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04/26/2008

It turns out that you are what your mother eats. Put another way, a mother's diet may determine the sex of her child. We learned this week that researchers in England at Oxford and the University of Exeter say that -- any woman who has a son could have told you this -- a diet featuring high energy intake around the time of conception makes it more likely that a boy child will be born.

Among women with the highest level of food consumption, 56 percent of those studied had sons; 45 percent of women who ate the least bore sons. Evidently, there was also a high correlation between women who ate breakfast cereals and those who had sons. What were they eating?

Skip breakfast, on the other hand, and you're more likely to have a girl, which apparently is a possible explanation for the declining number of boys being born in the industrial West. In the United States, the New York Times reports that the proportion of adults eating breakfast has been dropping steadily since 1965.

One caveat about these data: They could be unreliable. That's because they're based on the self-reports of the food eaten by the 740 women studied -- self-reporting of food intake being a notoriously deceptive activity. Ladies: When was the last time you told someone what you really, actually ate?

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