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VIRTUALISATION Want a boy baby, UK study says eat a lot of food
VIRTUALISATION Want a boy baby, UK study says eat a lot of food | Want a boy baby, UK study says eat a lot of food |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Thursday, 24 April 2008 | |
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They found that when the mother ate the most (least), she was more likely to have a son (daughter). The article stating this relationship is titled “You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans.” It was published in the April 23, 2008 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The authors of the study are Fiona Mathews (Hatherly Laboratories, School of Biosciences, University of Exeter, UK); Paul J. Johnson (Wildlife Conervation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK); and Andrew Neil (Division of Public Health and Primary Health Care, Institute of Health Sciences, Univesity of Oxford, UK). The three UK researchers studied 740 British women who were pregnant for the first time but did not know the gender (sex) of their unborn baby. Their goal was to find out if there was a link between the sex of the fetus (foetus) and the diet of the mother. The researchers analyzed records provided by the mothers on their eating habits before and during the first stages of their pregnancies. Based on the number of calories consumed each day around the time of conception, the women were divided into three categories. They discovered that 56% of the female subjects with the highest amounts (top one-third) of energy intake in their diet gave birth to male babies. Women with the lowest intake of calories (bottom one-third) gave birth to female babies. Besides total calories consumed per day, the study also found that the pregnant women were more likely to conceive males if they ate more nutrients and a wider range of nutrients—such as calcium, potassium, vitamin B12, vitamin C, and vitamin E. The introduction to their abstract states, “Facultative adjustment of sex ratios by mothers occurs in some animals, and has been linked to resource availability. In mammals, the search for consistent patterns is complicated by variations in mating systems, social hierarchies and litter sizes. Humans have low fecundity, high maternal investment and a potentially high differential between the numbers of offspring produced by sons and daughters: these conditions should favour the evolution of facultative sex ratio variation. Yet little is known of natural mechanisms of sex allocation in humans.” The researchers state that their conclusions support “the hypotheses predicting investment in costly male offspring when resources are plentiful. Dietary changes may therefore explain the falling proportion of male births in industrialized countries. The results are relevant to the current debate about the artificial selection of offspring sex in fertility treatment and commercial ‘gender clinics’.” The trend is for fewer boys being born in industrialized countries. The trend is for women to more likely be on diets. Additional information is found on the next page. |
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