My daughter brought home an Earth Day reminder letter today with suggestions about turning off lights and lighting candles from 8:30 to 9:30 this Saturday night. She's keen (as much I think about staying up late as anything else), and earnestly wrote the time on her calendar. Coincidently, I also got a new book from Random House in the mail called Eco Sex "Go green between the sheets and make your love life sustainable." It's mainly about making your own massage oils, green sex toys and aphrodisiac carob bars.
I don't know how much stock I put into making my own natural deodorant, but I know two friends who have given up the coloured plastic sex toys made with 4 dioxane and synthetic polymers because they cause rashes. What is more relevant was some of the off-hand comments about organic foods by author Stephanie Weiss as it relates to sexual functioning. In my practice, I am looking more and more at how junk food affect our urges and aptitudes in the bedroom.
Sex is always your early warning system, and I am seeing more and more weird stuff related to toxins. One of my first questions I ask a patient when I'm doing an intake is " do you or your partner works around chemicals?" I'm convinced that much of the drop of women's libido in North America (affecting 34-41% of women according to the study cited on Oprah) is related to food and environmental toxins. Some of it too much growth hormones in the milk, much is about the soy fillers in many processed foods increasing estrogen (particularly in men). Generally, it's all bad for your sex life.
Don't think it affects you? In the article in Diabetes Care found that people with the highest blood levels of pesticides were 38 more times more likely to have diabetes than those with the lowest levels. And diabetes is a huge problem for sexual functioning. In conversations with some of my sex colleagues, I'm hearing how more and more sex therapists are looking into organic food. I'm adding salba (www.sourcesalba.com) as an antioxidant to every meal, and am now trying it experimentally with those libido women who are desperate to try anything but hormones that put hair on their chest. Blaik calls them "super seeds" (as I put them on everything from his cereal to chewy smoothies) but they may be known as "sexy seeds" if the research shakes out.
So now I suggest a cleanse, and serious antioxidant and my own personal cocktail of supplements to improve sexual functioning. See my website www.sexwithsue.com and my book The Libido Diet for more specifics on this. But as we head to Mexico (ola) to an eco resort this weekend (solar powered, completely green holiday), this reformed junk food Queen is adding crunchy organic granola to my diet to keep me biting my lip and ensuring a bounce to my step.