Well, I worked with a woman who was/is anorexic. She drank slim fast through her entire pregnancy. We all bitched at her that it wasn't good for the baby, that she needed to eat. She weighed like 120 at nine months. The baby, a BOY, weighed 9lbs. Knowing what I know now, that last part makes sense. SlimFast has a lot of carbs.

As to environment. I had heard that the alkalinity or acidity of the uterus can affect which sperm reach the egg. eg female swim better in acid?(forget which is which) But, that may be overall diet, not necessarily breakfast.

And personally, their reasoning makes no sense. Males can reproduce many more times over than a female. And they don't incurr the same nutritional needs or inability to get around as they "reproduce"... So, this doesn't make sense to me. Unless you accept that women do hold on to nutrients more than men do. ie it's harder for women to lose weight. So, a female would survive lean times better than a male, and reach adulthood to reproduce when hopefully it's a feast time...

And...
I have to disagree with you here. When I was pregnant with my oldest, I did not want to eat meat. It just wasn't appealing. I wanted fruit. Particularly oranges. With my second, I had a hankering for tomato sandwiches. With salt and pepper. This was also something I did not usually eat, or even want, but my mom does all the time. Both children are girls. I just figure there was something nutritional that I didn't need with the meat avoidance. And something I did with the tomato sandwich. See, it wasn't even ice cream and pickles...

ETA: So, since we can usually get adequate food, does this mean the pyramid (ie low fat) is "starving" us, and we are producing mostly females? (My sister had two boys, so we are balanced out! )

Then how would you explain my craving for Chef Boyardy Ravoli & Gatorade. Which I never even liked before getting pregnant.

When I was pregnant I didn't want meat either that's why I gain so much weight . But I craved sweets big time cokes & ice cream were my favorite & then I got a Hot Fry craving too. Before I was pregnant I hadn't drank a coke in years. BTW I had a girl too.

Actually the female has 100% of the control, as such. While obviously not under conscious control, the male delivers both male and female sperm, out of his control by any measure. It is the egg and it's enviroment chooses which makes it through. Like I hand you twenty red chips and twenty blue chips, and you choose the one you want, out of my control.

So while it is the individual sperm's DNA that makes the child a boy or a girl, it is the egg that chooses the individual sperm out of the crowd.

It was a bit of sarcasm on my part.

maybe control is the wrong word... i meant it to be synonymous with intent or motive. the correlation you're drawing here, which is similar to the correlation the article seemed to be drawing, was that women have a conscious input in the decision-making process as to whether the baby will be male or female. but in reality, since all eggs are X chromosomed, women can't even claim partial responsibility over whether the child is male or female.

with your chip analogy, i'm making a conscious decision to reach out my hand and choose either a red chip or a blue chip. i have no conscious control over my eggs, and the egg has no conscious control over which sperm manage to make it all the way up, or which of the 100 or so that beat against the egg to weaken the cell wall will finally make it through to fertilization. it's not a case of choosing out of a crowd, it's a case of all the sperm working together to achieve fertilization.

while i do agree that diet can have an impact over the acidity/alkalinity of the cervix and womb, altering a diet would have more effect on increasing the probability of pregnancy than it would on the sex of the child.

what the article did NOT do was interview the 740 fathers to find out if there were any correlations between THEIR diet and the proportion of X sperm to Y sperm.

Well, no...

Let's use a more realistic analogy. I throw thousands of nickles and dimes at you. You have a filter which has random sized holes in it, all about coin sized, but varied. You can squeeze those holes a little, or relax them a little. If you squeeze them, it becomes more likely that a dime will make it through, if you relax, nickles have a better chance.

This is independent of how many nickles I mix into the dimes. Since only the first one counts, as long as I supply both nickles and dimes, the filter does the choosing.

The enviroment does the choosing, as someone else mentioned a change in ph makes a huge difference. The sperm levels and the egg are minor effects.

So it is the body chemistry of the woman that decides, statistically, if it will be a boy or a girl.

ok. and yes i see where you're going with this. varying the diet will vary the environment and vary which sperm are able to survive and which aren't.

one thing i always found interesting, from the day i took the sexual biology course in college and with each discovery health documentary i see on reproduction, is that despite common knowledge the odds are actually AGAINST pregnancy and gestation... then again, this is the same common knowledge that gives us the "fat is bad, carbs are good" dogma.

sperm can live for about 5-7 days. eggs are only viable for 24 hours after release from the ovary. except for the days immediately surrounding ovulation, the female body is incredibly hostile to sperm. while it only takes one sperm to fertilize an egg, it takes all of them working together to get to the egg and break down the protective membranes so that fertilization is possible. and with the 50% spontaneous miscarriage statistic that nancy posted, it's surprising that anyone ever gets born in the first place.

what bothered me was the tone of the article, which made it sound like "eat 2 from column A and 1 from column B and you'll have a girl, eat 3 from column C and 1 from column A and you'll have a girl, eat a combination of 6 from columns B, C, and Q and you'll have twins." it's totally discounting the male role. no matter what the woman eats in the hopes of having a boy, if the sperm that makes it to her egg produces a girl, then she's having a girl.

In my sister's ex-husband's family, there hasn't been a girl born in 6 generations. My sister's son by him recently had a son. I don't know if there's a possibility of a genetic mutation where they don't produce female sperm? Seems I heard something about it. His brother also had a boy. My sister is a Pepsi addict. Lots of sugar/carbs. I'm not sure about his brother's wife's diet. She's not heavy though.

I got Kevin Trudeau's second book, and there's mention in it about environmental poisoning scewing the ratio of boys to girls being born. So, maybe breakfast isn't the "secret" to having a boy. Maybe it's environmental hormones... I've only skimmed it, but he also discusses plane trails staying in place for hours. And that experiments are being done (through the plane trails?). Pretty much without our knowledge/consent. I'll get the page number if anyone else has his second book. "More Secrets....(can't remember and don't want to dig book out and wake DH)

But see, this way they can lie in wait. Kinda like the guys who hang out by the ladies room on ladies night.