Boy or girl? It could depend on breakfast

Becky Feyder rarely ate breakfast before her first pregnancy. Before trying for Baby No. 2, though, she did eat breakfast -- a lot of it. Scrambled eggs with cheese, hash browns and sausage. A banana, too. "I was pretty hungry from chasing around child No. 1," Feyder said.Baby No. 1 is a girl. Baby No. 2 is a boy. Coincidence? Maybe. But Feyder's babies fall right in line with a new study suggesting that women who eat a hearty breakfast before getting pregnant are more likely to produce sons.The study of 700 first-time pregnant women, published in a British medical journal in April, found that those who ate at least one bowl of breakfast cereal daily before getting pregnant were 87 percent more likely to have boys than those who ate no more than one bowl per week. Women who had boys also ate an additional 300 milligrams of potassium daily, on average. Want a boy? Have a banana.Susie Boeckmann generally avoids breakfast, aside from an occasional glass of chocolate milk. Last June, Boeckmann, 35, gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra. Might she consider chowing down the next time around? "I don't think there will be a next time," she said, "but if there was, I might try it."There's nothing quite as enjoyable as trying to outsmart nature, which is why studies like these are so much fun to read and discuss. And, to be fair, some say the findings in the somber-sounding Proceedings of the Royal Society B have merit. Certain nutrients, some theorize, may make the womb more welcoming to male embryos.That would not include Ted Nagel, a reproductive endocrinologist. His take on the theory? A pause, followed by a laugh."I've seen so many things come around over the years that I'm very skeptical," said Nagel, who practices at the Reproductive Medicine Center at the University of Minnesota. "There was this guy who sold some kind of tea to guarantee the preferred-sex child. He charged $100 and promised a money-back guarantee if parents didn't get what they wanted. Half of them asked for their money back. He still made $50 every time."Still, parents-to-be can't help themselves. Case in point: The Boy Dance."A friend of ours, who came from a largely boy family, said that his mom did the 'boy dance' after conception," said Feyder, 31, of St. Paul, Minn. "It involved lying on your back, putting your feet in the air and shaking your feet back and forth as fast as possible. It's supposed to help those poor male-producing sperm along, since it's said that the female-producing sperm are better swimmers."Although she didn't eat breakfast the first time around, Feyder does confess to doing the boy dance. "It was a running joke between our families. We laughed the entire time about how we were going to tell our friends about this." She was still laughing, and thrilled, when her boy turned out to be daughter, Belen, now age 3.The dance-phobic do have other options. Kits come with charts and thermometers for those who believe that the closer you time intercourse to ovulation, the more likely you are to have a boy. The most elaborate version is the Chinese gender selection chart, believed to have been buried in a tomb near Beijing for almost 700 years. The chart, which claims 93 percent accuracy, crosses the age of the woman at conception, and the month of conception, to produce the desired boy or girl.Even prenatal vitamins are offered in pink or blue. When Boeckmann was pregnant with Alexandra, for example, a co-worker told her she had a higher chance of having a girl if she took pink prenatal vitamins. "I had no idea that they came in different colors," she said, "but mine were pink!"Tying off the left testicle in men hoping to have boys is also an option, but that method, prescribed by Aristotle, faded out in about 330 BC. The passing of that practice is something today's fathers would no doubt salute.But seriously, scientists can now create the correct-sexed zygote to implant inside a woman. This method is sometimes used when a female or male would be destined to face a terrible disease. Nagel supports this method, in those rare cases. "But if it's just to say, 'I don't want boys, I don't want girls,' then no. That becomes much more dicey."Nagel prefers another approach. Couples get pregnant, and then wait for their wonderful surprise to arrive. The success rate of this method, he points out: A reliable 50 percent.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)