A study of how diet affects the health of new mothers and their babies produced the surprise finding that vegetarian women are more likely to give birth to girls.
Researchers at Nottingham University in Great Britain found significant differences in the sex of babies born to vegetarian and meat- and fish-eating women.
"We were very surprised," says Pauline Hudson, one of the report's authors. "It was just a fluke. This was something we were never looking to find."
Hudson, a midwife teacher, and co-author Rosemary Buckley monitored the 5,942 pregnant women seen at Nottingham's City Hospital during 1998, logging whether they were vegetarian defined as avoiding meat and fish. The idea was to monitor the health of vegetarians and non-vegetarian mothers, looking at things like hemoglobin and birth weights. What they stumbled upon was something else.
"The birth ratio in Britain is that for every 106 boys born there are 100 girls, that's pretty constant," Hudson says. "In our sample group of vegetarians (nearly 5 percent of those studied) there were 81.5 boys born for every 100 girls."