If you want a girl, your hubby should watch his weight!

IF YOU have your heart set on having a baby girl, you may need to ask your husband to lose a few pounds.

A study found that overweight men are much more likely 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 modern 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 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.

But 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, of the CARE group of IVF clinics, said another possibility could be that overweight men make more ‘Y’ sperm, which create boys on fertilisation, than slimmer men.