Sex is Good for Your Health

Sound nutrition, exercise and relaxation are three factors commonly cited as essential for good health. Almost always, a fourth important factor is omitted from the list--an active and rewarding sex life.

The evidence that sex is good for male health has been one of science's least publicized discoveries, never mentioned in those "how to keep well" manuals or "Dear Doctor" newspaper columns. Here are two little-known scientific findings linking sex to health that should delight us all:

• Testosterone, the most potent of the male sex hormones, is not solely a sex hormone. It also has so many, and such varied, health-maintaining functions that it might well be called a health hormone.

• The easiest, quickest and most enjoyable way to increase your supply of this invaluable hormone is through sexual arousal and sexual activity.

Day and night, through all the decades of life, the body is a battleground of (continued on page 156)Sex is Good(continued from page 125) two opposing processes: catabolism and anabolism.

Catabolism is the scientific name for the destructive processes constantly at work in the body--the breaking down of proteins, the death of cells, the wasting away of tissues. Anabolism is the repairing and restoring process--the building up of new proteins, cells and tissues. Good health depends on maintaining a positive balance of anabolic over catabolic processes.

Dr. E. B. Astwood, professor of medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, describes what happens when the catabolic processes dominate: "Following major injuries, after surgical operations and during fever or other severe illness, there is a profound catabolic state, leading to a widespread loss of tissue, wasting of muscles, shrinkage of the vital organs and loss of depot fat." Our appetite and weight fall off and we lose red and white blood cells. Our zest for life fades. Our bones may lose calcium. Changes occur in our skin. Our bodily defenses against infection--our immune reactions--are depressed so that we become more vulnerable to a wide variety of bacterial and viral infections. The bodily wasting away that sometimes occurs in old age is another example of the victory of catabolism over anabolism.

A physician, of course, will try to identify and remove the cause of any prolonged, severe and debilitating disease. He will also want to reverse the catabolic-anabolic balance. Some physicians try to do this by prescribing an anabolic steroid--that is, a medicine that is supposed to speed up the anabolic processes, stimulating the body to build new proteins, cells and tissues. The anabolic steroids they prescribe are, in most cases, synthetic testosterone derivatives--chemicals that differ from testosterone in only a few details.

Other physicians prefer to rely on the body's natural capacity to recuperate. Whether they think of it that way or not, these physicians are relying on one of the most potent of all anabolic steroids--the testosterone manufactured in the testes.

Once the anabolic processes overtake the catabolic, with the help of either our own testosterone or a prescribed testosterone derivative, we recover our appetite and zest for life, feel better, eat more, regain lost weight. Our bones stop losing calcium; our muscle strength and skin tone improve. Our immune reactions against infection return to normal; so do our red-cell and white-cell counts.

The importance of testosterone to normal development is demonstrated in the bodies of males whose testes fail to mature properly at puberty or who are castrated after puberty. In the absence of enough testosterone, the usual changes that come with puberty don't occur. The skeletal muscles remain underdeveloped. The skin is soft and thin, with a yellowish pallor. There is mild anemia--a dearth of red blood cells. The blood circulation is deficient.

If testosterone is given to an adult eunuchoid male in this condition, "increased muscular strength and physical vigor are noted within a few days, and a general feeling of well-being prevails," Astwood reports. There is a gain in weight as new proteins, cells and tissues are manufactured. The anemia disappears and skin tone improves. Erections of the penis begin within a day or two and the genitals rapidly mature.

The healing of a wound is another example of an anabolic process. New proteins, cells and tissues are needed to repair the damage. Anabolic steroids such as testosterone may hasten the healing process.

The effects of anabolic steroids have also been studied in men who are neither sick nor eunuchs nor wounded. One such study by Drs. L. C. Johnson and J. P. O'Shea of Oregon State University reported that muscular strength and oxygen uptake both increased when healthy male college students were given an anabolic steroid. They gained weight--but their fat deposits did not increase, indicating that they were building cells and tissues rather than adding fat.

Another experiment was run on six of the strongest and healthiest young men in the world by Dr. Gideon Ariel of the University of Massachusetts. His experimental subjects were all varsity athletes who had undergone intensive training in weight lifting for two years. The Ariel experiment lasted eight weeks--during which the men lifted heavy weights five days a week and were tested on the seventh day. The tests were designed to determine the maximum weight each man could lift from four standard positions known as the bench, the military press, the seated press and the squat.

During the second, third and fourth weeks, a little trick was played on the six athletes. Each man was given a pill containing no active ingredients--a placebo--each day but was told that it was a substantial dose of a potent anabolic steroid resembling testosterone. These placebos had very little effect on the maximum weights the men could lift. During the next four weeks, three of the men were continued on placebos. The other three, without any notice to them that their medication was being changed, were switched to a substantial daily dose of a potent anabolic steroid, a synthetic testosterone derivative. The experiment was double-blind; that is, neither the athletes nor their trainer knew which men were receiving the anabolic steroid and which were receiving mere placebos. Each pill bore a code number and the code was kept sealed in the office of the university's Student Health Service. Thus, any possibility of a psychological effect was ruled out.

During the first week that three of them were on the true anabolic steroid, there was little change in the men's performance. During the next three weeks, however, three of the men began lifting heavier and heavier weights--heavier as compared with their own past records and heavier as compared with the other three men in the experiment. At the end of the eighth week, the code was unsealed.

As you may have guessed, the three whose performance improved were the three who had been receiving the testosteronelike steroid.

The U. S. Food and Drug Administration strongly disapproves of any use of anabolic steroids to enhance athletic ability. Artificial steroids, some doctors believe, can have harmful side effects. Nevertheless, the use of these steroids by athletes is said to be widespread, despite the FDA warning.

The anabolic steroids prescribed by physicians are marketed under more than two-dozen brand names by many of the country's leading pharmaceutical firms, including Ciba, Organon, Parke-Davis, Schering, Searle, Squibb, Upjohn and Winthrop. But it isn't necessary to get a prescription for one or to buy it at a pharmacy. You can manufacture your own brand of testosterone without violating FDA regulations--and enjoy yourself in the process.

At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia, a male rhesus monkey named Quid demonstrated how testosterone levels can be raised and lowered without medication, through changes in sexual and other activities. The research on Quid was conducted by Dr. Robert M. Rose of the Boston University School of Medicine and two associates, Drs. Thomas P. Gordon and Irwin S. Bernstein of the Yerkes research center.

For the first two weeks of the experiment, the Rose team kept Quid isolated in his own cage and periodically measured the amount of testosterone circulating in his blood stream. Next, Quid was turned loose as the only male in a sort of rhesus paradise--a spacious outdoor compound inhabited by 13 female rhesus monkeys, several of whom were in heat. For that two-week period, Quid had a ball, engaging in the monkey equivalents of necking, petting and sexual intercourse whenever he felt like it--interrupted only by periodic checks of his testosterone. During his two orgiastic weeks, Quid's blood-testosterone level reached a peak more than twice as high as during the two weeks he spent isolated in his cage.

After the two-week sexual romp, Quid was returned to his cage. Over the next (continued on page 208)Sex is Good(continued from page 156) two weeks, his testosterone gradually fell to its previous level--indicating that if you are a rhesus monkey and want to keep your testosterone level high, you have to keep working at it.

During the seventh week of the experiment, Quid was transferred to another compound--this one occupied by a tightly knit social group of 30 male rhesus monkeys with no females. "The response of the resident males was dramatic. Within minutes, they challenged and attacked the male [Quid] who had just been introduced." The Yerkes staff had to intervene to break up prolonged fights and prevent serious injury to Quid. In less than two hours, it was necessary for his protection to remove him from the compound and return him to his own cage.

During the first two weeks of the experiment, Quid's blood had contained about 750 units of testosterone. During his two weeks of sexual freedom, his testosterone reached a peak of nearly 1750 units. Following his "brief but decisive exposure to defeat," it fell to barely 300 units--less than half the base-line level. And it continued to drop--to less than 200 units after nine weeks of caged isolation. Quid was now suffering from a severe testosterone deficiency.

How could this deficiency be cured? One way, of course, would be to give Quid a series of testosterone injections or oral anabolic steroids--but Rose, Gordon and Bernstein instead simply set Quid free again to romp with the 13 females in their compound.

"Twenty-four hours after [Quid was] introduced to the females, testosterone showed significant increases," Rose and his associates reported. Then Quid's testosterone soared to a new high--from less than 200 units after nine weeks of isolation following his defeat to almost 2000 units after four days of unimpeded swinging.

The Yerkes researchers put three other rhesus males through the same series of procedures. The same rises and falls in testosterone levels, with only modest variations, resulted in all cases.

Rose and his associates point out that their experimental results can be interpreted in more than one way. When admitted to the compound with the females, Quid and the three other males each became, in turn, the dominant member of the group--the "Alpha male." Later, in the compound with 30 hostile males, Quid and the others cringed at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. It is conceivable that their testosterone rose and fell as a result of their dominance status rather than as a result of their sexual arousal and sexual experiences. Rises in testosterone levels, however, have also been reported following sexual intercourse in rabbits, elephants and bulls--with no dominance change to explain the rise. In some male animals, testosterone goes up when they are merely permitted to look at a female in heat, with no social interaction or sexual access to her.

How about humans?

As early as 1967, the effect of sexual intercourse on human testosterone levels was studied by Drs. A. A. A. Ismail and R. A. Harkness in Edinburgh. Two of the males Ismail and Harkness studied were of particular interest.

One refrained from sexual intercourse for 18 weeks before the experiment started. He continued to refrain for the first 13 days of the experiment, during which all of his urine was collected and tested in 24-hour batches. During the next eight days, he had sexual intercourse four times. Following these sexual encounters, his daily collection of urine contained nearly twice as much testosterone as before.

The other research subject had no sex for seven weeks before the experiment began. His average urinary testosterone rose similarly following a period of moderate sexual activity (two sexual encounters five days apart).

Another human study was performed by an associate of Ismail's, Dr. C. A. Fox. The Fox experiment was performed on "a male subject aged 38 who has been married for 11 years and has four children" and who had had "considerable experience in experiments involving the physiology of coitus."

Each night at ten P.M., for 45 consecutive nights, the subject's wife drew a small blood sample from his forearm vein. Each blood sample was centrifuged within half an hour to separate the blood plasma from the cells; the plasma was then frozen and stored until testosterone tests could be run in the endocrinological laboratory. These plasma samples were the control samples.

During the 45 days of the experiment, the research subject had sex with his wife on seven occasions. "Sexual intercourse took place by desire and was not the result of advanced planning.... The duration of coitus was 15-30 minutes."

During each sexual encounter, the man interrupted coitus before his climax so that his wife could draw a blood sample. She also drew a second sample within five minutes after his orgasm. On every occasion, the blood samples taken during and shortly after coitus contained more testosterone than the control sample.

On one occasion, for example, the control sample contained 216 units of testosterone, while the sample taken after orgasm contained 507 units. On another occasion, the control level was 253 units, compared with 599 units after orgasm.

To confirm these findings, Fox ran a parallel series of tests six months later.

The subject was somewhat more active sexually during this second period; he had intercourse with his wife on 11 occasions in six weeks. The findings confirmed the initial study: Sexual intercourse raises male testosterone levels in the human species as it does in monkeys, bulls, rabbits and elephants.

Sexual arousal without coitus or orgasm also raises human testosterone levels. This was demonstrated at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, where Drs. Karl M. Pirke and Gotz Kockott, with an associate, Franz Dittmar, invited 16 healthy heterosexual males aged 21 to 34 to look at some movies. Eight of the men, selected at random from the 16, were shown an animated cartoon without sexual content. The other eight viewed a color film in three parts. "In the first part, the two partners are shown petting and undressing, in the second part foreplay and face-to-face coitus are shown and in the third part are shown foreplay and coitus in various positions."

The penis of each male was fitted with a device called a plethysmograph, which measures the duration and intensity of erections. The plethysmographic records demonstrated that all eight of the men in group A--the ones who watched the porn film--experienced full erections during portions of the film.

Much more important than the plethysmographs were the catheters inserted into the forearm veins of the 16 film viewers. Through these catheters, blood samples were drawn every 15 minutes--beginning 45 minutes before the films were shown and continuing for two hours after the showings were completed. Thus, Pirke's team could compare blood testosterone levels before, during and after the films--and compare the sexually stimulated men in group A with the unstimulated group B controls.

As might be expected, the control subjects, who watched the cartoon, showed no significant variation in testosterone. The testosterone levels of the eight men who watched the porn film, however, rose on the average by 35 percent, even though two of the men showed no increase. Three members of the group showed dramatic increases--76 percent in one case, 64 percent in another and 54 percent in the third. Testosterone levels continued to rise even after the film was over--reaching a peak 60 to 90 minutes after the end of the porn film.

No theater, so far as we know, has as yet posted a sign on its marquee: Porn Films are Good for Your Health. But the Munich findings suggest that a good porn film contributes at least as much to maintaining a strong body as a modest dose of an anabolic steroid manufactured by any of the big pharmaceutical houses.

For generations, young males in our culture--and in Asian cultures as well-- have been cautioned to avoid "sexual excesses," lest they ruin their health. Mahatma Gandhi refrained from coitus altogether for many years in order to conserve his resources. Medical folklore warns of the "worn-out old roué," whose early enjoyment of life has left him a decrepit sexual cripple, prematurely aged, a prey to many degenerative diseases. Even today, there are men in their 20s, 30s and 40s who restrain themselves sexually lest they deplete their powers.

The studies here reviewed confirm what perceptive observers have always known: The worn-out roué is a figment of the antisexual imagination. The vigorous old man who still enjoys abounding good health (and good sex) is the one who also enjoyed himself in youth, young manhood and middle age--and who thus kept his testosterone level high.

The raising of testosterone levels is not, obviously, the only way in which an active sex life contributes to good health. It just happens to be the only way that has to date been carefully examined scientifically. Here are some other considerations affecting both men and women:

• Many doctors agree that by improving our mood and relieving psychic tensions, sex makes us less vulnerable to the numerous aches, pains and more serious health impairments that are commonly labeled psychosomatic or functional; that is, arising from emotional stress, depression or other psychological factors.

• "Sexual intercourse," Dr. Neil Solomon of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine points out, "is an excellent form of exercise." An ideal exercise should require no special equipment, should make use of as many bodily muscles as possible, should enable you to improve with practice, should be something you enjoy and that you can do with another person--and it should be something you can continue throughout your life. Sex fills the order.

• Sex provides a valuable combination of stimulation and relaxation. During sexual activity, blood pressure and pulse rate rise, much as they do when we take a walk or climb a flight of stairs--then promptly return to quiet resting levels. It is precisely this sequence of stimulation and relaxation that is generally considered conducive to good health.

• Many athletes report that sex the night before a big game helps them get a good night's sleep and lowers excess tensions--both important contributions to good health. Casey Stengel agreed. "It wasn't the catchin' that caused the problem for athletes," he is supposed to have said, "it was the chasin'."

• Married men and women live significantly longer on the average than those who are single, widowed or divorced; that sexual activity plays a role in this greater longevity seems likely, though it isn't proved.

On the other hand, it's also pretty obvious that abstention from sexual activity is not necessarily a cause of poor health. Many monks, nuns and other celibates, for example, enjoy abounding good health and live into their 70s and 80s. Perhaps they have found other forms of stimulation and relaxation to take the place of sex; or perhaps freedom from many of the stresses of life compensates for the absence of sexual release.

Estrogen is the natural female sex hormone, resembling testosterone in numerous respects. It is chemically related to testosterone; and it plays much the same role in inducing female puberty that testosterone plays in male puberty. Just as testosterone is manufactured in the male gonads (testes), so estrogen is manufactured in the female gonads (ovaries). And, like testosterone, estrogen is an anabolic steroid that serves a variety of functions related to maintaining good health.

What isn't known, however, is whether sexual arousal and sexual activity raise female estrogen levels in the way in which they raise male testosterone levels. Our hunch is that they do. It's high time somebody found out.