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Mom's
diet may influence baby's sex
Mothers-to-be
who eat better, deliver more boys -- but critics aren't so
sure
By Jonel Aleccia
In the quest
to select a baby's sex, success could depend on breakfast
cereal and better nutrition, according to a new study that may
offer some women another reason to eat their Wheaties.
Mothers-to-be
who skip breakfast and eat less are more likely to give birth
to girls, while moms
who consume more calories and a wider range of nutrients -
including, specifically, those from breakfast cereal - are
more likely to deliver sons. That's according to new research
by British scientists that provides what they say is the
first-ever evidence that a mother's diet at conception may
determine her baby's sex.
Researchers
from the universities of Exeter and Oxford in England asked
740 first-time moms in the United Kingdom to keep food diaries
before and during early pregnancy. The women didn't know the
sex of their babies, but when researchers reviewed their food
plans, they found that moms who consumed more calories of
higher quality before conceiving were about 24 percent more
likely to give birth to boys than moms who ate less.
"The
overall sex ratio in our population was close to 50:50, but
individual mothers had a greater chance of bearing male
offspring if their nutrient intake was high prior to
conception," wrote Fiona Mathews, the study's lead author
and a research fellow at the University of Exeter. "The
consumption of breakfast cereal was also strongly associated
with having a male infant."
Fifty-six
percent of women in the group with the highest energy intake
gave birth to boys, compared to 45 percent in the group with
the lowest energy consumption, according to the study.
Mothers of
boys consumed an average of 2,413 calories a day before
conception and higher amounts of foods containing potassium,
calcium and vitamins C, E and B12, the researchers said. Women
who had girls logged 2,283 calories a day and less protein,
vitamins and minerals.
Odds of
having a boy were much higher for women who ate at least one
bowl of breakfast cereal a day compared to women who ate less
than one bowl a week, the study said. Breakfast cereals are
usually fortified by vitamins and minerals.
Critics wary
of claims
Critics,
however, said the new research contradicts basic facts of
human genetics. A fath er's
sperm determines a child's sex, and there's no evidence that
maternal nutrition has anything to do with it, said Dr Paul
Magarelli, Vice President, Pacific Coast Reproductive Society.
"A
correlation does not make the truth," said Magarelli, who
is also director of the Reproductive Medicine and Fertility
Centre in Colorado Springs, Colo. "I think it's a
spurious correlation, that's all I can say."
The British
scientists said that although fathers do determine sex, their
research indicates that mothers' may be able to favour the
development of one sex over another, perhaps in the way that
high-glucose environments in in-vitro fertilisation appear to
favour male embryos and inhibit female embryos.
The research
is also supported by an evolutionary drive to produce more
offspring in times of plenty. In many animals - including
horses, cows and some species of deer - more males are
produced when a mother has more resources, the scientists
noted.
Skipping
breakfast, for instance, extends overnight fasting and
depresses glucose levels, which could be interpreted by the
body as a poor environment, researchers said.
Their
argument deserves further study, said Dr Tarun Jain, an
assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. "It's not showing far
and away that if women eat a certain diet they'll have a boy
or a girl, but it certainly is giving us some
information," Jain said. "Could there be dietary
factors that influence conception?"
Diet trends
may explain fewer boys.
In addition
to suggesting that breakfast cereal may produce more boys, the
researchers said that nutrition and diet trends may account
for an incremental decline in male births in developing
nations. Over the last 40 years, births of boys have also
dropped by about one per 1000 births annually in the United
States, the U.K. and Canada, they said.
At the same
time, many young women in those developed nations have begun
skipping breakfast and eating poorer-quality diets.
"This
research may help explain why, in developed countries, where
many young women choose to have low-calorie diets, the
proportion of boys born is falling," Mathews said.
That's
counter to the trend in countries such as India, Vietnam and
China, where births of boys now outpace girls because parents
selective sex techniques, including abortion, to obtain highly
prized sons.
The new
study may influence mothers to try to use nutrition to select
sex, which worries ethicists such as Nigel Cameron, president
of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future at the
Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of
Technology.
"It
adds to the manipulative tool box whose purpose is designer
babies. We need a lot more social debate about the fact that
children should be received as-is," said Cameron. |
(scarring) or caner. 80 percent of all liver cancer in the
world is caused by chronic hepatitis B. Most people infected
in adulthood are able to clear the Hepatitis B virus from
their blood in six months. However, five percent to 10 percent
of infected adults, 30 percent to 50 percent of infected
children and 90 percent of infected babies cannot get rid of
the Hepatitis B virus. These individuals with chronic
Hepatitis Band are at increased danger of developing
complications later in life.
Conference of the Asian Pacific Association for the Study of
the Liver in 2008. Approximately 2,000 medical practitioners
specialising in the study of digestive disorders have attended
the four-day conference. The APSAL meetings were focused on
subjects related to the diagnosis and treatment of liver
diseases and their regional epidemiology.
peri-natial or child to child contact. In many developed
countries, the pattern of transmission is different and the
majority of infections are acquired during young adulthood via
sexual activity and by the use of drugs.
Hepatitis B that is the most alarming outcome of first phase
of discussion. Now it is responsibility of the health policy
makers, decision makers, health management consultants,
clinicians and health care providers to establish an action
plan to combat with that situation.
during sleep when the brain replays recent experiences. But
how do you remember what happens when? According to
researchers at the University of Lubeck in Germany, shut-eye
not only strengthens a memory's content but also the sequence
in which they are experienced. Students were presented sets of
words in a particular order. One group of these students was
allowed to sleep and another was not. Those who were allowed
to sleep could more often recall the order of words than those
who were not allowed to sleep.
a rare form of blindness. Experts called this development a
major advancement for the experimental technique. Some vision
was restored in four of the six young people who got the
treatment, teams of researchers in the United States and
Britain reported. Two of the volunteers who could only see
hand motions were able to read a few lines of an eye chart
within weeks. The two teams of scientists, working separately,
each tested gene replacement therapy in three patients with a
form of a rare hereditary eye disease called Leber's
congenital amaurosis.
problem-solving ability and improve fluid intelligence,
according to new University of Michigan research.
"Considering the fundamental importance of fluid
intelligence in everyday life and its predictive power for a
large variety of intellectual tasks and professional success,
we believe that our findings may be highly relevant to
applications in education," U-M psychology researchers
Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl concluded. Many
psychologists believe general intelligence can be separated
into "fluid" and "crystalline" components.
Fluid intelligence, considered one of the most important
factors in learning, applies to all problems while
crystallised intelligence consists of skills useful for
specific tasks.
guilt-free and all in the name of science. The trial starting
in June will explore whether compounds called flavonoids found
in chocolate and other foods can reduce the risk of heart
disease for menopausal women with type 2 diabetes, the
researchers said. "We are looking at a high risk group
first," said Aedin Cassidy, a biochemist at the
University of East Anglia, who will lead the study. "We
hope there will be an additional benefit from dietary
intervention in addition to the women's drug therapy."
Previous studies have suggested dark chocolate is rich in the
beneficial compounds linked with heart health but experts note
the high sugar and fat content of most commercially available
chocolate might cancel out some of the advantages.