Moms-to-Be: Eat This. Have a Boy?

26-05-2008 - 20:30

Ladies, if you want to have a son, get into the habit of eating a hearty breakfast laced with sugar long before you become pregnant. And if it's a girl you want, then eat low-energy foods that skimp on calories, minerals and nutrients. That's the word from researchers at the University of Exeter and the University of Oxford in Great Britain, who have determined that a woman's pre-pregnancy eating habits can influence the gender of her baby, report Agence France Presse and Reuters Health.

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The study: Led by Fiona Mathews, the team queried 740 first-time pregnant mothers who did not yet know the sex of their unborn baby to provide detailed records of their eating habits before and during the pregnancy. The women were placed into one of three groups based on the number of calories they consumed daily around the time of conception.

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The results: Fifty-six percent of the women who ate foods with the highest energy intake had sons, compared to 45 percent in the least-well fed group, reports AFP. In addition, the moms who had boys were more likely to have also eaten a wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12.

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Here's the magic food to eat if you want a boy: Breakfast cereal. The women who consumed as least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily, compared with those who ate one bowl or less a week, were far more likely to have a boy than a girl. Obviously, a baby's gender is determined by the father; however, high levels of glucose in the mother's body encourage the growth and development of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos. In evolutionary terms, this correlation may actually make sense.

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"This research may help to explain why in developed countries, where many young women choose to have low-calorie diets, the proportion of boys born is falling," Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter told Reuters Health. The study findings were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Britain's de facto academy of sciences.

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