Day 83 – Sex, PETA, And Hunting Antelope

“T. Rex doesn’t want to be fed, he wants to hunt. Can’t just… suppress 65 million years of gut instinct.”

~ Dr. Alan Grant

187.4 lbs.

Yup, I’m back on the obese topic. Previously I wrote about how obese men experience a testosterone drop, which could lead to less sex drive.

Ads put out by PETA claim “Studies show vegetarians have better sex” – well, like a lot of PETA’s claims the facts say “kinda, but not really”. Of course, PETA also says BP isn’t to blame for the current oil spill in the gulf of Mexico – meat eaters are. Conclude from that what you will.

Vegetarianism doesn’t automatically mean good sex. Vegetarian women are more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), something that’s usually accompanied by vaginal dryness; and the zinc deficiency that often goes hand in hand with vegetarian diets can cause lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives in both vegetarian women and men.

Wait - we're saying vegetarianism means good sex. should this asparagus really be limp?

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, it seems. If you’re too fat, your drive goes down. If you’re too vegetarian, same thing. Why? Because we’re not biologically designed to be either. We’re meant to be running across savannas hunting antelope to go with our tubers and berries. Instead most of us sit in cubicles or at desks, pushing buttons, while eating hormone injected fatty meat or sacrificing whole food groups from our diet in the mistaken belief that doing so is “better for you”.

When Leo Tolstoy became a vegetarianism, one of his motivations was because eating meat “only serves… to promote fornication”. Sylvester Graham – yup, the guy who invented the original, bland Graham cracker – believed that meat encouraged the “degenerating habits of luxury, indolence, voluptuousness and sensuality.”

So in a century we’ve swung from the belief that eating  meat encourages sexual activity to the idea that not eating meat is the key to getting lucky. Since the human race has been around far longer than that, eating a variety of diets and all the while making still more humans, I think it’s safe to say neither two legged omnivores nor herbivores can claim to be the masters of the two backed beast.

Eat lean meats or ones with the good fats and you’ll be fine. Eat only plants if you prefer, as long as you put enough variety in your diet to fill in the missing nutrients.

So why does PETA claim that vegetarians have better sex?

The studies they refer to actually say that cardiovascular disease can lead to sexual dysfunction in both women and men, and that obesity has been linked to low libido in both sexes. Obesity and heart disease aren’t synonymous with being omnivorous. If a vegetarian ate a lot of french fries, f’rinstance, they’d increase their risk of heart disease. Omnivores eating omega3 rich fish or getting the “good” HDL cholesterol from dairy would be lower risk for heart disease.

But obese people, regardless of their meat intake, not only have worse sex but they have it less often. This month French and British researchers released a report stating, among other things, that obese women have four times as many unplanned pregnancies as healthy-weight women – despite having less sex. They also say obese men are more likely to have sexual diseases despite scoring fewer partners. These killjoys also found that obese women are less likely to ask for contraceptive advice or use the pill, and obese men are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

With two thirds of North Americans now overweight or obese, and many European and Asian countries catching up rapidly, are we doomed to be a race of bloated blubberballs boring in bed?

“In public health terms,” says Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, a specialist in psychosexual medicine at Britain’s Ipswich Hospital, to bring me back to the report topic, “the study lends a new slant to a familiar message: that obesity can harm not only health and longevity, but your sex life.” Okay, she actually wrote that in an editorial on the study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

The research, which was actually led by Professor Nathalie Bajos of France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM – it’s a translation thing), is the first major study to investigate howbeing overweight or obese impacts sexual activity and other things such as sexual satisfaction, unintended pregnancy and abortion.

The team surveyed 12,364 men and women aged between 18 and 69 years in France in 2006. About half of them were normal weight, with a body mass index (BMI) of 18.5 to 25; another 2,500 or so were overweight, with a BMI of 25 to 30, and around 750 of them were obese, with a BMI over 30.

Compared to normal weight men, obese men were 70% less likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the past year, and 250% more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. Obese men under 30 years old were far more likely to have had a sexually transmitted disease.

Sexual dysfunction wasn’t linked to BMI in women, but compared to normal weight women obese women under 30 years old were less likely to ask about contraceptives or use the pill, and were more likely to have an unplanned pregnancy.

The study also found that obese women were more likely to have an obese partner, and (possibly as a result) less likely to view sex as important for personal life balance.

Nathalie said low self-esteem, social pressure, and concerns about body image might explain some of these results.

Sandy reminds doctors who might find it difficult to talk about sex and weight issues with patients that they should be more prepared to do so: “We need to understand more about how obese people feel about their sex lives, and what drives the observed behaviors and attitudes.”