*Obese men are up to 27% more likely
to father a son, researchers find
IF you have your heart set on having
a baby girl, ask your husband to watch his waistline.
A study found that overweight men
are much more likely than usual to father sons.
While their weight didn’t affect
their odds of having a child, it did seem to cut their chances of having a
daughter.
Although this might seem bizarre,
everything from the stress of everyday life to the pomp and circumstance of
royal weddings has been linked to fluctuations in the number of boys or girls
born.
However, previous research has
focused on the mother’s life and health, rather than the father’s.
The Chinese researchers studied
8,500 couples undergoing fertility treatment and looked at whether the men’s
weight affected their odds of having a boy or a girl. It is normal for there to
be slightly more male births – a phenomenon that is thought to be nature’s way
of compensating for the fact that baby boys are more sickly and more likely to
die in infancy.
The slim men fathered 611 boys and
569 girls. This equates to there being 7 per cent more boys than girls – a
typical sex ratio.
However, the overweight and obese
men fathered 27 per cent more boys – a much higher figure than usual.
The Peking University Hospital
researchers said: ‘The present study is the first to report that overweight and
obese men lead to a higher sex ratio at birth compared with normal weight men.’
Writing in the journal Fertility and
Sterility, they said they aren’t sure what is behind the phenomenon.
But one possibility is that female
embryos created by overweight men are for some reason less hardy than male ones
and so are more likely to be lost early in pregnancy.
Simon Fishel, a leading British
fertility expert, said another possibility is that overweight men make more ‘Y’
sperm, which create boys on fertilisation, than thin men.
Professor Fishel, of the CARE group
of IVF clinics, said: “The finding is very interesting but more work is needed
to confirm the results and to look at possible explanations.”
By Chukwuma Muanya
By DailyMail
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