London, March 9: Keen on having a son? Opt for a high-energy diet.
Researchers have found that a woman’s diet at the time of conception and immediately afterwards may influence the gender of her
child. Regular breakfasts and a high-calorie diet full of fatty food and carbohydrates increases the odds of a male child, while a lower energy diet is more likely to produce a girl.
The University of Missouri study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said a low-calorie diet led to a surfeit of girls.
“High-calorie diets generally favour the birth of males over females, whereas low-calorie diets tend to favour females over males. In humans and mice, food restriction and a suboptimal diet during the period around conception and early pregnancy also lead to a surfeit of daughters, most probably due to selective loss of male foetuses, the most vulnerable sex in the womb,” Dr Cheryl Rosenfeld, lead author of the study, said.
In April 2008, British scientists had also found a clear link between higher energy diet intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. Women who consume around 2,200 calories a day were 1.5 times more likely to have a boy than those who ate less than 1,850 calories a day, the study by the University of Exeter and the University of Oxford had concluded.
The study also found that diet during pregnancy influences the future health of the baby, with outcomes differing depending on the child’s sex. Diet affects almost 2,000 genes in of a foetus and it affects the female foetuses more than the male ones, the study found.
“The expression of 1,972 genes was changed more than twofold in comparisons across diet. Female placentae demonstrated more striking alterations in gene expression in response to maternal diet than male placentae. Notably, each diet provided a distinctive signature of sexually dimorphic genes, with expression generally higher in genes from female placentae than those from male placentae,” the study said.
The study found that sons of obese mothers are more likely than daughters to become obese and develop diabetes as they get older, even though no differences in birth weight may be evident. “The reason why a maternal high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet favours survival of sons and a maternal low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet results in more daughters continues to elude us. The effect was such that the more women ate the more likely she was to have a boy.”
“Women who had sons were also more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. They were also more likely to have eaten breakfast cereals.”
Age Correspondent
