Diet For Great Sex with Christine DeLozier, LAc: Rational Wellness Podcast 204
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Christine DeLozier, LAc, discusses Diet For Great Sex with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:06 Hormones, including both testosterone and estrogen, are important for sexual health. In men, not only is testosterone important, but so are small amounts of estrogen and progesterone important for sexual health. Testosterone is also important for sexual health in women.
6:41 Eating the right diet by avoiding junk food and avoiding sugar, consisting of lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and leafy greens can help some women to not have to go on hormone replacement therapy after menopause. Both a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar and a diet very high in fat can disrupt your hormones.
13:07 Leafy greens are very high in both potassium and antioxidants, like vitamin C, which protect not only our hormones but our neurological health and reduces oxidative damage to our nerves.
18:19 Omega 3 fats are super important for brain health and neurological health. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is a huge component of pleasure and the circuitry for dopamine requires omega-3 fats, which you can attain from consuming wild salmon or from taking fish oil capsules.
Christine DeLozier, LAc, is an acupuncturist and herbalist at Needle and Herb Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine in Rochester, New York, and author of the new book, Diet for Great Sex: Food for male and female sexual health. Her website is ChristineDelozier.com.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates, and to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me. And let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. Today, our topic is diet for great sex with Christine Delozier, LAc. Christine Delozier is an acupuncturist, herbalist, and author of the new book Diet for Great Sex: Food for Male and Female Sexual Health. Christine, thank you so much for joining us.
Christine: Thank you so much for having me on your show.
Dr. Weitz: So my first question is how much does it facilitate sex to wear an N95 mask?
Christine: Well, it can be a barrier to oral for sure.
Dr. Weitz: So for the first real question, Christine, in your book Diet for Great Sex, you focus on the three systems of our body that affects sexual health, and you break it down into hormones, neurological and vascular. So let’s start with hormones and let’s talk about which are the most important hormones for sexual health.
Christine: Well, the short answer to that is all of them. Our hormonal balance is like a symphony. And when one of them gets out of whack, many of them tend to fall out of whack. It’s very rarely that one hormone is out of balance in isolation. Of course, testosterone is really important. Estrogen is really important, and both of those are important for both male and female sexual health. So men need estrogen just as much as they need testosterone, but of course, in different proportions. So for sexual health, males do better with higher levels of testosterone, lower levels of estrogen and for females is just the opposite.
Dr. Weitz: So when it comes to testosterone for men, I was surprised to see that you wrote that testosterone improves mathematical reasoning and cognitive ability, because we usually think that when testosterone levels rise, those things go out the window.
Christine: Yeah, it’s amazing. How many bodily functions, testosterone affects. I mean, the short answer is everything. Testosterone affects cognition. It affects overall health, it affects our energy levels, it affects everything. So when testosterone is low, that can affect so many aspects of health, the brain, it affects sexual function, it affects cardiovascular disease, everything.
Dr. Weitz: So in the section where you’re talking about men, you also mentioned estrogen and even small amounts of progesterone, enhance sexual function in men. Maybe you could talk about that.
Christine: Sure. Again, it’s in the right ratios. So progesterone, it’s not good when it’s too much, it’s not good when it’s not enough and the right ratio ratios, it facilitates an optimal sexual function, optimal blood flow, optimal hormonal balance.
Dr. Weitz: I mean, we measure a lot of hormones in men and I often find that progesterone is low. And I often wonder if men would ever benefit from taking a small amount of progesterone.
Christine: That’s interesting because the problem with that is that progesterone has actually been used to reduce libido in men like sex offenders and things like that. So when you don’t get the ratio right, you might have just the opposite effect, if that makes sense.
Dr. Weitz: And so when it comes to estrogen, let’s take estradiol. On a serum test, what would you consider a good level of estradiol for a man?
Christine: I don’t know. The most of my research focused on the evidence for how foods effect these different things. So the specific numbers, I wouldn’t say that’s really my specialty, but what I looked at was the research on foods that help to balance hormones. So it’s hard. The thing about it is it’s just like minerals hormones are kind of like minerals in the sense that as soon as we try to kind of play God with them, we can sometimes throw things out of whack and you need somebody who really knows what they’re doing to attempt that game. And it’s the same with minerals. We take a calcium supplement and we can sabotage our iron, we take a magnesium supplement, we can sabotage our calcium, we take a zinc supplement and we can inadvertently, make magnesium levels low. So all of these-
Dr. Weitz: Or you could just measure all of them.
Christine: We could. Yeah, but there’s so many minerals that come into play that your best bet is to try to get as much as you can from food. Obviously, a lot of times that’s not possible. And then maybe take kind of a broader mineral supplement, for example.
Dr. Weitz: So on the testosterone theme with respect to women, testosterone is also very important for the libido, but too much testosterone leads to PCOS. So what about testosterone? And what is a good level and especially what about for post-menopausal women?
Christine: So some women for example, have improved libido by taking testosterone, but again, taking one hormone in isolation can be risky like you mentioned with PCOS. So the answer to that is enough for that individual. There’s no one right answer for every person, but when it’s low women definitely experience low libido, they experience a decline in sexual function. So there are a lot of ways to help normalize those levels though, and help normalize that whole kind of symphony of hormones.
Dr. Weitz: Should women take hormone replacement after menopause, if they want to have good sexual function?
Christine: That’s a conversation I would say, would be best left to their doctor. What I can say is this. Food can help you to not have to go on hormone replacement therapy. A proper diet can help balance your hormones without needing to do that. But again, some women will still need to do that, talk to your doctor about it, but eating well can only help. The way our lifestyles are. It definitely puts a strain on our hormones. The high sugar intake will sabotage hormones. There’s tons of evidence that shows that eating a high refined sugar in our diets, it disrupts our sex hormones. It makes for worse sex. So that’s just one simple thing that you can do to help move your body in the right direction post-menopause or at any time in your life.
And other things also are very high, fat diets can also disrupt our sex hormones. Certain foods can help restore balance to our sex hormones. So when we eat a lot of leafy greens, which is kind of how nature intended it, when we look at other primates, we see that they sit around eating leaves a good portion of their days. We don’t eat a whole lot of leaves. We eat a lot of junk food and leaves, for example, reduce cortisol levels. And cortisol is a stress hormone that can interfere with testosterone in males and females. So that’s one way to help normalize that balance.
Dr. Weitz: I just wanted to mention as far as the hormones that you mentioned for sexual health, one that I often have heard other people talk about that seems to be important for sexual health is oxytocin.
Christine: Yep. I found that in my research as well, that it was important. Again, it’s this symphony of hormones, even things that you don’t think of as being related to sexual health, like ghrelin and leptin. We know that these are hormones that tell us when we’re full and when we’re hungry, but they actually just can interfere with sex hormones when they’re out of whack. So when people have what we call leptin resistance, which is when we eat so much refined sugar, well, in some cases, it’s because we eat so much refined sugar, our body has become desensitized to leptin, which then affects our sex hormones.
Dr. Weitz: So what are some of the principles of the best diet to promote healthy hormones? And should men and women eat differently?
Christine: All the research that I came across was that men and women should eat the same pretty much. The specific hormone ratios are different, but eating in a way that’s in accordance with the natural biological design of humans promotes that balance. So if we were going to say a general overarching theme would be lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, we have tons of research to show that helps with hormonal balance and optimal sexual function related to sex hormones. So lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, lots of leafy greens, that sort of thing.
Dr. Weitz: Some would say if we’re going to go in balance with nature, we’d want to follow a paleolithic diet because that’s similar to what say the caveman ate for hundreds of thousands of years.
Christine: Sure. There’s so much debate about that. And everybody has an opinion. It’s interesting to note that when we look at other animals, whether it’s squirrels or chipmunks or any other animal, they seem to know what to eat, what is the healthiest, but humans have kind of lost their way. If we look at other primates though, they are biologically kind of our cousins. And if we look at how much, for example, meat, that’s a big issue with diet. If we look at how much meat other primates eat, there’s a big range. It’s anywhere from 0% of their calories to 90% of their calories comes from animal product, whether it’s bugs, whether it’s mammals, that sort of thing, where humans fall in that range is a big matter of debate. But what we can agree on is that we know that they eat tons of leaves. We know that they eat lots of fruit and vegetation and that they take in many times the amount of certain minerals like calcium, magnesium, zinc, certainly potassium for sure. And so that’s one thing that we can strive to do, whether we’re following like a keto type diet or whether we’re following a more plant-based diet.
Dr. Weitz: A keto diet is fairly popular these days. And that basically involves a very low carb diet. And a lot of people have found this type of diet to be beneficial for cardiovascular health and neurological health. What about the ketogenic diet?
Christine: The problem with the keto diet is this, it falls short in terms of vitamin C and also things like potassium. Potassium is one of those things that we don’t get enough of. There’s lots of evidence to support that. And it’s lacking in a keto diet. All of the things that contain a lot of potassium almost all of them are high in carbs. So your best sources are potatoes with the skins on. Yams with the skins on. Squash, bananas, oranges, all the things that have carbs in them. There’s one though, if you are following a keto diet, what I would say is really make sure that you’re getting lots of leaves in, because leaves are one of the few non carby sources of potassium. So humans, we used to take in about 10 times as much potassium as sodium in our diets. And now it’s kind of the opposite. We take in about 10 times as much sodium as potassium, and it’s wreaking havoc on our blood vessels and also hormonally as well. So get those leafy greens in if you’re going to do keto.
Dr. Weitz: So talk about some of these aspects of diet that you feel are important for promoting hormone levels.
Christine: So again, eating leafy greens, eating-
Dr. Weitz: And how does eating leafy greens help with the hormone levels?
Christine: Well, like we talked about, for example, we know that it lowers cortisol levels for example. Also even things like antioxidants, leafy greens are very high in antioxidants, even antioxidants can have an effect on hormone levels. So one study I was reading, for example, there was an effect of certain antioxidants on estrogen levels, for example, in the female menstrual cycle. So antioxidants definitely something that you want to focus on, but hormones, aren’t the only piece in this trifecta of great sex. We consider nerve conduction and we consider vascular health and they all kind of mutually influence each other. So when we talk about hormones, every hormone that’s produced by the body, every neuro-transmitter, every substance produced by the body is ultimately controlled by the nervous system. And so in strengthening the nervous system, we also affect hormonal health. And one of the best ways to strengthen the nervous system is through antioxidants, which they help repair damage to nerves just caused by our lifestyles, our environments. And they also protect from oxidative stress because most of that damage comes from oxidative stress. It comes from eating processed food. It comes from not exercising. It comes from being exposed to the environmental toxins that we’re exposed to every day, all of those sort of things.
Dr. Weitz: So what are the most important antioxidants? Because we have a broad range of antioxidants. We have vitamin C, we have the vitamin E family. We have tocopherols, tocotrienols, we have selenium, we have whole bunches of many, many phytonutrients, polyphenols, which are some of the most important antioxidants for sexual health.
Christine: All of them. Yeah. All of them can play their role. Vitamin C is a huge one. Absolutely. It’s important for many different processes, including balancing our body chemistry, also serving to protect our nerves and our blood vessels help repair damage, that sort of thing. So vitamin C is a huge one. Everything that you mentioned is a huge one. Polyphenols are a huge one. Polyphenols were shown to improve vascular health excuse me, arterial function. So they helped blood flow within a couple hours of eating them. They were actually measurably functioning better in their measurably more elastic within a couple hours of eating things like berries, which are high in polyphenols. So those are really high, our mineral balance is really high like selenium you mentioned. So they’re all really important. If you’re getting a broad variety of fruits and vegetables, you’re going to be getting a broad variety of antioxidants.
Dr. Weitz: In your chapter on neurological health, you mentioned mushrooms as a key category of food that helps with neurological health. Maybe you could explain that.
Christine: Sure. Yeah. Mushrooms are so exciting and they’re especially exciting in modern nutritional research with so much emerging research showing how important the microbiome is to our health. It’s important not only to weight, it’s important to cardiovascular health. It’s important to pretty much every system in the body. We’re finding that things we didn’t even think were related to this delicate balance of microbes in our digestive tract affect so many things. They even, for example, we’re able to transfer cardiovascular disease risk from one group of subjects to another simply by trans giving them these fecal transplants where they took feces from the group of high risk of cardiovascular disease and transferred it to those who did not have high risk of cardiovascular disease repopulating their microbiome. And they then developed high risk of cardiovascular disease.
So it affects everything. So the cool thing about mushrooms was that there’s a lot of emerging research showing that one of the actions of mushrooms is on the microbiome. One of the ways that it exerts all of its contribution to health is by actually improving the diversity of microbes in the gut. So improving populations of beneficial microbes and reducing populations of non beneficial microbes, which is really cool. Also, they’re loaded with antioxidants, which again, speed nerves, repair damage. One of the superstars, as far as nerve repair was lion’s mane, but all of them had offered benefit to this aspect of sexual health in terms of their contribution where they had say accidents.
Dr. Weitz: And of course, Omega-3 fats are super important for brain health and neurological health as well, given that most of the nervous system is made of fat.
Christine: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And dopamine is a huge component of pleasure, so the circuitry for dopamine requires abundant omega-3 fats and everybody can’t make it. We have to take it in from our diets. So it just shows us again how omega threes can equate to pleasure. When our dopamine pathways are operating functionally, we experience pleasure when our partner touches us.
Dr. Weitz: Do you advocate taking omega-3 supplements?
Christine: I’m always a little bit more conservative with supplements than I am with whole foods. I’d rather see people having some wild salmon. There’s mercury in fish, a wild salmon is one of the ones that does have mercury, but it’s a little bit more balanced than some of the other ones. It offers a lot of omega-3s and it offers relatively less mercury.
Dr. Weitz: For me that’s one of the advantages of taking omega-3 fats besides consuming salmon. I know I can get a high dosage in a molecularly distilled product that is going to be free of mercury and other contaminants.
Christine: Yeah. And that works for people. So my personal philosophy on supplements is just to be cautious and then when possible get them from the diet, but our lifestyles makes it very difficult to do that. So there’s definitely a reason why that would be an attractive option.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. So let’s talk about blood flow and sexual health. What is some of the nutritional approaches to improving blood flow?
Christine: Sure. So we all know that males need blood flow for sexual health and for sexual function, but most people don’t realize how important it is for female pleasure, female sexual arousal, lubrication, blood flow is responsible for lubrication. It’s very much involved in the arousal response. It’s very much even involved in how sensitive the female clitoris is to stimulation. So blood flow is important for everybody. And our diets tend to compromise that blood flow in a lot of different ways. One of which is we were talking about our potassium intake. Potassium is something that softens the delicate lining of blood vessels, improving the elasticity and improving blood flow. So getting more potassium in our diets is something that we really want to do. The vast majority of Americans do not get enough potassium in their diets and should increase it.
Not only that, the processed foods that we eat actually sabotages our potassium because in order to deal with all that extra sodium, we have to flush potassium with it. And then your body is forced to conserve potassium in other ways just to have basic bodily function. So getting more potassium will definitely help increase blood flow. Again, leafy greens. Leafy greens are kind of important in this whole trifecta of great sex. So leafy greens, what they bring to the table is they bring a lot of antioxidants for sure which help blood vessels. They also are high in dietary nitrates, which first of all, it promotes vascular health. And secondly, it dilates blood vessels, even in the short run. So dietary nitrates basically convert to nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. And so in one study that I read, for example, the subjects ate one serving of spinach and within a couple hours, their salivary nitric oxide levels were eight times what they were at baseline. So it can definitely have a very immediate effect on blood vessels, as well as promoting vascular health in the long run.
Dr. Weitz: And of course, drugs that stimulate nitric oxide production are among the most popular to promote libido.
Christine: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So if you’re looking for maybe a more natural approach, you might try food. There are three to four categories of food that actually have been shown in research to improve blood flow within a couple hours of eating them. So you can choose certain foods for date night that will do that. As well as kind of avoiding foods that might tank your testosterone. So for example, in research, a very sugary meal that really bumped up glucose a lot sharply reduced testosterone, which is definitely not what you want in the short term.
Dr. Weitz: And of course, beet root juice is something that some athletes take to stimulate nitric oxide production.
Christine: Yeah. And that’s another good choice for a date night sex menu too. Beet juices is a real good one, celery juice, beet juice.
Dr. Weitz: And of course we have supplements on the market with the beet root and L-Citruline and certain other nutrients stimulate nitric oxide production. Are you a fan of those at all?
Christine: I have not used the beet root. My daughter has, my daughter uses a lot of those supplements for her pre-workout, but I haven’t used them myself. Some of the nitrate supplements have not had really great results clinically and have had some adverse risks to them. But that doesn’t necessarily include the B root powder and things like that. But these are just more like strictly, nitrate supplements.
Dr. Weitz: So you mentioned potassium, what are some of the other minerals that are super important for sexual health?
Christine: Yeah. So again, all of them are really important, but zinc is a huge one. Zinc is a huge mineral for sexual health. It’s one of those things that when it’s low, it can affect so many aspects of it can affect hormones. It can affect the vascular system, it can affect nerve function, it can affect everything. So that’s a really big one. And it’s one of those ones that is focused on even in fertility. So it’s good for sexual health, good for fertility. And it’s something that Americans get way too little of. I read a few studies that were saying that 97% of Americans have an inadequate dietary intake of zinc. So really important. It’s antiviral of course as well. And it also promotes-
Dr. Weitz: I certainly have all my patients take an extra zinc because of their antiviral properties.
Christine: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So that’s a really big one.
Dr. Weitz: Zinc with quercitin because that increases zinc absorption.
Christine: Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: So which is some of the best herbs to stimulate libido?
Christine: So we’ve got our culinary herbs, then we’ve got our more medicinal herbs, things that have been used in traditional Chinese medicine, like horny goat weed was one that had a few studies to show its efficacy. So that was a big one. Anybody though, if you’re going to go the medicinal herbs route, I would suggest consulting a practitioner who has been trained in it. Most acupuncturists have a master’s degree in herbal medicine as well, Chinese herbal medicine. So that’s one choice.
Dr. Weitz: Let’s say if you were speaking to practitioners, because we have a percentage of practitioners that listen into our podcasts. Which ones do you find can be most efficacious for female and now sexual health?
Christine: Yeah. So horny goat weed is one. The research on something like [inaudible 00:26:38] is one that was shown to be effective though it also had its risks as well for toxicity.
Dr. Weitz: [inaudible 00:26:48]?
Christine: Yeah. [inaudible 00:26:50] was definitely one that had a few studies to support its use. Then there’s some culinary herbs that also actually had some studies like saffron. Saffron actually had several studies to support its efficacy, to promote sexual health, both animal studies and human studies. It showed that those taking saffron had more sex, higher libido and more blood flow.
Dr. Weitz: Interesting.
Christine: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: You mentioned viruses. Are more people having sex now that they’re home because of COVID?
Christine: If they can stand their spouse there. Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: So heavy metal toxicity. How can this be a impact on sexual health?
Christine: So I would say most people think of heavy metal toxicity as some sort of freak exposure that happened because they lived near a landfill or something like that. But actually the research shows that all of us are exposed to a growing number of toxins in our environment, from our water, our air, our food, we’ve got ketamine in our food, we know we have ketamine in our food. It goes into the air from smelting and then it comes down into agriculture. And then we see it in our food sources in our food chain.
Dr. Weitz: We know a lot of the soil that fruits and vegetables are groaning contains lead. We have arsenic, we have arsenic in the chicken. We have arsenic in the rice. We have warnings about arsenic all the time. We know we have mercury spewed into the atmosphere from coal fired power plants and we have mercury in the fish.
Christine: Yeah, exactly. So all should be concerned about this, not just somebody who’s living next to a power plant or night or next to someplace that we know has more risk. So one of the things I found in research where there were a lot of studies again with antioxidants, that was a big one in terms of protecting yourself from the damage of these toxic heavy metals. So things like vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A were all important. And then there were certain foods too, like cilantro, like onions and tomato were shown to either deal with the effects of that or reduce absorption of those. But as far as reducing-
Dr. Weitz: Do you ever measure heavy metals and use specific protocols to try to reduce them?
Christine: No, I don’t have any experience at all with that. I don’t. But I am familiar with research that has measured specific levels and then measured them following things like cilantro and found that it actually had a stronger ability to reduce. I forgot which one study I’m thinking of. I forgot. I think it was arsenic that it had a stronger ability to actually remove that from brain and liver tissue than some of the pharmaceutical drugs, but minerals were actually really important in reducing absorption. So the fact that we are exposed to all these heavy metals, improving our mineral profile can help us to not absorb as many of those heavy metals, because zinc was a big one actually, zinc is a big one. Calcium’s a big one. And magnesium is a big one in terms of helping our bodies to flush that out before it’s absorbed by our tissues.
Dr. Weitz: How about an EMS? Are those an issue for sexual health?
Christine: Absolutely. And it’s again-
Dr. Weitz: Basically with 5G coming.
Christine: Yeah. I wasn’t sure what kind of research I was going to find on that because it’s such a big controversy with 5G that it’s these extremists or conspiracy theorists that are concerned about the electromagnetic fields or wifi. So I really didn’t know what I was going to think. And everybody thinks of these people with these tinfoil hats and things to protect them from the rays and stuff. So when I looked at the research, I was really flabbergasted because the research is so strong that I found study after study, after study. In fact, I found very few studies that failed to find negative effects of EMFs on our health and the most prominent effects are neurological and hormonal. They definitely disrupted hormones and they definitely caused oxidative stress to the point that it caused neurological damage.
Dr. Weitz: So what are some of the best tips for dealing with that?
Christine: Again, what I found were antioxidants helped deal with that. Helped, it doesn’t eradicate it. We still need to make a conscious effort to reduce our exposure to EMS and including cell phones, things like that, turning off our wifi at night and trying to use a hands-free piece so that our heads aren’t right next to our phones, that sort of thing. All are important in reducing our exposure. Because the studies that I found were that normal exposure, I’m talking about the amount of exposure that the average person has to wifi through their cell phones, for example, was enough to cause damage.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And of course, now people using headsets that are wireless, everything’s wireless. And so we’ve got more of these EMS flying around going through our heads and the rest of our bodies.
Christine: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: So what about natural aphrodisiacs?
Christine: Yes. So again, the culinary aphrodisiacs that are really fun at least from my opinion, to play with being a foodie. And I like the aesthetic of food. I like playing with different kinds of concoctions and stuff. So some of them that I really like are things like cloves. Cloves, we’re one of the few culinary aphrodisiacs that were shown to actually have an immediate effect. So within a couple hours of, I think it was within one hour after participants ate the cloves, they had improved sexual function. So that’s a fun one to play with because you can make so many things with it. I like making rice dishes and then throwing in some of those aromatic spices, like cloves, nutmeg was also one that had some research to support it.
And those are two spices that have a really rich history, world history as well. They’ve been highly coveted and wars have been fought over them to control the rights of them, but they kind of are worth it and how they have this wonderful fragrant aroma. And they did have some studies to show that they improve sex. In that case it’s not going to be like a Viagra, it’s going to be more subtle. It’s a more subtle enhancement. So even garlic and let’s see saffron of course, you can kind of combine all those, even onions, things like that have some aphrodisiac properties. So when I say aphrodisiac, I don’t necessarily just mean that it may improves libido. An aphrodisiac can either improve blood flow, it can improve libido or it can improve pleasure. So any of those.
Dr. Weitz: What are the best natural products for lubricants? Because there’s a lot of controversy over what types of lubricants are good. Some people like coconut oil, but coconut oil is very alkaline and the vagina is very acidic.
Christine: Oh, that’s a really good question, but I’ll answer-
Dr. Weitz: I mean, I know it’s not a part of the diet for sex.
Christine: Well, that’s why I’m going to answer you in a cheeky way and tell you that that the best lubricant is exercise, going for a run 20 minutes prior to sex it, it’s going to offer the best lubrication and also eating some of these foods, which improve blood flow because lubrication is subsequent to blood flow. So basically blood flows to the vagina and clitoris. And from that blood flow, it basically diffuses through and becomes a vaginal lubrication, if that makes sense.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Christine: So a specific product, I really don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that question quite honestly. So I don’t know which one I would recommend, but I guess if I were to choose, I’d say maybe coconut oil would be a good thing, but as you mentioned, it’s alkaline. So you certainly wouldn’t want to disrupt the pH balance of those tissues. So I would say whatever works for that person that doesn’t irritate them, or irritate their skin.
Dr. Weitz: So maybe a couple of foods that are most damaging to sexual health.
Christine: There’s three. There are three big, huge culprits, and that is… The wrong kind of fats. I mean, high fat in general, but particularly the wrong kind of fats, which is not just trans fats, but if you’re loading everything with oil and frying it, that’s not good either a lot of the processed fats and high sugar, definitely a big one and then high salt. So those three, that’s the worst combination that you can get. And that’s something that should all kind of focus on.
Dr. Weitz: So fat, sugar and salt.
Christine: Yep.
Dr. Weitz: Are there some fats that are really good for us that we want to load up on?
Christine: Yeah. Omega-3 fats. So for example-
Dr. Weitz: What about olive oil?
Christine: Well, even if it’s olive oil, I wouldn’t want to be deep frying things. I wouldn’t want to be using tons of oil in your dishes in general, because it definitely can contribute to plaque accumulation, even when it’s olive oil. So most a high fat meal, even just one fatty meal will increase arterial stiffness within a couple hours of eating it. However, omega-3 fats actually had the opposite effect on arteries within the short term, so they improved vascular function in the short term. So making the blood vessels more elastic for example.
Dr. Weitz: Okay, great. So I think that pretty much completes the questions that I had prepared. Any final thoughts, information you wanted to provide our listeners and viewers?
Christine: No. Just try to eat as close to nature as possible. And that’ll usually steer you in the right direction.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. How can viewers and listeners get ahold of you and find out about your book and what you have to offer?
Christine: My website is dietforgreatsex.com and you can purchase my book Diet for Great Sex on Amazon.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Thank you so much, Christine.
Christine: Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you listeners for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness podcast. Please take a few minutes and go to Apple podcasts and give us a five-star ratings and review that would really help us so more people can find us in their listing of health podcasts. I’d also like to let everybody know that I now have a few openings for new clients for nutritional consultations. If you’re interested, please call my office in Santa Monica at 310-395-3111 that’s 310-395-3111. And take one of the few openings we have now for a individual consultation for nutrition, with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you and see you next week.
