Emily: 0:00

Hey, nice.

Vanessa: 0:01

Hey, so welcome to wellness. MIS we have a fun little mini soda plan today in honor of Valentine's day. Uh, M do you have any Valentine's day plans?

Emily: 0:14

So since everything's really locked down still, I think we're just going to stay in maybe cook. A little meal together, or maybe like one of us will cook the meal because I don't really want to fight on Valentine's day. It's just seems like not in the spirit. And that's usually what happens if we're like trying to be two cooks. So yeah. What about you?

Vanessa: 0:38

I'm assuming that my lovely husband is listening to this episode right now. And it is Friday the 13th. No, this will be coming out on the 12th. So Friday the 12th, you have two days honey, to plan something. Very elaborate. No, I'm just kidding. We don't really have, we don't have much plan. We're not huge Valentine's day people every day is Valentine's day in our household.

Emily: 1:08

Yeah, I could see that with you too. Hopefully Matt brings something good to the table too. We'll see.

Vanessa: 1:13

Yeah, we'll see.

Emily: 1:16

Let's get started.

Vanessa: 1:29

So we thought it would be really fun to do a mini episode on aphrodisiacs and honor Valentine's day. This time of year, you can probably see a lot about aphrodisiacs on magazines, maybe on Facebook, different advertisements, showing all kinds of different foods to boost libido and sexual desire. So Emily and I today wanted to talk a little bit about whether there is validity behind some of those or not.

Emily: 2:01

I'm so excited to talk about this because Valentine's day is the perfect time. I think it's kind of everywhere, different foods that you can use to elevate your Valentine's day plans.

Vanessa: 2:12

And with things like this, you want to have a lot of caution, right? Because sex sells and people are trying to sell you stuff and they know that. You don't have to make sex sexy. It already is. so something I actually wanted to start off with a really good example. So a popularly touted aphrodisiac is Maka. And there is, some print, some pretty good studies. Why behind why Maka might actually be an aphrodisiac. I was scrolling through Instagram and researching for this episode and I had put in the hashtag libido booster. And so in my scrolling, cause I wanted to find out just different things that people were selling. Right. And so in my scrolling, I found a poster about Maka and it was about. You know, increasing sexual desire also claimed in and mind you this post, they were, I won't, I won't say what the company was, but they were selling mocca and they also claimed that it would increase your breast and butt size, making them rounder and giving them a more feminine shape. Yes. Yes. It's claiming that their product is going to change the distribution of fat to produce more womanly herbs,

Emily: 3:52

Oh, my God. And that's somehow tied to the sexual desire.

Vanessa: 4:02

I guess. But you know, the funny thing is too, is they're telling you to take it with your workout. And then you're going to see a bigger, but

Emily: 4:13

I would love to see the research on that.

Vanessa: 4:15

another sentence in this post is which we won't dive too much into this, but I think it's important to say, so they say, and unlike soy, flax, and other herbs, it doesn't increase or contain unwanted own estrogen. So that's a big hint that they don't know what they're talking about. Also.

Emily: 4:36

Yeah, definitely. We're going to have to do a whole, whole episode on soy and estrogen for sure.

Vanessa: 4:41

That is a whole, you know, could be an hour long podcast for sure. But I just thought that was so funny because, and it's a really good illustration of, you want to be really careful with this stuff in what you're buying, because people are trying to sell you stuff. And like I said, sex sells. So this is, they have a really easy Avenue to get it to you because people want it.

Emily: 5:07

Right. Totally. Something that I really wanted to discuss too, was. This industry is kind of feeding off of people's insecurities or feelings of inadequacy. Right. And I think that when aphrodisiacs are marketed, it's, they're trying to sell you something and convince you that you need something. It's important to look at that root cause of whatever's going on. We'll talk about antidepressants a little bit later, something that can definitely affect libido. Is there something that's disabling you from being comfortable with your partner? Maybe there's some kind of physical issue that might make you less interested in sex in general, and all of these things could be worked on and it might be a little more beneficial to deal with it via therapy or, you know, we just, this week had our pelvic floor therapist on and. There's a lot of discussion about this whole topic and being comfortable in one's body in that episode. But I think that, you know, people sometimes tend to go to these trendy things because they're looking for a band-aid for a deeper issue.

Vanessa: 6:16

For sure. And I also think something, especially maybe more in our generation, um, before you go. All buy some trendy supplement or something like that, maybe, you know, put down your phone for a

Emily: 6:30

Yeah, definitely stay on, try more, less social media and then see what happens.

Vanessa: 6:36

Right. Everyone's, you know, laying in bed scrolling and, uh, that's certainly not going to help situations.

Emily: 6:43

Yeah. For so many reasons. Okay, so let's define an aphrodisiac. So. From my research, I saw that it was a food drink or drug that stimulates sexual desire and that it was also classified into three different types based on their mode of action. And those types are number one, increased libido. Two is potency like sperm count for men or sexual pleasure.

Vanessa: 7:14

Want to go over to some of the most popular ones. So I'm not sure what you did, Emily, as far as your research. For mine, I stuck to mostly foods. We'll talk about some herbs probably, but I get a little bit nervous when we get into herbs. Cause some of them can be dangerous in some situations. For example, like Spanish fly, is a commonly advertised natural aphrodisiac and it can actually cause kidney damage and bleeding and your GI tract.

Emily: 7:45

Yeah. The side effects can be really intense. Often the herbs come from Chinese or Eastern medicine practices, and those are the basis for claims on aphrodisiac quality. So you definitely want to be working with a specialist for those types of protocols.

Vanessa: 8:05

Especially because some of them, you know, people are looking at it like, Oh, it's an herb, it's an natural substance. So it must be safe. And that's just not always true. Everybody's a little bit different. And you can react to things in some cases really badly, or you might have interactions with other things that you're doing. So it's definitely not something you want to be lackadaisical about.

Emily: 8:26

Yeah, definitely. So what were some of the foods that you found in your research?

Vanessa: 8:32

So some of the foods were artichokes, asparagus chocolate, bigs, oysters, uh, chili peppers, strawberries, watermelon, sham pain. Um,

Emily: 8:45

Oh, wow.

Vanessa: 8:49

um, I had one that said garlic, which I thought was kind of interesting. Celery was also in there.

Emily: 8:57

of course. It's a cure. All didn't, you know?

Vanessa: 9:02

What about you?

Emily: 9:04

I focus a little bit more on the herbs. I'm curious to hear from you, if there's any more, if what the research says about the foods.

Vanessa: 9:15

So a lot of the foods have very little evidence and I think that's probably for a couple of different reasons. One of them probably being that. They're just not going to do that many studies on chocolate or something like that. You know what I mean? I guess there probably wouldn't be much benefit in that and these very kind of ordinary foods. There's a lot of like rat studies and things like that, but you probably found with the herbs, I did find with honey, I thought this was really interesting. I guess for centuries that we was used to bring romance into marriages, which I had never heard of honey in that way. Have you, I guess people call each other honey as like a pet name. I don't know if it's maybe comes from that. I just thought, cause it's sweet.

Emily: 10:10

That's really interesting. Like they had both partners eat the honey.

Vanessa: 10:16

I'm not sure

Emily: 10:18

I'm like, are they

Vanessa: 10:18

doing with the honey. Yeah,

Emily: 10:20

Are they pouring it all over each other?

Vanessa: 10:23

no, I don't know what they're doing with the honey, but apparently it's, you know, bringing romance.

Emily: 10:28

So did you see anything about oysters? That's one that I hear about a lot.

Vanessa: 10:33

When we talked about doing this episode, that was the first thing that came to mind. And it's kind of funny when you think of some of these foods, they don't seem like very sexy foods, you know, like oysters or garlic. When you see chocolate on there as strawberries, you think like chocolate covered strawberries. Like that kind of makes sense. But some of these foods like oysters and garlic do not seem sexy.

Emily: 11:01

Well, and I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm eating garlic like every single day. I mean, I don't really think, I like, how much do you need to eat? Like, do I need to prepare myself like what's happening?

Vanessa: 11:13

That was something with celery too. One of the claims is that it increases pheromones in men that It makes women attracted to them. But there's no known amount that you can like that you need to eat. I guess all those guys out there just starting in celery, I don't know. It could be a lot.

Emily: 11:39

Moral of the story is there's. No. Specific amount or no specific food that is going to assuredly increase libido.

Vanessa: 11:49

Right, right. There are some things that have, you know, a little bit more evidence than others, or that make a little bit more sense. Like when we go back to oysters so oysters are super high in salt. So in some studies with rats, they found libido boosting effects. We also know that zinc is really important for sperm. So that does makes sense.

Emily: 12:12

Right. One of our, if one of our categories is potency, then zinc containing foods would definitely help out with that.

Vanessa: 12:21

for sure. Well, were there any other specific, like vitamins or minerals that you found? I was finding kind of a trend in foods in the minerals. Did you find

Emily: 12:35

Oh, no. Tell me about it. Tell me about the trend.

Vanessa: 12:37

So when I was looking at them, a lot of the foods I was noticing were either high in zinc or magnesium.

Emily: 12:45

Hmm. Interesting with the magnesium.

Vanessa: 12:48

Yes. But when we think about magnesium, it relaxes our central nervous system, potentially giving us more energy with its role in ATP. So it does kind of make sense, you know, that consuming more magnesium might boost libido.

Emily: 13:08

And I think it just goes to show how complex this topic is. And probably a big reason why there isn't a ton of research because there's so many variables. You know, you could say, Oh, like, you know, you mentioned champagne was an option earlier. Okay. You know, if I hear someone drank five glasses of champagne and then went home and had sex with their partner, I'm not going to be surprised by that, but it's not because of that. I think champagne, some there's some secret component in it, right? Like it could just be the booze.

Vanessa: 13:43

Yeah, exactly. And that was something too that was cited. So with alcohol, there is an upper limit for that. So, you know, in studies where they said alcohol as a potential aphrodisiac, there was a person that had, you know, one or two glasses of champagne. And maybe because of that, you know, was feeling a little bit more relaxed in lower inhibitions. But you know that exactly for those who are binge drinking every day that. We'll have the opposite effect.

Emily: 14:15

Yeah, you can't go out there and just start drinking, like bottles of champagne every day in the name of libido increase.

Vanessa: 14:23

Definitely not.

Emily: 14:24

The research is not supporting it.

Vanessa: 14:26

No, we are neither.

Emily: 14:28

No, definitely not. The one that I saw often in my research was ginkgo root. The big draw with ginkgo is that it claims to increase blood flow. And there isn't a ton of research on it. And I think, you know, Vanessa, you probably found the same thing. There's really not that much research on the mechanism of aphrodisiacs and what they really do. But in the research for Gingko, it's a very small studies and a lot of the research is based off of folks who are on antidepressants and that usually causes a serious dive and libido and Gingko helped reduce the loss of libido that antidepressants caused in around 84% of participants in a study. Granted, there weren't very many people in that study, but they both male and female participants said they experienced increased desire, excitement and ability to orgasm after 60 to 240 micrograms of the supplement.

Vanessa: 15:36

Yes. I think I actually looked at that exact same study and yeah. So Gingko, like Emily said, mostly, we're just seeing the research with those folks that are on antidepressants. So yeah. Um, those who aren't on antidepressants, there's not a lot of research about Ginko. It does make sense. So when we think of Gingko, we also think of memory and blood flow, um, relaxed blood vessels. So when it comes to sexual desire or pleasure, that does make sense.

Emily: 16:07

Yeah, there's a lot of, rat based studies, which it's like, if you know anything. About science. It's just that yeah. We might be able to do it there, but will it have the same mechanism in humans? We don't really know fully until we try that out.

Vanessa: 16:23

So another herb that I found is Chast Berry, or Vitex is another name for that? So this one I thought was really interesting because I have a fun fact about this. So they actually used to use Vitex to suppress the libido of monks but some studies have shown that has the opposite effect in women.

Emily: 16:45

Oh, wow. That's interesting. You know, It's crazy to me because, well, not crazy. It's actually makes so much sense when I think about our culture. But a lot of the research that I saw was very male centric.

Vanessa: 17:00

Yes. I wanted to bring this up too. I feel like I was when I was trying to find, um, the mineral connection. So I mentioned I was seeing a lot of foods that were high in magnesium and sink. And I was trying to look into that a little bit more, specifically like magnesium and libidos think and libido. And almost every time I would type something like that in the studies that were coming up were erectile dysfunction.

Emily: 17:28

For every one study, there was about female sexual pleasure. There's about 12 studies about erectile dysfunction, which I understand that because erectile dysfunction can be helped by increasing blood flow. And there's definitely a lot we can do for that. But I definitely think it speaks volumes that we're a little more concerned with that as a society than about female pleasure.

Vanessa: 17:54

I think that's something like erectile dysfunction, men are going to go to their doctor and try to figure out what's happening when something like that. Going on with them and women just tend to not do that. And I think that's largely, you know, would be attributed to our culture of women, not talking about that, or, you know, talking about their pleasure.

Emily: 18:22

Yeah, it seems very normal to be watching TV and seeing like eight commercials about erectile dysfunction. And I don't know if it's just because that issue is so apparent and obvious since it's external, maybe that has something to do.

Vanessa: 18:38

it.

Emily: 18:39

Yeah. And I think that men are just made to feel a lot more comfortable. And so when we look at research, there's biases all across the board and. You know, there's less research typically on the concerns of women because of the patriarchy. So to close, are there any real aphrodisiacs that we would recommend and support?

Vanessa: 19:06

I don't know what Emily is going to say, but I would say as far as aphrodisiacs that I would support I would probably steer. You know, clear, some of them have some of the herbs and things like that. Cause like we said, those can have some pretty bad side effects. But as far as the research I saw, I would probably recommend Maka and fenugreek. And I would recommend talking to your partner, putting your phone down. You know, creating a connection, and maybe not searching for external things and going more internal to see what's going on. There could actually be some issues going on. You could have, you know, low testosterone or something like that. And there could be a reason, that's beyond just doing work with your partner, you know, internal work on yourself, that you need might need a little bit more outside help, but I think it's important to do that internal work first.

Emily: 20:19

Yeah, we're basically just saying that aphrodisiacs, aren't going to fix your sex life. If that's what you're looking for them to do.

Vanessa: 20:27

Right, right. But I mean, if you want to have some chocolate covered strawberries and some garlic and honey and oil spurs and asparagus and artichokes, I mean, feel free to have those. Those are not going to do any harm unless you're allergic. So, I mean, have at it.

Emily: 20:45

Right. Maybe not all at the same time.

Vanessa: 20:50

Yeah. I don't know if that's going to make for a very fun Valentine's day. If you eat those all in one sitting.

Emily: 20:58

Yeah, I think that the bottom line is the studies are small. The research is fairly limited. We definitely need more, but you can never underestimate the power of the placebo effect.

Vanessa: 21:11

Yes, a very, very important factor in all of this. And Hey, guess what? We'd love the placebo effect in these kinds of situations.

Emily: 21:20

Absolutely. Well, we hope everyone has an awesome Valentine's day. And we definitely want to hear from you if you try any of these aphrodisiac.

Vanessa: 21:30

Yeah, absolutely.