Long legs = big baby

As if the jet-setting lifestyle and big money were not enough, supermodels have discovered a new benefit from being tall and slender.

Researchers claim that long-legged women produce larger babies.

According to their studies, there is a direct link between the length of a mother's limbs and her child's birth weight.

For every half an inch above the average mother's leg length of 30in, the new-born baby is almost 1oz heavier than the average 7lb 3oz. The research at Bristol University will certainly ring true among a number of supermodels who have given birth to bouncier-than-average offspring.

Presley, the son of Cindy Crawford, Elle Macpherson's son Flynn and baby Mingus, whose mother Helena Christensen has 44.8in legs, all weighed 8lb or more.

Woody, the son of leggy radio presenter Zoe Ball, was 9lb when he was born in December 2000. And Damian, the son of Liz Hurley, is understood to have been even heavier.

While Miss Hurley is a modest 5ft 8in, she has proportionally long legs, with an impressive outside leg measurement of 40in.

The study will be published this week in the journal, Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology.

It calculates a woman's leg length by measuring her height standing without shoes, minus trunk length. The trunk length is her height when seated minus the height of what she is sitting on. It indicates that a leg length of 26in would result in a 6lb 8oz baby, 33in a 7lb 7oz baby and 37in an 8lb 2oz child.

Debbie Lawlor, who led the study of 4,000 women from across the UK, said no previous studies had investigated these ratios.

A mother's leg length was an indicator of childhood nutrition. Women who had a low-energy diet as a child had shorter legs, and an interruption in growth tended to result in a relatively long torso and short legs.

Birth weight can also indicate a child's future health, with big babies less likely to suffer from chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Christopher Martin, of the Medical Research Council's environmental epidemiology unit at Southampton University, said: 'Work like this adds to the evidence that if you want to have new generations of healthy large children, you have to have healthy, well-fed mothers.'