Right diet for child's sex: son or daughter?

Boy? Girl? Would-be mother’s diet, i.e. preconception diet, can help make the choice. This comes from a study titled, You are what your mother ate”, published in the journal Proc Biol Sci in 2008. If son is the choice, the woman before pregnancy should be pigging out!

There is paucity of information about natural and/or environmental factors affecting mechanisms of sex allocation in human evolutionary process. The investigators studied 740 women. The women with the highest energy intake preconception were likely to have sons. While food intake during pregnancy had no impact, women with the top third intake food intake had sons 56% of the times, whereas only 45% from the group from the lower third of energy intake had sons.

Interestingly, women eating cereal everyday prior to conceiving had almost 90% chance of having a son as compared to those eating just one bowl or less of cereal per week. Women having sons ate about 300 more calories than the ones who had girls. Potassium rich diet is also likely to lead to a male child.

Is it because boys tend to be bigger and larger energy investment tilts balance?

Are these results plausible? While more data is needed to confirm these findings, these results are consistent with laboratory data related to fertilitization and survival of male embryos.

“Our results support hypotheses predicting investment in costly male offspring when resources are plentiful”, wrote the authors. These results also have implications for artificial gender selection in fertility clinics.

Do you think diet can or does affect ultimate sex of the would-be baby? Do you know of someone who goes by this theory and practice it? Please share your story.