As seen on CNN - Eat more Banana and your Baby will be a boy

[Stan]

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Women can influence the gender of their child with what they eat before they conceive, according to new research that lends scientific support to age-old superstitions about pregnancy.

The study of 740 women showed that higher calorie intake led to a higher probability of a male birth.

The discovery shows higher calorie intake prior to conception can significantly increase the chances of having a son while women on restricted diets are more likely to produce daughters.

Scientists at Britain's Oxford and Exeter Universities, who studied eating habits of 740 women during their first-time pregnancies, say that their findings seem to back certain traditional links between diet and gender while disproving others.

"We were able to confirm the old wives' tale that eating bananas and so having a high potassium intake was associated with having a boy, as was a high sodium intake," research leader Fiona Mathews, a specialist in mammalian biology at Exeter University, told the Guardian newspaper.

"But the old take about drinking a lot of milk to have a girl doesn't seem to hold up. In fact, more calcium meant they were again more likely to have a boy."

Mathews said the study pointed to a simple technique to influencing the chances of a male birth: Eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

"If you want a boy, eat a healthy diet with a high calorie intake, including breakfast," she told New Scientist magazine.

"Of women eating cereals daily, 59 percent had boys, compared with only 43 percent who bore boys in the group eating less than a bowlful per week."

The researchers said that a higher calorie intake prior to conception can increase the chances of having a son from ten to 11 boys in every 20 births, according to the study published in the Proceeding of the Royal Society B.

They said it could explain why male births in richer countries are experiencing a slight reduction.

Source

[Stan]

Some days, you wake up and just never know what you are going to read......

[John317]

This information about the influence of certain foods on the gender of children was known back in the late 1970s. It was already being written about in the medical and scientific journals of that time. It has to do with the diet that a woman eats at the time of conception. Scientifically it actually makes good sense. As I recall, at that time they thought it has something to do with the fact that male and female fertilized eggs do better in either acidic or alkaline environments, and course the diet of the woman affects this. Depending on the diet, it would favor the male or the female egg traveling up the fallopian tube and entering into the uterus.

Welcome subject first thing in the morning, I bet.

[Dottie]

I was eating very little, trying to lose weight, when I conceived my first son. Fifteen months later, I was on a forced diet of one cheese sandwich (white bread) a day, and also conceived a boy. Wehn I conceived my daughter, I was eating a lot of very healthy food (the 9 1/2 # baby was evidence of that).

The fourth child was conceived as an idea of my husband, and he weighed 16 pounds when we first saw him.

[LynnDel]

Quote:

he weighed 16 pounds when we first saw him.

Whoa there! Did you stop at four, Dottie? I guess you and I must be in the 41% that goes against the research. Well, some of us have to exist in order to match the statistics, don't we? Both my girls weighed well over 9 lbs, and I had cereal every day, often with bananas.