You are what your mom eats
-
- April
- 25
A new study says that if you eat potassium-rich foods (such as bananas) and don’t skip breakfast, you’re more likely to have a boy.
The study, “You are what your mother eats: Evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans” (OK, so my headline wasn’t the most creative play on words on the entire planet, sue me), was published this week in the British medical journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Here’s a PDF of the full study.
At first, I was rather skeptical. After all, it’s the man’s sperm that determines a child’s gender. It’s not as if you can become pregnant, start eating lots of bananas and suddenly the girl fetus morphs into a boy fetus.
But I read on and it’s not as simplistic as that. It’s how you eat before you become pregnant that can make your body more hospitable to the sperm that carry the Y chromosone and male embryos, it appears.
Fortunately, Associated Press medical writer Lindsey Tanner understands medical-speak (I double-dog dare you to try to understand the study as written), and she explains:
It is not proof, but it fits with evidence from test tube fertilization that male embryos thrive best with longer exposure to nutrient-rich lab cultures, said Dr. Tarun Jain. He is a fertility specialist at University of Illinois at Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study.It just might be that it takes more nutrients to build boys than girls, he said.
University of Exeter researcher Fiona Mathews, the study’s lead author, said the findings also fit with fertility research showing that male embryos aren’t likely to survive in lab cultures with low sugar levels. Skipping meals can result in low blood sugar levels.
***
Women who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily were 87 percent more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowlful per week. Cereal is a typical breakfast in Britain and in the study, eating very little cereal was considered a possible sign of skipping breakfast, Mathews said.
Compared with the women who had girls, those who had boys ate an additional 300 milligrams of potassium daily on average, “which links quite nicely with the old wives’ tale that if you eat bananas you’ll have a boy,” Mathews said.
Myself, I’d never heard that old wives’ tale. But I do have a rather healthy appetite (ahem) and had two boys (the second of whom was a rather big baby). And I do like bananas. I tend to be a big meat-eater, too. Don’t know if that makes a difference.
But, as Dr. Michael Lu, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and public health at the University of California at Los Angeles, told Tanner, “The bottom line is, we still don’t know how to advise patients in how to make boys.”
This entry was posted
on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 10:58 am by Amy Vernon.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Share and Enjoy: 
| 
Print
| 
Email
Nothing like oatmeal in the morning!