Chapter 135
Preserving Your Sex Life
The most common reason for the lack of sexual activity among older adults was impairment or limitations of one’s own physical health or that of one’s partner. This implies that people who keep their bodies in good shape can actively take part in everything life has to offer. Yet about half of older men and women report specific problems, most commonly low sexual desire in women and erection problems in men. Although these sexual problems seem to bother only a minority of those affected, they can be a warning sign for larger health problems.
In one study in which more than 2000 men and women were followed for about six years, those who were sexually active had a significantly lower risk of death. Those who had sex at least 52 times a year (that is, about once a week) had only half the mortality risk of others who had sex once a year or less, even after accounting for physical activity and health limitations such as obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease. Even if sexual activity is only an indicator of general health, it has positive effects on physical and mental health. For example, endorphins—feel-good hormones released during sex—have been shown to improve the function of natural killer cells.
Scientists suspect the relative protection against early death could be attributable to sex as a form of physical exercise, but people may overestimate their performance in bed. One of the “seven myths about obesity” identified by the New England Journal of Medicine is that a round of sex burns several hundred calories. You may be thinking now: “Hey, that’s a serving of fries!” But when you pair people up (literally and figuratively) and measure their oxygen consumption during the act (assuming they don’t get too tangled up in all the wires and tubes), it turns out that sex uses as much energy as bowling. An average sexual act lasts about six minutes, and a young man burns about 21 calories doing it. Just lounging in front of the TV, he would have burned about a third of that through basal metabolism, so the added benefit is only about 14 calories. That’s enough for one fry.
Regardless of whether they are the cause or the result of illness, sexual dysfunctions can be mitigated through lifestyle changes. Quitting smoking, being physically active, and eating a healthier diet—for example, with more fruits and vegetables—has been linked with a lower risk of sexual dysfunction in both men and women. An intervention study in which men and women with diabetes were randomized to switch to a Mediterranean diet confirmed that it can slow the deterioration of sexual function in both sexes and halve the incidence of new sexual dysfunctions.
Passing the sniff test
There may be love at first sight and beauty in the eye of the beholder, but sight is not the only sense that plays a role in physical attractiveness and the romantic idea of a partner. Body odor conveys a great deal of information about eating habits, hygiene, health, and more. In a survey of heterosexual college students, visual information was most important to men for mate choice, while for women, smell was the most important bodily trait. In other words: For women, body odor is more important for physical attractiveness than appearance.
But men may have a finer ability to discriminate in this area than they think. For example, heterosexual men unconsciously distinguish between body-odor samples from pregnant women and those from women who are ovulating. Functional MRI scans show that the different samples activate different areas of the male brain. What do postmenopausal women smell like? And older men?
As people age, both men and women develop a characteristic body odor. The Japanese even have a term for it: kareishu. The smell appears to be due to a chemical compound that we begin producing as early as 40: 2-nonenal, which smells unpleasantly grassy and greasy, caused by the oxidation of omega-7 fats that our skin increasingly secretes.
What can we do to smell better? Eat mushrooms. Scientists in Japan conducted a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind study to explore the effect of three different amounts of a button mushroom extract on the mouth, pillow, pajama, and fecal odor of older men and women. The testers sniffed the participants’ breath from a hand’s breadth away while they talked for one to two minutes, smelled their used pillowcases and pajamas, and rated their fecal odor, “after the test person had used the toilet.”
All doses of the mushroom extract beat placebo on all tests. After two to four weeks, the mushrooms improved the smell of the participants’ breath, bedding, clothing, and stool. And these were cultivated button mushrooms—the cheapest and easiest-to-find mushrooms—which you don’t have to order from a shop specializing in rare and exotic mushrooms, but can get almost anywhere. To compare them with a placebo, the scientists had to produce an extract they could put into a capsule. They did not describe the extraction process, but if it was simply dried mushrooms in powdered form, the largest dose used would be equivalent to only about one small mushroom a day.
What else can we try? In my video see.nf/bodyodor I explain how consuming 100 milligrams of chlorophyll daily can help reduce underarm odor. That is the amount of chlorophyll in about a dozen spinach leaves. So before you smear aluminum into your armpits, I recommend deodorizing from the inside out by eating a big salad every day. It can improve body odor in two ways: with the necessary amount of chlorophyll and by strengthening your health.
As I explain in the video, inducing inflammation in humans through endotoxin injections leads to a more unpleasant body odor than in other test subjects who receive placebo injections. So do you stink when you eat meat? The typical kareishu smell of older people is attributed in part to the “modern diet with its high proportion of animal fats,” but there is only one way to find out. Czech scientists developed a test and published their results in “The Effect of Meat Consumption on Body Odor Attractiveness,” a study therefore not only of body odor, but, mind you, of the attractiveness of body odor.
For two weeks, male “odor donors” were fed either with or without meat. During the last 24 hours, pads were taped into their armpits that absorbed their body odor. Then 30 women rated “fresh odor samples”—directly from the armpit—according to the criteria pleasant, attractive, masculine, and intense.
A month later the study was repeated with the same men, with the diet reversed. The same women were used as testers. Incidentally, the men received 2000 Czech crowns, about 80 euros, for their time and “possible inconvenience due to the prescribed diet.” And the women who had to smell all those armpit pads? They were not paid, but received a chocolate bar for their participation.
So whose body odor was most pleasant, most attractive? The results show that the “odor of the donors when they ate a meatless diet was perceived as significantly more attractive, more pleasant, and less intense.” In the “masculine” category there was no difference. The scientists concluded that meat “can negatively influence the sensuality of perceived body odor.” In other words: Those who eat a predominantly plant-based diet smell significantly more pleasant.