"Overweight and Obese Men More Likely To Father Sons" - has this been discussed?

So I've been doing a ton of reading, on this site (love the Maternal Dom/Privileged Daughter essay!) and elsewhere, and I'm super fascinated by the stuff being studied (and things I wonder might contribute, that have yet to be studied). This study made me worry a bit, though:

Overweight and obese men more likely to father sons according to Peking University Hospital study | Metro News

First off, I recognize this study was done on couples seeking infertility treatment, and while there's no evidence of this, it may have been skewed from the fact that it was done in China where the boy preference plus only child rule has become a real problem (what with sex selective abortions). Still I'm curious if there might be any truth, or counter-studies.

Anyway, if this has already been discussed on another thread, I'll be happy to redirect there. Thoughts? Personal experiences? From what I'm reading on genderdreaming, the thought goes that overweight man might sway girl due to lower fertility and/or excess estrogen. Full disclosure is that hubs is overweight while I am normal BMI (20), and we both eat close to the same calorie count (he's about 2500 daily, while I'm closer to 2200 daily), with a super nutritious diet. I'm like to sway lightly girl for our first, but am thinking with high fasting blood sugar and rising BP this past year for me personally, I'd do the PCOS LE diet plus AM fasting, with a vegetarian skew concentrating on the macro ratios (lowering protein and fat without worrying about vitamin/mineral content). I wasn't planning on doing anything for DH except cooking him dinner (ha!). He's been slow enough to act on decreasing his own calorie count and increasing his expenditure for years that I feel it's not worth pressing the issue, and honestly I feel bad making comments because my only concern with his overweight is his health - he's still the cutest, sweetest man that I want to be the father of my children & my life partner.

Well, I can say that for my family, my DH was normal to slightly underweight when we conceived DS1 and DS2. Ironically, they were both conceived right before or during the death of a family member. That is why my DH was low weight due to being sad/depressed.

For DS3, my DH was normal weight but upper limit of normal.



DS1[emoji125]🏼, DS2[emoji577], DS3[emoji170][emoji577][emoji843][emoji602][emoji170] Jan. '16 I'll sway for a DD[emoji166][emoji171][emoji166] for my DH!!

Yes I was going to post this when it came out because I do not believe this to be a correct observation but then I got busy and forgot to come back to it.:worry: I read the actual study itself and I believe there are SOO many complicating factors that it's basically a garbage study, unfortunately. WE see time after time, chunky hubbies having more daughters. Many of my Custom Swayers for blue have obese husbands, and many of our pink swayers, myself included, got a girl after our spouse gained quite a lot of weight. You can even see this among celebrities too with some heavier celebs having all or mostly girls. (John Goodman, Patton Oswalt, Louis CK, Al Roker, Kevin James come to mind)

We do get a lot of studies done out of China and while they are interesting, you can never take them out of context really because it's just not without a lot of causes for concern. First of all yes the sex-selection abortion idea skews it badly as does the possible use of PGD/IVF or some other technique that we don't know about (such as sperm spinning).

Secondly, obesity in China is a different thing than in the US. Not only is it a fraction of the population (less than 5% overall, about 20% in some Chinese cities, vs. 27% in the US overall with higher rates in some regions) IT's not the same subset of humanity. In the US a lot of poor people are overweight and rich people are thin, but in China this is not as likely the case, as well off people in cities are more likely to be heavy vs. those who live in the countryside and are poorer. Since we already know that well-off people high in social status have more boys anyway this may be skewing the results. Additionally they may be able to afford abortion or sex selection via other methods whereas poorer people in the countryside may not be able to or may have less access to the medical equipment necessary. Corrolary to that, Trivers Willard hypothesis suggests that poorer families may actually prefer and invest more in girls anyway (not necessarily consciously) if they are unable to provide a son with the financial means to compete for mates - and in China with its "bare branches" problem this is a big deal. So poor couples may both be thin and be less motivated to even seek out the sex-selective aborion that more well off couples might pursue.

Third, smoking. Lots of Chinese people smoke, by far and away more than in the US, (2/3 of all adult male Chinese people smoke) and smoking may contribute to thinness and also having less money for buying food anyway. Smoking, especially by men, has been a HUGE factor for us swaying pink.

Fourth - things seem to work somewhat differently for Asians than for other ethnicities. They react differently hormonally to things like alcohol and coffee, we see VERY thin and petite Asian women having boys all the time (even mostly boys) and PCOS also seems to present differently with them, with many of them being quite thin and having relatively low blood sugar, yet still having very severe PCO when they develop it. So I would not even count out that it could be something that may function differently depending on one's genetics.

Fifth - While this seems a bit of a reach, it actualy has the most data backing it up. There is an interesting theory that Hepatitis B and Toxoplasmosis infection both of which are endemic in that part of the world, may be partially skewing gender ratios towards more boys. For reasons we can only guess at, active/chronic Hep B and Toxoplasmosis infections seem to sway blue and have pretty good studies demonstrting this. So that may be playing some part.

Sixth - New data seems to indicate that certain types of microbes in the gut may contribute to obesity and our evidence indicated that probiotics seemed to sway strongly blue, so that may have something to do with it as well.

So, long story short, my observations based on what I have seen are pretty overwhelmingly heavyset hubbies = more girls, and this is not a study that I find to be very helpful at all really.

From my casual not-at-all-scientific observation I would be very surprised if this was true. Every overweight man I know (which I admit is not many) or see around regularly has daughters. Every last one. I know zero with even one son.

With women I see all kinds of variation and lots of different body types producing either or both sexes but fat men really seem to be good at making girls.

Thank you for sharing XXforhubby! And Atomic WOW. I was guessing there might be problems with the study, but the breadth of your research totally blew me away!:bowdown:

I gotta say, this site is amazing! I will not say ANYTHING about DH losing weight, then (also since the maternal dominance hypothesis seems also to point to NOT "swaycessing" esp. if you want to sway pink!). He can have his beer and morning cappuccino, and extra helpings of whatever low-fat veggie food I'm cooking once I'm trying to go LE.

Thanks for sharing, trifecta! I agree that most of the overweight fathers I know have girls, although family size may be too small to make a generalization (mostly 1-2 child, 1-2 girl/0 son families).

Also, so sad XXforhubbby that your DH was depressed/low weight at the time of conception for your sons. I hope he found great joy & comfort in being a dad to them after his losses.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by A Mad Swayentist

Thanks for sharing, trifecta! I agree that most of the overweight fathers I know have girls, although family size may be too small to make a generalization (mostly 1-2 child, 1-2 girl/0 son families).

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:agree: it's hard to know if we should be looking at this like "ok 10 heavyset guys have 1 girl apiece" or if it needs to be "2 heavyset guys have 5 girls apiece" in terms of evidence. I need an army of grad students and a zillion dollars to study all this jazz. :)

Well my hubby was like 260 lbs when we conceived our son (older son has different dad who was always thin).
Most men I see who are obese though do tend to have more daughters but that's really anecdotal evidence and not scientific at all. He's put on about 40 lbs since though so, although I worry about his health, I don't mind the obesity potentially swaying pink for us!
Blue swayers, don't lose hope, even if obesity may sway girl in men, it's not impossible to have a boy with an obese man either!

Wow Atomic you know your stuff! Bowing down to you!

For what it's worth, my DH has always been normal weight and was actually looking pretty underweight when we had DS2 due to being in law school, studying 24/7 for 3 years, and being super stressed (DS2 was born 5 days after he graduated law school). He's actually at his heaviest weight right now, which is almost 20lbs heavier than he was when we had DS2, so hopefully that works in my favor if I ever end up pregnant again.

The chinese men really do smoke like crazy, it's a machismo thing. My 2nd to last BF (in 2008) moved to China for work he was an occasional social smoker to begin with but told me heavy smoking and drinking was pretty much required during business meetings and dinners. He also had to eat all kinds of disgusting foods. I saw it for myself when i visited him in China. Then we broke up and he conceived a girl with another (white) woman!

:agree: totally. It colors every study that comes out of China.