Eat More Yam and Give Birth to Twins!

The village of Igbo-Ora, Nigeria is often referred to has “The land of twins” because there is hardly any family within the community without a set of twins. The unusually high number of twins born within this community has led many fertility experts into believing the community’s daily consumption of agida (local name for yam tubers) might be the cause of the many twins. See excerpt from Yahoo:

There is hardly a family here without a set of twins,” said community leader Olayide Akinyemi, a 71-year-old father of 12, as he settled a dispute between two neighbours. “My father had 10 sets, while I had three sets…

The rate of identical twins is pretty steady throughout the world at about 0.5 percent of all births, according to a 1995 study by Belgian researcher Fernand Leroy, who has worked extensively on twins.

But West Africa bucks that trend, particularly with a much higher incidence of fraternal, or non-identical twins than in Europe or Japan. That is especially true, experts say, amongst Nigeria’s Yoruba community which is largely concentrated in the southwestern part of the country where Igbo-Ora is located…

Yam consumption may be one explanation for Africa’s largesse, some West Africans and Western experts believe. Yams contain a natural hormone phytoestrogen which may stimulate the ovaries to produce an egg from each side.

It appears this observation is not causal, but purely a correlation between a local community that consumes a “yam-heavy” diet (and its derivatives) and multiple pregnancies. Other dietary elements may also have confounded or contributed to the observation as well. However, if this “Yam theory” is really true, those looking for twins better start loading up on yam; dump the clomid and other fertility drugs!

Image credit: AFP