Dr. Mercola May 13 2008 88,450 views
What a woman eats before pregnancy may play a role in whether the baby is a boy or a girl, according to surprising new research.Women who have a hearty appetite, eat a lot of potassium-rich foods like bananas, and don’t skip breakfast appear more likely to have a boy. Previous studies have also shown that male embryos do best with longer exposure to nutrient-rich lab cultures.It could be that more nutrients are needed to build boys than girls. 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, a possible sign that they were skipping breakfast.Among women with the highest calorie intake before pregnancy (but still within a normal, healthy range), 56 percent had boys, versus 45 percent of the women with the lowest calorie intake. Women who had boys also ate an additional 300 mg of potassium daily on average, and about 400 calories more daily, compared to women who had girls.
The research involved about 700 first-time pregnant women, and has been billed as the first to show a link between a woman’s diet and the gender of her offspring. The women were asked about their eating habits in the year before getting pregnant.
The findings of the British study described above strike me as at best tentative, and at worst dubious. The leap to the conclusion that women who ate less breakfast cereal were skipping breakfast and therefore getting less nutrients, for example, seems unsupported by any real evidence. In fact, breakfast cereals are not a good breakfast at all for most people, especially the typical highly processed breakfast cereals available to most, including those in this study. Although breakfast is important, there are many better options than cereal, and at least some of the women who were avoiding a grain and sugar-filled morning might very well have been opting for a healthier choice like fresh vegetable juice, especially if you are a carb or mixed nutritional type.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t any connection between a woman’s diet and her child’s gender, of course; I just don’t believe that this study is anything close to the final word on the subject. What is indisputable, however, is that your choice of foods when you are pregnant can indeed have repercussions that could affect the course of your child’s entire life.
The Dangers of Soy
As just one example, when mothers who eat an entirely vegetarian diet during pregnancy have boys, those children have a fivefold greater risk of developing hypospadias, a birth defect of the penis. In hypospadias, the opening of the penis is found on the underside of the penis rather than at the tip, requiring corrective surgery -- untreated, it can interfere with urination and sexual function.
The birth defect is most likely due to the greater exposure vegetarians have to phytoestrogens, the hormone-like compounds found in soy. For the exact same reason, vegetarians with a soy-rich diet during pregnancy expose their female offspring to a higher risk of breast cancer later in life.
No matter what you may have heard, soy is not a health food. There is a 70 billion dollar industry that funds many studies attempting to show that soy has benefits so that you will consume it. Their goal is to sell more domestic soy. Their goal is NOT your health. Pregnant women in particular should avoid soy completely, with the exception of fermented soy products which have a greatly lowered phytoestrogen content.
Don’t Overeat
“Eating for two” used to be the recommended way of doing things, but it’s not the best idea for your health or the health of your child. Women at a healthy weight should gain no more than 25 to 35 pounds during pregnancy. However, many women actually gain 40 pounds or more.
Being overweight or obese while pregnant increases the risk for a variety of problems, including:
One study showed that one in three UK women who die during pregnancy or childbirth are grossly overweight, and the death is usually associated with obesity. And if you put on too much weight during pregnancy, you very well might keep it on for years, increasing your risk of many health problems.
Babies born to overweight mothers have twice the risk of congenital heart defects and three times the chance of being born with omphalocele, a defect in which intestines or other abdominal organs protrude through the navel. They also have a greater risk of spinal cord and brain defects, and a variety of cancers.
The Benefits of Omega-3’s
Not all news is bad news, however. There are some steps you can take during pregnancy which will greatly benefit your child’s future health. One of the best is increasing your intake of omega-3 fats.
A study published in the British Medical Journal clearly showed that omega-3’s are associated with lessening the risk for premature delivery. They dramatically reduce pregnancy complications, and do wonders to improve the health of all children.
A high intake of omega-3’s during the later stages of pregnancy can increase fetus growth (without extending the duration of the pregnancy!)
In fact, it can even increase your child’s intelligence.
To sum up, an awareness of which foods are good for your baby -- and which are harmful -- can reduce the risks of birth defects, protect your child from obesity, and even increase their intelligence.
Someday, it might be possible to influence the gender of a baby by knowledgeable food choices. But even if that time comes, your food choices can result in a healthy baby, which is far more important in the long run.
See that? We guys are in a hurry even before we're conceived! LOL
Okay, seriously, what Rivkah is saying, is that during the "window of conception", if timing is such that the egg is not far along in its travel down the Fallopian tube, the male gametes will have died out but the hardier female ones will reach the egg and a girl will be conceived; but later, when the egg is much further along in its travel, the faster male gametes will reach it first, rather than not at all, and a boy will be conceived.
Obviously there's a mid-point as well, where the males are winding down but haven't yet quit and the females are catching up, so for just a brief moment it's a crap-shoot. But nobody can know exactly when that is.
HOWEVER, there's another point, after that mid-point or perhaps the entire later half-window, where (I think it's) pH is a factor, knocking out the males before their time, according to degree of female excitement, according to at least one researcher/scientist/expert (sorry, memory fails here). A low level shifts the odds back toward conceiving a girl then too.
Which makes it interresting to contemplate the family that's all boys, and the family that's all girls. ...Think about it... ("Things that make you say, 'Hmmm...'")
Under "HOWEVER", that's a lower pH level resulting from a higher level of excitement. In other words, a "quickie" is even more likely to result in a boy but a really serious session could net you a late-window girl baby. ("Hmmm...")
Like everything else, it's never quite as simple as we would like it to be.
The article presents this possible gender-determination effect completely backwards, both genetically and adaptively. Not to say they are entirely wrong, just that there is little there to support their contention, other than yet another “study”. However, these days, with all the estrogen analogs floating around the environment and food supply, I would think birthing males would become increasingly difficult, regardless of diet.
Uuuhh, you are definitely reading way too much into one of the silliest nonsense pseudostudies to come out in a long time. And you are also forgetting that it would be some twenty years before all those supplemental male children would begin to contribute to to the tribe's welfare, in this purely imaginary scenario.Times of plenty vs. times of hardship can vary or cycle wildly in 20 years. And who feeds all those extra boys until they can hunt with the big dudes?
Let's not go inventing entire dinosaur societies based on a single tooth -- we already have people to do that.
Bob2 is exactly right... there are no options in the female gametes other than an "X" chromosome, while in the male's it's 50/50 "X" or "Y", therefore the father's contribution of genetic material determines the child's gender.
Thank you Bob2! My husband was telling me about this same "study" after reading about it on Fox or Yahoo and I had to laugh! I told him it made absolutely no sense because the woman can only provide an x chromosome and the man's sperm actually determines the sex of the baby. He had to think about it for a few seconds but finally got it- those Marines!
There was however another similar study with the idea that what a woman craves during pregnancy may be a predictor of the baby's gender. Some people have indeed run out of useful things to spend money on studying.
It's also possible that the diet the mothers reported having eaten is generally the same as what their spouses/partners ate over that same period. If the woman ate a poor diet, the man probably did, too. Could a poor diet contribute to whether the man is more likely to produce a higher proportion of X sperm vs. Y sperm? If so, they completely missed the point in drawing a conclusion about the influence of what the woman ate. No matter *how* well she eats, she can still only produce an X chromosome. The man provides the variable.
AMEN! I'm glad to see that Dr. Mercola feels that it's a crock too. Such pointless bull, especially for those of us who have had many children and our eating habits didn't change before, during or after pregnancy. All of my pregnancies were basically the same, whether they were boys or girls. No morning sickness, just hungry. Some heartburn starting at four months and then craved rubber (what's with that?)the rest of the pregnancies. Good question, as to who does these studies or if they even do studies at all, but just come up with some dumb idea and project it out to the general public. Morons!
I agree with you seg and CATRYNA. The gender of a child is an energetic/chemical reaction. I don't get where diet would determine that. Remember the rumor that went around regarding sexual positions determining the sex of your child? That was hogwash too - but fun to give it a try.
This is definately a issue of trusting who's doing the research and who the research company is.
Of COURSE it's a crock. The Brits apparently have run out of anything useful to study, probably because we beat them to it a lo-o-ong time ago, butresearchers still have to pretend to research SOMETHING -- i't called "job security", like the auto engineers that keep changing every detail every year seemingly needlessly -- but it's NOT needless, they NEED to, or they're out of a job! And all the Mad morons of Modern Mainstream Media (M5) need to keep reporting all these spurious "breakthroughs" not because they're informative or have some other value, but only to push our emotional buttons to keep us watching their B.S. so they can demand higher ad rates from their advertisers who only want to sell us more Ford F-150s, more junk foods, and more Purple Pills because we're all sick from the junk foods. And the new Ford F-150 is so you can ride to the doctor & pharmacy in STYLE, Billy-Bob Jimbo.
Did you get some of your emotional pushbuttons pushed? Sure you did; it worked again, LOL.
I have to agree with seg - this article was kinda a joke and there are many more useful things these scientists could be doing with their time. What you eat does not decide the gender of your baby - God does! He knows before that child is even conceived whether it will be a little boy or little girl - no matter what you eat, what you do, or anything!
Michelle
I‘ve been looking at the results of research done into toxins and the female reporductive organs/cycle a lot recently. In one study from "chemical alley" (that strip along the great Lakes) the birth ratio of boys to girls which is normally 105/100 dropped by 40% over a 40 year period. The same 40 year period after the 1940‘s boom in chemical manufacture.
IT‘S NOT JUST DIET!
-it‘s our air, our water, our personal care products. Another study found DDT in 2/3 of the homes tested, DDT was banned 30-years ago. Once put out there we can‘t get it back.
The levels of heavy metals was higher in a 10-year-old child than her mother so we won‘t know the results of what we have done for at least another generation.
There is lots of research showing that a woman‘s lifetime exposure to estrogen (or chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body) may be one of the key factors pre-disposing a woman to breast cancer.
There are synthetic estrogens in many of the products that we use all the time--pesticides, detergents, cosmetics Certified Organic personal care products/make-up), plastics & the drugs we take. Lab tests of chemicals found in common personal care products (shampoos, toothpaste, perfume, make-up etc) showed that:
884 are toxic
218 cause reproductive abnormalities
146 cause tumors
314 cause biological mutation
On my blog today I‘m going to post about some non-toxic, everyday items that we can use to replace those chemical products we keep in our kitchen cupboards.
Each one of us can make a difference. With our buying habits we can cut pesticide use. We‘re not only protecting our own home & ourselves, we‘re also protecting our water and air, the schools near the farmland, and we‘re protecting the farmers & their families.
That‘s a difference!