so, eating cereal for breakfast makes you more likely to conceive a boy?

[CatIsSleepy]

heard it on the radio this morning and have to say my gut reaction was 'bollocks'

here for what the times has to say about it

ok maybe it's not complete bollocks but still

am slightly worried that women who are trying to conceive girls are going to half-starve themselves thinking this will help in some way

actually I think 'trying' to conceive a baby of either sex is a bit daft

but that's another subject

Surely what you eat once you are pregnant has nowt to do with it, because by then the sex has already been determined.

FWIW I always eat cereal for breakfast and never bananas, and I have a boy and am pregnant with number two whom I strongly suspect (but dont know) is also a boy.

I hadn't realised that having three boys was going to mark me out so definitively as a greedy pig

have jsut read the whole paper

if I interpret their tone correctly they were jsut as surprised as everyone else

iirc, there is a long standing link between higher calorie diets & higher incidence of boy babies - theory goes:

• boys are less resilient (more likely to kick the bucket therefore more of a risk to have boys in a harsher environment

• less boys are 'required' to ensure survival of the gene pool (one boy can father more children than a girl can 'mother')

yes but all the women in the study were white British and middleclass well-nourished

the effects had previosuly only been seen in pretty badly nourished populations

the 200 calories in a bowl of cereal is a veeeery small difference

althouygh they make the point that the 'extension of the nocturnal fast' might make the body think it's in famine conditions

yes and it was cereal as opposed to other foodstuffs
odd

aha, I see Mrs badger - I had obviously been too busy lazy to actually look at the original article

and it was boring cornflakes and shredded wheat too

if it was kids' 'fortified with 9 vitamins and iron!' cereals then I could believe it might make a difference to micronutrient deficiency status

cornflakes are fortified though aren't they? not sure about shredded wheat, can't stand the stuff

stranger and stranger. So the difference is generated purely by eating cereal, not by increase in overall calories, right? And what sort of resultant increase are we looking at?

Yup, fortified with iron, vits & folic acid.

if you want girls get your dh to take up smoking heavily.. this is my mum's theory so I can't claim any scientific basis for it, but my bil is a heavy smoker and has 6 girls and another friend of the family is also a heavy smoker with 6 daughters. Something to do with smoking damaging the y chromosome according to dr headfairy, I suppose conversely a very health father will be more predisposed to having boys.

Am I the only one to have concentrated on sex rather than food prior to conception?

I always eat breakfast and mostly it is cereal. I have 2 girls and then a boy.

Never, ever eat cereal as cant have milk

but always have something fro breakfast.

higher cal thing may work though as coulnt conceve when I was at a lower weight, put some on and fell immediately 9for ds4, fell immediately for first 3 whilst bigger)