You might think that discussing the health benefits of having sex makes for a pretty pointless discussion – after all, thanks to our God given sex drives and our innate desire to propagate the species, sex is not something that we really need much prompting to do…and that’s not even mentioning the irrefutable fact that it’s fun.
Unlike quitting smoking or taking up running, you don’t need to be force fed the health benefits of sex to spur you on. You don’t need a solid reason to cling on to in order to help you endure the pain – because there isn’t any…only pleasure (unless you’ve got some nasty STD of course). Having sex is a bit like eating, sleeping, drinking and crapping…it’s a habit that comes pretty naturally and most of us just enjoy it for what it is.
Pointless and purely academic such a discussion may be though, it certainly hasn’t stopped a fair few scientists over the years from squandering their research funds (or thinking about it, stopped me from writing this unintentionally rather lengthy article). And in fact, the numerous positive life improvements that such research has linked to regular sex does make interesting reading; and therefore, goes some way to justifying the expense (and likewise, me taking the time to write this article).
Having a rampant sex life is, according to scientists, good for mind, body and soul…and the combined effect of these things can even help you to live longer. So if you’re just interested to find out how every shag you have improves your life…or you do in fact need a little bit of an incentive to get it on, here are the top reasons why a tumble in the hay has more to offer than just carnal pleasure.
Frequent Sex and Longevity…
It might seem a bold statement to suggest that frequent sex can actually extend your life span – but the culmination of ten years of research by scientists at Queens University, Belfast into the relationship between overall health and sex, suggests that if you’re a middle aged man at least, it might be true.
Their study, published in the British Medical Journal in 1997, monitored the health and lifestyles of over a 1000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade and found that the men who reported the greatest number of weekly orgasms were 50 percent less likely to die over the course of those ten years in comparison to those who reported the fewest.
Now just stop skimming through this article for a second – because that’s worth pondering over for a moment. Those scientists didn’t just conclude that sex would cut death rates in middle aged men by some trivial statistic that only other scientists could get excited about – they didn’t come back and say in their boffin like drones, ‘if you have sex twice per week you’re statistically 0.54739 of a percent less likely to die in the next 10 years’.
They said, still in their boffin like drones, that middle-aged men slashed their chances of dying by half if they had frequent sex – a pretty enormous statistic by anyone’s standards.
So how can having frequent sex have such a massive impact on the average bloke’s life expectancy? Well it seems as if the combined positive effects of sex on cardiovascular health, reduced cancer risk, as well as on weight, sleep and stress management all play their role…
Frequent Sex Lowers Your Risk of Heart Disease
Research published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2010 suggests that the effects of frequent sex of heart health can be substantial.
Relying on health data collected from 1165 men who were involved in a 16 year trial to assess the effects of male aging on health and lifestyle, researchers at the New England Research Institutes in Massachusetts attempted to find out whether aspects of sexual functioning (such as how often the subjects had sex, but excluding erectile dysfunction) offered any form of accurate assessment of future risks of heart disease.
The simple answer to their hypothesis seemed to be yes…because those men who’d reported having sex twice per week suffered half the incidences of heart disease as those who had sex just once per months or less.
Of course suffering from heart disease doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have heart attack or stroke – it just raises your odds considerably.
But according to another study published in 2001, up the number of times you have sex to three times per week…and your chances of suffer one or other of those potential sudden killers is also slashed in half.
The irony of course, is that given the choice, most men would probably want to shuffle off this mortal coil whilst engaged in a bit of horizontal fun. Alas, as these studies aptly demonstrate, the chances of that happening seem to get more and more remote the more sex you have.
How does sex protect the heart?
The above studies undoubtedly establish that men who engage in frequent sexual activity run a far reduced risk of suffering from heart disease. But if you’re feeling particular astute, you might be asking yourself one particularly relevant question…
Does having regular sex actually reduce your chances of developing heart disease because it actively helps to protect the heart, or is it just a case that the fitter you are (and therefore, less at risk of suffering from heart disease in the first place) the more likely you are to have regular sex?
It’s a bit of a ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ kind of question – and in reality, the answer is probably…a bit of both.
It goes without saying that the trade-off for a less than healthy lifestyle is often less sex. If your natural inclination is to sit all day on the couch in a Marlboro induced smog, force feeding yourself Doritos and Pepsi, then the opportunity for a rampant sexual lifestyle is likely to be limited – both because the physical exertion would probably kill you and because, with the notable exception of Ron Jeremy, stuffing ones face and having women queuing around the block for a good seeing to rarely go hand in hand.
Likewise, studies show that there’s a strong correlation between erectile dysfunction and heart disease, and as any impotent bloke will tell you…being impotent can make it pretty difficult to have sex.
So yes…there’s certainly an element of truth to the argument that the amount of sex you have is directly linked to your overall health and fitness levels. But it’s equally true to say that having sex involves a moderate degree of physical exertion – and like any type of regular exercise, the physical exertion of regular sex will help to improve cardiovascular health. What’s more, as you’ll read below, regular sex additionally helps to reduce stress, improves your emotional well-being, promotes better sleep…and may even help you to maintain a healthy weight (if you do enough of it)….all of which can indirectly impact on the health of your heart as well.
Frequent Sex Lowers Stress
The fact that having sex relieves stress probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise – it’s thanks to the sublime state of relaxation that only a good shag can induce that old movies were able to skip the sex scene and jump straight to the fag lighting, smoke blowing, ceiling staring bed scene. Sex and relaxation are synonymous – light a cigarette in bed and look relaxed and even the most backward of movie goers understands the implication.
But the good news is that it seems that the immediate wave of relaxation that washes over you after sex lasts longer than just the time it takes to smoke the cigarette. In fact, research published in the journal ‘Biological Psychology’ suggests that frequent sex can help you to take the stresses and strains of everyday life in your stride far more effectively.
In this study conducted by the University of the West of Scotland, researchers recruited 24 women and 22 men to give verbal presentations in front of an audience who had been covertly instructed by the researchers to look as restless, bored and disinterested as possible. To accurately gauge the levels of stress the subjects experienced during their torment they were monitored through continuous blood pressure readings.
When the results were compared, the researchers found that the individuals who’d engaged in “penile-vaginal intercourse” in the couple of weeks prior to their public ordeal exhibited lower blood pressure readings during their presentations (hence lower stress levels), and also saw their blood pressure readings return to normal substantially faster than the individuals who’d reported having no sex or who’s only sexual outlet had been through masturbation.
So sex reduces stress – everyone naturally knows it and some bored scientists even took the time to prove it…but how?
Well…it’s all down to chemicals. When you climax, your brain is flooded with a potent cocktail of mood stabilising neurotransmitters and hormones, such as serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin and gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), all of which help you to maintain a sense of well-being – even when you’re giving a particularly boring presentation.
And you can look on sex’s apparent ability to make you as laid back as a hippie smoking a doobie as beneficial in a couple of ways. Firstly, as noted above, frequent sex helps to reduce overall anxiety levels, thereby allowing you to deal with life’s little disasters with a smile, skip and a hop. But the stress relieving effects of having all those ‘happy chemicals’ surging around your brain will consequentially, also help to keep your blood pressure levels in check – which means less likelihood of suffering from cardiovascular disease…and its associated nasty’s – such as stokes, heart attacks and aneurisms.
A word of advice though – if you’re going to use sex as a stress management tool, it’s probably a good idea to making it part of your routine before stress starts to dominate your life. The problem with stress of course, is that it’s a killer when it comes to libido – which could leave you in the catch 22 predicament of being stressed but having as much desire to relieve that stress through sex as a eunuch.
So the moral of the tale is that you should see frequent sex as a means of stress prevention rather than a cure.
Sex and Weight Management
Theoretically at least, sex can help you to burn a fair few calories. But, if you’re hoping to make your sex life a truly effective substitute for those sweaty sessions on the treadmill then you’d better be prepared to either have a lot of frequent sex or make sure that your sex sessions are of the marathon kind…because unfortunately, the average sex session doesn’t come close to being lengthy enough to do any form of serious damage to those cream cakes your girlfriend keeps force feeding you after dinner.
Energy Expenditure…
A good way to gauge the effectiveness of a particular physical activity is to look at its ‘Metabolic Equivalent of Task’ rating (sometimes just called ‘metabolic equivalent’ or MET). The metabolic equivalent of a physical activity is simply a multiplication of how much energy is expended doing a specific task in comparison to resting.
Sitting down on the couch watching re-runs of the X-Files and wandering whether Gillian Anderson wore sexy French lace panties under her demure 90′s FBI exterior for example, has a MET value of 1 (which is representative of resting metabolic rate). Walking to the fridge to get another beer during the commercials has a MET value of 2 – because it takes twice the energy of sitting on the couch.
Going up the scale, a moderate jog around the block will see you pushing your MET energy expenditure up to 8, whilst if you manage to run at a pace of 5.31 minutes per mile without fainting or puking, you’ll be engaged in a physical activity with a top whack MET value of 18 – or in other words, you’ll be using 18 times more energy than you’d need to sit on the couch and fantasise about Gillian Anderson’s choice of underwear.
So how does having vigorous sex compare? Well…erm…it has a metabolic equivalent of 5 – which is about the same as engaging in light to moderate stationary cycling.
With a MET Value of just 5 it’s unfortunately wishful thinking to hope that frequent sex is going to keep you from doing hard time in Satan’s very own temple – the gym. If you could consistently maintain your vigorous ‘sexercise’ for 30 minutes per session four times a week then you might have a chance of evading those satanic instruments of torture such as the elliptical trainer and treadmill, but the problem is the average bloke can’t.
Because according to a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2005 which involved sex, stop watches and 1587 men, the average bloke takes a meagre 7.3 minutes to reach climax.
Lasting for just 7.3 minutes means that a man who weighs 180 pounds (82 kilograms) burns off just 52 calories per romp in the hay – a poor excuse for any workout and barely enough to burn off a single Dorito.
And of course, if the fat burning potential of sex isn’t particularly impressive for Mr Average…then you’re basically buggered if you suffer from premature ejaculation.
Formula to work out calories expended using METS
Say you can last longer though – maybe you can grind away for an hour at a time without the missus complaining that she’s getting sore – how would you work out how many calories you’ve burnt off then? Well, here’s the formula:
MET value of physical activity x 3.5 x bodyweight in kilos / 200 x duration of activity in minutes
Don’t worry…it’s simpler than it seems. Take the example of a 200 pound (91 kilo) bloke who gives his old lady a vigorous seeing to in a marathon 60 minutes sex session (remembering that sex has a MET value of 5):
5 x 3.5 x 91 / 200 x 60 = 477.75 calories burnt.
Sex – The Ultimate Insomnia Cure
If your missus complains that once you’ve shot your load you just roll over into a death-like coma instead of fulfilling her demands for a loving cuddle you can argue (the next day of course) that it’s not your fault – it’s your biological makeup that’s to blame – a cruel twist of nature over which you have no control.
The argument goes thus: The powerful brew of hormones and chemicals that surges into your blood stream after you’ve reached orgasm not only promotes a sense of well-being and relaxation as we learned above, but also act as a one-way ticket to La La Land.
But the relaxing effects of the aforementioned biochemicals including norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin and gamma aminobutyric acid (all of which put you in the right mind-set for nodding off) are just part of the story. Orgasm also releases two very powerful sleeping aids into the system – prolactin and melatonin.
Prolactin:
One of the most interesting effects of Prolactin, a hormone produced in abundant quantities by the pituitary gland just after orgasm, is that it temporarily disengages the male sex drive like a clutch disengages the engine of a car from its wheels.
Prolactin counteracts the effects of a neurotransmitter called dopamine – the chemical that you can thank for getting you worked up into a sexual frenzy beneath the sheets in the first place. With the counteracting effects of prolactin after ejaculation, the single-minded preoccupation with sex that we men are cursed with most of the time gives way to an (almost) blissful state of sexual satisfaction. And of course, with our temporary parole from the shackles of our sex drives comes an almost uncontrollable urge to fall asleep.
In fact, studies have shown that animals injected with prolactin have a predisposition to falling asleep akin to that of a sleep deprived long-distance lorry driver on a particularly monotonous bit of road.
But if you’re tossing and turning in bed don’t think that you can stimulate your body’s prolactin levels and hence cure your insomnia with a quick wank – because for some inexplicable reason, a recent study found that masturbation releases just a quarter of the of prolactin that’s released from having sex.
Serotonin:
Orgasm also causes a spike in melatonin – the primary hormone that helps us to regulate our sleeping patterns. Melatonin can be such a powerful sleeping aid that it’s mass produced in synthetic form by many a health supplement manufacturer and taken by insomniacs the world over. Of course, if all those insomniacs knew that they could effectively raise their melatonin levels by simply having an orgasm before bed then a multi-million dollar industry would crash and burn quicker than a Cessna in a dogfight against an F16 – so we all better keep that one quiet.
Physical Exertion…
Promoting the release of a cocktail of chemicals into your system that could tranquilise a horse plays a big part of the sleep inducing effects of sex, but it’s not the only one.
Sex of course, also requires physical exertion (unless you can convince her to get on top and do some of the work for a change) and this in turn depletes your body’s glycogen stores – the very substance your muscles rely on for energy.
When you combine the fact that sex is an intrinsically tiring physical activity with the fact that it releases more ‘feel good chemicals’ into your system than can be produced out of an entire Columbian poppy harvest, is it any wonder that the lights go out before you even have a chance to say, ‘I love you too.’ ?
The upshot of all this is that the good sleep promoted by good sex leads to a host of health positives – which means that the two really do go hand in hand. From psychological benefits such as emotional stability and mental alertness through to a reduction in the risk of physical problems heart disease, obesity and diabetes – the benefits of falling asleep straight after sex far outstrip the negatives of not managing a post coital kiss and cuddle.
Reduced Prostate Cancer Risk
Prostate cancer alas is extremely common: in the Western world one in six men develops it and following lung cancer, it’s the biggest male cancer killer.
The prostate of course, produces seminal fluid – which makes up the greater part of what you ejaculate. And it seems that the prostate, after going through all the hard work of manufacturing said seminal fluid, likes you to do with it exactly what was intended i.e. ejaculate it – because according to recent research, frequent ejaculations might just help you to quite dramatically cut the odds of developing prostate cancer in later life.
That was the conclusion of a study published by the National Cancer institute for example, that in 1992 asked 23,342 men between the ages of 46 and 81 to divulge how many times they’d ejaculated on average per month both during their 20′s and then again during their 40′s. Monitoring the incidences of prostate cancer in these men over the following 18 years, the researchers noted that those who on average ejaculated 21 times per month had a 33% reduced lifetime risk of developing the cancer.
Another study conducted by cancer specialists in Melbourne, Australia, and published in the British Journal of Urology in 2003 told a similar story. In this study, the researchers correlated the incidences of prostate cancer to ejaculation frequency in two groups of men – all of whom were of similar age, although half had already developed the disease.
By comparing the cancer group of 1079 men against the healthy group of 1259 men, the scientists were able to surmise that those who ejaculated most frequently from their early 20′s to late 40′s were the least likely to develop the disease. The news got better for those who managed to shoot their load on average once per day during the 20′s – the protective effect of their daily ejaculations seemed to have reduced their chances of developing prostate cancer by a third in comparison to those who only reached orgasm a couple of times a week.
The study’s lead author, Professor Graham Giles, puts forward an interesting theory about the apparent protective effects of frequent ejaculation. He suggests that the highly biologically reactive chemicals that make up seminal fluid may start to become carcinogenic if left to build up in the prostatic ducts. Regularly flushing the ducts out through frequent ejaculation therefore, isn’t only highly pleasurable, it also prevents semen mutating into a potential carcinogenic substance.
Frequent Sex Boosts the Immune System
On the physical side of things, it’s not just your heart and prostate that’ll thank you for your stern resolve to having frequent sex – so too will your immune system according to researchers at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
In a study involving 111 college students, researchers found that those who professed to having had sex one to two times per week over the previous month maintained 30 percent higher levels of a protein called immunoglobulin A (IgA) in their saliva; in comparison to their less fortunate fellow students who’d forgone the sex and had instead spent their evenings nursing their complexes and greasy hair over a beer in the student bar.
As the researchers pointed out, immunoglobulin A is a key component of the immune system, which acts as a first line of defence against viral illnesses such as the common cold and flu. Admittedly, telling someone that they’re less likely to get a runny nose if they’ll sleep with you is unlikely to be the world’s most effective chat-up line, but you never know…it may work if the object of your desire is feeling particularly desperate and has just run out of her monthly supply of vitamin C.
Convincing the Girlfriend
So you’ve decided that the health benefits of sex really are worth the effort and regardless of any lack of motivation, this is one resolution you’re not going to slip up on (yes…I am joking). But what do you do to persuade your other half that it really is in both of your best interests to perpetually shag like rabbits…particularly since she never seems to get colds, doesn’t have a prostate and seems to show more affection to Tiddles, her pet poodle?
It’ll make her look younger…
Well try this…tell her it’ll keep her looking as youthful and as gorgeous looking as she looks now – even if that’s stretching the truth a little – because, according to research conducted at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland, sex really does keep you looking young.
Having accumulated over a decade’s worth of research into the factors that keep some people looking great long past their sell by dates this study has thrown up some dramatic conclusions. According to the study’s lead author Dr David Weeks, genetics plays but a relatively small 25 percent role in determining how well you’ll age. The biggest factor – the 75 percent, the good doctor suggests, is down to behavioural lifestyle factors including diet, whether you smoke, exposure levels to the sun and…how much sex you have.
Over the course of a decade, Dr Weeks quizzed over 3500 men and women between the ages of 18 and 102 (yes…really) from the UK, Europe and the US about their sex lives, before then showing their mug shots to an independent panel of judges. When assessing their ages from the photos, the panel of judges reckoned that those who claimed to have had sex at least 3 times a week looked on average 7 years younger than their actual chronological years – which no doubt the 102 year old nympho found quite flattering.
One likely explanation for this youth preserving effect is according to the researchers, the fact that orgasm in addition to releasing a plethora of ‘feel good’ chemicals also ups the levels of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) surging around your system. And as Sly Stallone is ample evidence of, HGH can certainly help you to defy your age in later years by maintaining youthful muscle and skin tone.
She says she’s got a headache…
But what if your other half isn’t convinced and still insists on bestowing most of her affections of Tiddles; and to further legitimise her lack of desire to have sex with you she falls back on the age old, time tested excuse of ‘having a headache’?
Here too, science now gives you the upper hand – because in both sexes orgasm has been found to stimulate the release of endorphins: morphine like substances that possess strong pain killing effects. In fact it’s these endorphins that are responsible for dulling the pain during vigorous exercise and giving you a ‘high’ afterwards – and of course, as we’ve discussed above, sex most definitely qualifies as exercise.
So the next time she protests, ‘not tonight darling, I’ve got a throbbing headache’ – you can retort that you’ve got a throbbing cure.
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