IF YOU would like a baby boy, try eating a bowl of cereal daily as part of your pre-pregnancy diet.
So says Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter in the UK. 鈥淓at a healthy diet with a high-calorie intake, including breakfast,鈥� she suggests.
Mathews and her colleagues identified the link after recording the dietary habits of 740 women before and during pregnancy. Of the third of women on the highest energy diets prior to conception, 56 per cent had boys, compared with 45 per cent in the third consuming least energy. Breakfast cereals had an even greater effect, with 59 per cent of daily consumers bearing boys, compared with 43 per cent of those eating a bowl a week or less.
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The team suggests that extra glucose from a high-energy diet helps male embryos survive: because they grow bigger than girls they need more energy. Animals such as horses and cows have developed ways to favour male offspring when food is plentiful, so perhaps sensing the extra glucose enables women to do the same, Mathews and her colleagues suggest in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences ().
鈥淓xtra glucose from a high-energy diet may help male embryos survive鈥�
The team identified other dietary ingredients that may favour boys, including salts containing sodium, potassium and calcium. One theory is that salt alters the acidity of the vagina in a way that鈥檚 beneficial to male sperm. But Matthews says there is scant evidence of this.
Lucilla Poston, who studies maternal nutrition at King鈥檚 College London, is cautious about the findings, but says there are precedents in the animal world for environment influencing the sex of offspring. One possible factor in cereals might be folic acid, or folate, which helps prevent faulty gene activation as embryos develop. Folate might also affect the genes linked with sex selection, although there鈥檚 no evidence to support it, she says.
