, sad, awful ilk. But what about the brain stuff? People haven’t talked about that much.
I suffered the exquisite pain of actually reading chunks of her manuscript (linked in the Pink News article) because I wanted to know what was going on in this person’s “mind” and I wanted to see the “neuroscience” she claimed to have “researched”. After all “Rita” has a clinical psychology “degree”.
Though the whole thing is presumably supposed to be about food and behaviour having an effect on the brain, Rita only scantly gets into the minutia of any neuroscience. One thing she talks about is the presence of “neurotransmitter system imbalances” in gay people. Okay, Rita. What kind of imbalance? Sadly, Reader, she doesn’t tell us. I was left looking for crumbs when I was at least expecting nuggets.
Amidst the shenanigans of Rita’s vitriol, she cites one (read: 1…. yup, just one) study on rodents that were fed a high-fat diet and then provided with mating opportunities. Apparently, the high-fat diet promoted more same-sex mating than a control diet. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but this awfully-run study used very few animals (too few to derive any conclusion from) and regardless of the outcome (which was, in my opinion, non-existent because it was such a bad study), if anyone is trying to translate rat sexual behaviour to human sexual orientation, they are in for a bad surprise—it’s hard. (Also, I did some digging on the corresponding author of this specific study and it’s kind of hard to find out all of the details but I think he was kicked out of some American university and resolved to peddle his crappy hypotheses via rogue “scientists”).
Human psychosexuality is complex. What makes us who we are is a never-ending question because we are different every day. Sadly, our pal Rita failed to grasp this during her degree.