FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

Some Women Believe Eating McDonald's Fries After Sex Helps You Get Pregnant

Looking for a perfect post-coital, baby-making snack?
Photo via Flickr user EvelynGiggles

It's impossible not to love McDonald’s fries, those salty strings of reconstituted potato. Give them to me anytime, anywhere. Stuff them in my face at my local Mickey D’s. Hand some to me through a drive-thru window. Feed them to me while I’m in bed, post-coitus.

That’s right, folks. A small sliver of mothers—3 percent, to be exact—who took part in a recent survey conducted by Channel Mum, a website operating out of the United Kingdom that serves as a network for parents, claimed that they “eat McDonald’s chips immediately after sex” in the hopes of getting pregnant.

Advertisement

"We surveyed 1,500 mothers based in the UK, 75 percent of whom are 35 and under,” Siobhan Freegard, founder of Channel Mum, wrote MUNCHIES on Tuesday. "All the respondents are users of our site ChannelMum.com, so very representative of the UK demographic.” Channel Mum released the survey results in anticipation of yesterday's National Baby-Making Day.

READ MORE: McDonald’s Denies Using ‘Secret Tricks’ to Give Customers Fewer Fries

Eating McDonald’s fries after sex was admittedly one of the less popular stated schemes to get pregnant. Get a load of some of these numbers: 37 percent of respondents felt eating dark chocolate every day would help them get pregnant, while 32 percent claimed eating pineapples and drinking pineapple juice would do the trick. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed claimed that you could "Use reverse psychology and tell yourself you don’t want a baby, then have a wild night out and forget about ‘trying’," which, uh, sure.

The concept of eating fries from McDonald's to induce pregnancy isn't exactly new, Freegard claimed, though she's a bit flummoxed as to why people swear by it. "It's very popular among the surrogate community in the UK as a pregnancy and conception hack,” she wrote MUNCHIES. “We genuinely don't know why it has caught on and why it has to be McDonald's, not any other fast food chain.” (McDonald’s UK did not respond to immediate request for comment from MUNCHIES on Tuesday.)

Shockingly, there’s exactly zero science to bolster claims that McDonald's-french-fry consumption will facilitate pregnancy. It's a truth that Freegard herself acknowledges, though she suspects that may be changing in the coming years.

READ MORE: Pregnant Women Can Basically Feel Free to Stuff Their Faces with Sushi

“We don't know of any science to back it up,” Freegard said. ”But it does seem to be filtering from the surrogacy community into the mainstream, so perhaps there will be some firm research looking into if and how it could possibly help. It's certainly an odd idea, but some mums absolutely believe it helped them conceive.”

Until then, we'll just be eating McDonald's fries because they taste pretty damn great.