

Mother's diet can help determine sex of child - kradic
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080423/wl_uk_afp/healthdietsexchildren

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Jesin
Hmm. It's also worth considering the possibility that the sex of the child
could affect the appetite of the mother.

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tlrobinson
Exactly. Correlation does not imply causation.

Whenever I hear about various things that supposedly make children smarter,
like listening to Mozart as a baby, playing a musical instrument, or having a
fish as a pet, I can't help but think in almost every case it has much more to
do with the type of environment the child is raised in.

There was a good "Bullshit!" episode (Penn and Teller) about exactly that.

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WilliamLP
Yes and it might be that smarter parents will play Mozart for a baby, and read
to them, and have them learn a musical instrument. I'm not saying none of
these things can possibly affect anything on their own, but just that you have
to take extreme care with these kinds of statistics before making conclusions.
And that kind of care seems to be lacking in articles like the parent.

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greendestiny
Interesting but I now officially remain skeptical of all studies where they
don't introduce the studied mechanism in a random fashion (ie take people and
make them eat a lot of calories or not) and they haven't identified a
mechanism. At best this kind of research simply gives some impetus for further
inquiry.

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vikram
Maybe they shouldn't have tracked sex of a child as compared to the weather on
the day of conception or delivery of the child. To work out if kids conceived
on a rainy day where more likely to be boys or girls.

I have a confession to make. I don't read any newspapers or listen to any
tv/radio news. As they have a tendency of giving credit to anything. They'll
put results taken from one study and publish it as if they are really
statistically significant. One of the worst things is people who don't
understand science commenting on it.

One study of 740 women among maybe a million times that number every year, is
meaningless. They could have as easily tracked the weather and found out that
55% of the kinds conceived on rainy days were boys.

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maximilian
Isn't it the father's sperm that carries the X or the Y x-some that determines
the sex of the baby? How could the mother's state determine which sperm is
accepted to be "the one"?

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snowmaker
It's not that simple. It is well-known from other research studies,
particularly the ones which document the effect of social status on gender
ratio, that the woman does have an ability to influence the gender ratio of
her children. The most likely mechanism by which she does this is altering the
porosity of her cervical channels, which could change the ratio of male to
female sperm, but as far as I know no one has observed this directly.

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rms
Also see the press release for this posted at thingene: includes link to the
scientific paper.

[http://www.thinkgene.com/you-are-what-your-mother-eats-
first...](http://www.thinkgene.com/you-are-what-your-mother-eats-first-
evidence-that-mothers-diet-influences-infant-sex/)

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dimitry
Hacker news?

