Gay and bald? Evo Morales thinks you ate too much chicken

Male pattern baldness and the mysteries of human sexuality are no puzzles for the president of Bolivia, who has declared they are caused by eating chicken.

Evo Morales has claimed that both homosexuality and baldness can be caused by the humble chicken.

Speaking at an environmental conference on Tuesday, Morales said chicken producers injected fowl with female hormones and insisted that "when men eat those chickens they experience deviances in being men".

The Bolivian president since 2005 added that eating chicken could make men go bald.

Morales's theories do not appear to have been immediately accepted by the scientific community, to put it mildly, and have been criticised by Spain's National Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals, which sent a letter of protest to the Bolivian embassy in Madrid describing the president's remarks as homophobic.

The president of the Argentina Homosexual Community campaigning organisation, Cesar Cigliutti, said: "It's an absurdity to think that eating hormone-containing chicken can change the sexual orientation of a person.

"By following that reasoning, if we put male hormones in a chicken and we make a homosexual eat it he will transform into a heterosexual."

The dubious potential effects of hormone-infused chicken aside, Morales's warning may be out of date anyway as chicken producers in Europe, the US and many other countries abandoned the use of hormones in poultry several decades ago.