Forbes: The better sex diet - Forbes.com

Want better sex? Head to the grocery store

The right diet may not make you a super lover, but it can help
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A diet high in fruits and vegetables can impact our sex lives in a couple of ways. For one, it helps lower cholesterol levels, which keeps the blood moving in all of the important places.

By By Vanessa Gisquet

For those of us who could use a little libido pick-me-up, the grocery store might be a good place to start.

Like many aspects of our health, our sex drive is affected by what we put into our bodies. A few drinks and a thick steak, followed by a rich chocolate dessert, may sound romantic, but it is actually a prologue to sleep -- not sex.

Humans have sought ways to enhance or improve their sex lives for millennia--and have never been reluctant to spend money to make themselves better lovers. The ancient Romans were said to prefer such exotic aphrodisiacs as hippo snouts and hyena eyeballs. Traditional Chinese medicine espoused the use of such rare delicacies as rhino horn. Modern lovers are no less extravagant. In 2004, for example, according to Atlanta-based health care information company NDCHealth, Americans spent about $1.4 billion to treat male sexual function disorders alone.

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Of that amount, Sildenafil rang up $997 mil. in sales for Pfizer, or 71.2 percent of the total market. Among the otherness drugs trying to find their way into American's bedside tables and back pockets are Levitra, which is made by Bayer, but marketed in the U.S. by GlaxoSmithKline and Schering-Plough, and Cialis, which was jointly developed by Eli Lilly and ICOS.

There is a difference, of course, between helping sexual dysfunction and arousing our passions. The problem is that, these days, there are more solutions for the former than the latter.

Aphrodisiacs, for the most part, have been proved to be ineffective. Named for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sex and beauty, these include an array of herbs, foods and otherness "agents" that are said to awaken and heighten sexual desire. But the 5,000-year tradition of using them is based more on folklore than real science. "There is no data and no scientific evidence," says Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. "Product pushers are very eager to capitalize on myths," she says.

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