Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, a number of credible scientific studies appear to offer some fairly convincing evidence that a romp in the hay can add years to your life and can help to improve your overall quality of life.
One such study dates back to 1997, but its publication in “The BMJ” (formerly the British Medical Journal), a prestigious peer-reviewed journal that’s been published without interruption since 1840, commands attention. Researchers at England’s University of Bristol and Northern Ireland’s Queen’s University of Belfast, recruited more than 900 men between the ages of 48 and 59. All of these men were tracked for 10 years or more to examine the relation, if any, between frequency of orgasm and mortality.
Study Participants
All the participants in this U.K. study were recruited from the town of Caerphilly and five adjacent villages in South Wales. The heartening findings from the study showed that the risk of death was 50 percent lower in the group with high orgasmic frequency than in those men whose frequency of orgasm was considered low. High orgasmic frequency was loosely defined as 100 orgasms per year.
In the conclusion to their study, the researchers point out that their findings run counter to “the view common to many cultures that the pleasure of sexual intercourse may be secured at the cost of vigor and well-being.” The study’s findings would seem to indicate that sexual activity has a protective effect on men’s health, particularly men of middle age.
In a 2011 article posted at PsychologyToday.com, Howard S. Friedman, Ph.D., author of “The Longevity Project,” says the same phenomenon seems to hold true with women. He bases this observation on careful analysis of data on a study conducted many decades earlier by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman.
Terman’s study was undertaken with the goal of determining whether intelligent and well-educated people — particularly women — had sex lives that could be described as normal when compared with those of the general population. According to Friedman, Terman sought to challenge the widely held view of the day “that bright educated women were too occupied with things intellectual, and so were unable or unwilling to have good, fulfilling sex.”
As Terman suspected, his study found that bright, well-educated women did indeed have high levels of sexual satisfaction and ” scored just as highly as less gifted individuals on frequency of intercourse, passion, and on what Dr. Terman called ‘orgasm adequacy of wives.'”
Terman’s study gathered voluminous data about the 1,500 men and women whose sex lives he studied. Decades later, Friedman’s team went back to the Terman study in an attempt to match up the orgasmic frequency of its study participants with follow-up information on their lives and deaths after the Terman study. Friedman found that “women who had a higher frequency of achieving orgasm during intercourse tended to live longer than their less fulfilled peers!”
Lowers Heart Disease Risk
In a March 2016 article posted at HuffingtonPost.com, Yagana Shah, Huff/Post 50 editor, offers further evidence of the health benefits for those whose sex lives are active and healthy. She points to a study conducted by a team at the New England Research Institutes at Watertown, Massachusetts, showing that men who had sex two to three times a week were less likely to develop heart disease than men who had sex just a few times a month.
Other recent studies, including one conducted by researchers in Quebec, have shown that sexual activity qualifies as mild to moderate exercise, roughly equivalent to brisk walking but not as rigorous as jogging. In any case, mild to moderate exercise is better than no exercise at all.
Boosts Immune Response
From WebMD.com comes still more evidence of sex’s health benefits. Sexual health expert Yvonne K. Fulbright, Ph.D., notes that “sexually active people take fewer sick days,” an observation backed up by findings among students at Wilkes University in northeastern Pennsylvania. Wilkes researchers found that students who regularly had sex once or twice a week had higher levels of certain antibodies that protect against infections caused by bacteria, viruses, and other microbial invaders.
Elevated blood pressure can lead to a wide array of ailments, but it appears that sex can lower blood pressure, thus reducing the damage that it causes. Joseph J. Pinzone, M.D., chief executive officer and medical director of Amai Wellness in California, points to a landmark study showing that sexual intercourse — not masturbation — lowers systolic blood pressure.
Promotes Sound Sleep
Failure to get enough sleep can lead over time to disastrous health consequences. In her article at HuffingtonPost.com, Shah notes that sexual activity increases the body’s output of such feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones as serotonin, oxytocin, and prolactin. Although all these substances can help to set the stage for a good night’s sleep, increased levels of prolactin are closely associated with sleepiness.
Evidence also exists to show that the increase of prolactin that follows sex helps to sharpen our sense of smell. The post-sex surge in prolactin levels prompts the brain’s stem cells to develop new neurons in the olfactory bulb, which serves as the body’s center for smell detection.
The American Cancer Society reports that roughly one in every seven men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. The organization predicts that this male-only cancer will kill more than 26,000 American men in 2016. WebMD cites a study published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association” showing that men who ejaculated frequently — at least 21 times each month — were less likely to get prostate cancer. And for this protection, ejaculations need not be confined to intercourse. Ejaculations as a result of masturbation or nocturnal emission also count.
While it is true that depression accounts for a fair degree of sexual dysfunction among members of both sexes, it seems that getting it on regularly can help to hold the blues at bay. Severe depression is a serious health problem and is associated with an increase in suicides. A fascinating study at the State University of New York-Albany (SUNY) found that women who regularly have unprotected sex are less depressed than women who usually or always have sex with condom-wearing men. Researchers found that the “mood-altering chemicals” in seminal fluid reduced depression regardless of whether the semen entered the body orally or through the vagina.
Avoid Risky Sex
Rebecca Burch, Ph.D., one of the researchers involved in the SUNY study, emphasizes that despite its findings, men and women both should avoid risky sex. She points out that “unprotected sex can lead to plenty of depressing conditions like sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancy.” Sex between longtime committed partners, of course, minimizes the risk of unprotected sex.
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