"Biological warfare Mass casualties occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s when Fusarium-contaminated wheat flour was baked into bread, causing alimentary toxic aleukia with a 60% mortality rate. Symptoms began with abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and prostration, and within days, fever, chills, myalgias and bone marrow depression with granulocytopenia and secondary sepsis occurred. Further symptoms included pharyngeal or laryngeal ulceration and diffuse bleeding into the skin (petechiae and ecchymoses), melena, bloody diarrhea, hematuria, hematemesis, epistaxis, vaginal bleeding, pancytopenia and gastrointestinal ulceration. Fusarium sporotrichoides contamination was found in affected grain in 1932, spurring research for medical purposes and for use in biological warfare. The active ingredient was found to be trichothecene T-2 mycotoxin, and it was produced in quantity and weaponized prior to the passage of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. The Soviets were accused of using the agent, dubbed "yellow rain", to cause 6,300 deaths in Laos, Kampuchea, and Afghanistan between 1975 and 1981.[16][17] The "biological warfare agent" was later purported to be merely bee feces,[18][19] but the issue remains disputed."

"wheat flour"

"Since fungi are well-known as producers of mycotoxins, it has been reasonable to attribute these changes to. the increased growth of fungi. In an earlier study the authors were able to show that blueberries from artificially fertilized forest land make hens infertile in that after eating these berries they laid eggs without shells or with defective shells. In large doses the blueberries were so toxic that all the hens died."

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium

"General description 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol is a trichothecene mycotoxin, secreted by Fusarium species. It stimulates the activation of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK)/ p38 mitogen-activated protein kinases and prevents protein synthesis. 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol is a weak inducer of apoptosis. Application 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol has been used in a study to compare the ability of two fungi to improve wheat growth, decrease root colonization of Fusarium, and withstand mycotoxins. 3-Acetyldeoxynivalenol has also been used to induce and study anorexia in mice."

wheat - again, anorexia

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/GB/en/product/sigma/a6166

did someone say this stuff is used in packaging?

THat is a bold claim. The share of people in the US identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen from 3.5% in 2012 to 5.6% in 2020. Not very constant if you ask me.

Sauce: https://www.statista.com/statistics/719674/american-adults-w...

I think this growth is more plausibly explained by changes in public tolerance of homosexuality making people more comfortable declaring something than a commensurate increase in mould in food...

Thing is, we literally have no idea. There was the "hide this" aspect, truly and surely. But we have never, even today, had an accurate, truthful rendering of numbers.

So the numbers could have risen, fallen, been the same.

One thing I will say, stating it's always been the same over all human history seems flawed. Even if it's genetic, genes change in populations over time.

"Relatively constant" doesn't mean "5.0%". It means it's always been present (which is true as far as we can tell, it's even present in other mammals), and it's always been a small minority.

More important still, regardless of what the actual level is, we haven't seen any evidence of sudden outbreaks of homosexuality in populations reliant on a particular contaminated source of food, or apparent decline in homosexuality following stricter controls on food storage, or any of the sorts of things you'd expect if homosexual attraction was generally cause by exposure to particular foodstuffs

(cf the leaded gasoline and criminality hypothesis, which sounds pretty speculative but gets more plausible when people start modelling data on regional levels and controlling for other causal factors)

To be fair, studying homosexuality from the perspective of "it's not natural/genetic" can end a career. Seriously.

Yes, which is why this guy studying rabbits as livestock in 1987 was the last guy to even try.

There's several anecdotal reports on YouTube of people doing gut cleanses and then losing their homosexual urges[1]. They said it was worms or parasites doing it, but I couldn't find any evidence for a possible casual link. I started digging around in pubmed for something else related and found these citations and started connecting dots. While replying in this thread, I just discovered the one about the vegetarians having more fusarium in their gut than standard diet eaters. There are a couple of random threads on internet forums asking why the LGBTQ people are more likely to be vegetarian. The rabbit hole grows! My guess would be the heavily processed food in standard diets probably has a lot more anti-mold preservatives in it or something like that.

Absolutely nobody who values their career will ever follow up on this hypothesis, so I just throw it out there for open discussion when it's on topic. Btw, I do some independent alt health research, but I have no credentials so I'm not worried that I'm never going to get a grant again for even coming up with this idea. I couldn't get one in the first place.

[1]https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM

You'd be amazed how many citations can be found for research into possible causes of homosexuality conducted since 1987.

You will forgive me for suggesting that searching for citations to support a YouTube video in which an individual whose description of his "homosexual urges" is straight out of a Jack Chick tract shills for the parasite cleanse services of a naturopath who not only "cured" him of his homosexuality but discovered the medical profession had misdiagnosed his friend with Stage IV lung and bowel cancer when actually she just had "demonic" parasites too may not be a fruitful use of your time for reasons other than lack of grant availability.

The searches for the causes of homosexuality, as far as I'm aware must satisfy two criteria. 1. They are determined before birth and 2. Sexual orientation is immutable after birth. This is kind of like the dogma that amyloid plaques are the only cause of Alzheimer's and specific identifiable genetic mutations are the only cause of cancer. Both have been research dead for years, yet they keep getting grant money.

Because I am a nobody hobbyist I can come up with whatever theory I want and look for evidence for it in the medical literature.

Sure this guy is a religious guy, but he's just reporting a personal experience. No credentials needed for that really.

I'm afraid if you're credulous enough to believe a guy claiming that a particular quack's "parasite cleansing" service not only cured him of 24/7 anal sex obsession (which is totally how real gay people feel) but also his friend of late stage cancer is a real life data point and not transparently false advertising for said quack's services, you're probably not in a position to cast aspersions on the quality of medical research, and not because medical research is above criticism. No, you don't need any credentials to testify that you have personally experienced parasite cleansing miraculously curing homosexuality and ailments apparently mistakenly identified as late stage cancer in YouTube video. Nor do you need to have ever been homosexual, or to have the slightest idea what's involved in cancer diagnoses.

Trust me, it's entirely possible to get funding for research into post natal causes of homosexuality and the last high profile study on genetics reached the rather unfashionable conclusion that the most obvious candidate "gay genes" not only had little explanatory power but were more to do with sexual openness in general than homosexuality per se in a blaze of publicity with no career-limiting consequences whatsoever. Please don't mistake professionals' lack of faith in the veracity of stuff like Jennifer Daniels' patient testimony for rigid adherence to their own dogmas.

You are of course free to use your time how you want, and there's value in pursuing unconventional theories, but the ability to screen out palpable nonsense is pretty fundamental to that.

Dolphins have a rather non-mammalian gut microbiome yet have observed homosexuality. The correlations aren't there.

The issue is threatening the freedoms of a group by treating their sexual orientation pathologically. Even referring to homosexual "outbreaks" is pretty troubling to me. Humans are capable of some awful things with very little perturbation.

It can, but there are a lot of people studying causes of homosexuality nevertheless.

And even if there weren't, if the back-of-the-envelope evidence points in the opposite direction (if there's any correlation at all between homosexuality and fungi in foods, it's that we're observing more people declare themselves to be homosexual in populations eating commercially produced and processed food screened for zearalenone which is the opposite of the expected result if zearalenone is the causal factor, and "outbreaks" of homosexuality amongst groups with shared diets simply aren't observed) it's not a theory with much in its favour.

People can also choose for themselves within the constraints of their biological predilection. Society becoming tolerant then becomes subject to sexuality fads, and the percentage of people is identifying openly with sexuality of any stripe will fluctuate around a baseline.

The percentage of people who are genetically, intrinsically, unchangeably bound to a particular identity will reveal itself over time so long as culture remains tolerant. To correct for fads and fashion, we'll probably need a few centuries.

Absent sufficient data, confounding factors will make any assertions about external factors affecting sexuality impossible to falsify.

We'll have reverse engineered the brain, and genetic influence on behavior and personality, long before we've collected enough data to empirically correlate sexuality accurately enough to validate hypotheses like "mold is making people hay."

I know a lot of people feel more comfortable coming out now which is a good thing, but to add some anecdata to this...I know, and have heard of, a large number of people who claim to be gay or bi and by every indication are not. Not that their sexuality is my concern, but a few of them are obviously just posturing or something. I don't know if they've attached virtue to certain sexualities, or maybe they need to feel like they're a minority so they aren't "oppressors" (they're all whites, of the concerned variety), or if they got invested in gay culture and feel like they belong to it, or if they fetishized it or whatever but it's weird. I literally had one woman tell me, who proclaims her bisexuality every chance she gets and paints her nails rainbow colors on pride day, say that sex with women was gross...sorry lady, but I don't think you're a bisexual...

Is there a word for this? It's like the label of something has taken on more importance in their minds than the meaning behind it.