Cereal is not sex linked (duh!)

Back in April I blogged about a British study that suggested that women who ate lots of cereal when they were pregnant were more likely to have a boy:
http://babybumpproject.blogspot.com/2008/04/want-baby-boy-eat-breakfast.html

According to a different research team from Cornell, this is..well..highly unlikely. Using a different statistical test, the authors think that the results from the first study were largely due to chance:" By our analysis, it looked like everything was random and there was nothing special about cereal," says Stan Young, assistant director for bioinformatics at the National Institution of Statistical Sciences.

Just by the nature of a large dataset, it is inevitable that the interaction of some variable will show statistical significance. Confirming my own suspicions at the time, the Cornell group further implores the tenuous link between nutrition and gender (if there is one at all).

So ladies, you can keep eating the Cap'n Crunch but just don't get your heart set on a growing a tiny pair of testicles in your womb.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/765psy

Want a baby boy? Eat breakfast.

And more useless information from the people who study things:

According to a new British study, pregnant women that eat breakfast (and cereal in particular) around the time of conception are more likely to have a boy. Those women that consume less calories and skip breakfast are more likely to have a girl.

Argh. Bad, bad science.

I don't know about you, but I was always under the impression that sex was determined by sperm..so how in the world caloric intake affects this process is beyond me. Moreover, the methodology of the study is also highly unreliable. The research had 740 women keep a food diary before and after falling pregnant. They were then split into groups according to caloric intake. Self-report is a highly problematic methodology especially when it comes to women and food, a very sensitive and culturally meaningful issue. Let's face it. Informants lie about lots of things and it is very possible that the women who were in the lowest calorie group were purposely underreporting their intake.

I'm particularly troubled by the suggestion by one of the researchers that this information "could be of help to women wanting to balance their families." Right. And why might this logic lead to very bad things? As it has occurred throughout history and through to the present (Hello, China!?), such a proposition implies that girl babies are usually less desirable and now women will think that they can control sex through food. Ridiculous.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=561384&in_page_id=1774