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Can cereal determine your baby's gender?
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The baby Frosted Flakes built?
You’ve always wanted a rosy baby boy, and thanks to your favorite cereal, you may well get one. Or perhaps you’re dreaming of pigtails and tea parties, in which case your kitchen cupboard is still your uterus’ fairy godmother. A recent study indicates that moms-to-be can tweak their diets to influence their babies’ gender.
According to the study, mothers who ate cereal and diets abundant in potassium gave birth to more boys than mothers who skipped breakfast and consumed fewer calories. While experts are quick to point out that the study merely found an association between diet and a baby’s gender—not a magic formula—this sadly won’t stop your Aunt Gerdy from insisting that eating three pounds of raw tofu every morning is your ticket to a giggling baby girl.
A study featured in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 740 pregnant British women listed the foods they favored the year before conception. Those who regularly ate breakfast cereals and foods rich in potassium, as well as diets that were higher in calories, delivered more boys than their cereal shunning, lower calorie diet counterparts. It’s not clear whether the nutrients or the calories are the overruling factor, but a study involving hamsters supports this data and shows that underfed hamsters tend to conceive females while hamsters without diet restrictions do not.
Gender selection is on its way to becoming big business, with the release of books like How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby and websites pedaling “gender preference kits.” Despite the growing popularity of these products, Steven Ory, a reproductive endocrinologist and the past president of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, insists that there is no old-fashioned method that can determine sex selection. "You have a 50-50 probability of a girl or a boy," Ory says. If a couple is attempting to influence gender through dietary changes or different positions or intercourse timing, he says, "there is a tendency to attribute what you did to getting results [you wanted]. And people tell their friends. In medicine, we call them anecdotes."
But with cutting-edge technology and new scientific breakthroughs occurring every day, is it only a matter of time before parents can choose their baby’s sex with the same ease they order a sandwich for lunch?
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