Product Description

EAT YOUR WAY TO BETTER SEX AND BETTER HEALTH!

It’s not all in your head, it’s not a sign of age, nor is it even a lack of interest: About seventy million American men and women have problems in the bedroom. It’s no wonder designer drugs like Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis are in such high demand. But research shows that for many of us, the problem that ends in the bedroom starts in the kitchen, and that great nutrition is the real secret to great sex.

Written by two health psychologists with both clinical and academic experience in nutrition and sexual function, and backed by the latest nutritional and medical research, Great Food, Great Sex is the first food book designed to fire up sexual vitality in both men and women. The simple-to-implement program–including recipes from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health–serves up a dazzling array of sumptuous foods packed with the key nutrients that provide an ample supply of nitric oxide (NO), the proven “miracle molecule” for optimal sexual function.

Robert Fried and Lynn Edlen-Nezin’s plan focuses on the three food factors for sexual vitality: nitrogen-rich vegetables and legumes that deliver NO, proteins high in the amino acid L-arginine (another source of NO), and brightly colored super-antioxidants that combat the destructive effects of free radicals. In Great Food, Great Sex you will find straightforward nutritional information that will help you make smart food choices, along with creative ideas for menus and simple recipes for fantastic dishes that really deliver, like

• Broccoli Beef Ginger
• Finger-Licking Curried Chicken
• Spinach Stuffed Sole
• 1-2-3 Peach Cobbler
• Poached Pears with Raspberries
• Luscious Chocolate Strawberries

The only “side effects” you’ll experience are a higher energy level, weight loss, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure.

So put the spark back into your sex life, without supplements or dull menus. All you need is an appetite–for great food and great sex. Who knew that getting healthy could be so much fun!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #405304 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fried and Edlen-Nezin's volume adds "great sex" to the list of enticements for the food-fad conscious, but readers looking for a hot and juicy read will be disappointed-after a section on sexual dysfunction, sex seems to be little more than an afterthought to discussions of the benefits of eating healthfully (though there's bound to be a reader who will appreciate grape seed oil's secret life as a "natural lubricant"). Fried and Edlen-Nezin stress nitric oxide's role in relaxing blood vessels (and thus lowering blood pressure) and the importance of amino acid arginine as a source of nitric oxide. However, the included recipes neglect to list figures for arginine or anti-oxidants in the accompanying nutritional data. Though there is a trove of tips about preparing healthful food and making healthy dietary choices, the book is hamstrung from the beginning by its dependence on what amounts to little more than a smattering of hackneyed comments ("Get ready to X-rate your plate," or, at the end of the introduction: "enough foreplay, let's get down to business") spliced into an otherwise serviceable guide to heart-healthy eating.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Robert Fried, Ph.D., is senior professor of biopsychology at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is a member of the American Physiology Society (APS) (cardiovascular and respiration division) and the American Psychological Association (APA). A fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, Dr. Fried lectures in the U.S. and abroad on cardiovascular function. He has appeared on national and international TV, including CNN and Fox News. He is also the author of The Arginine Solution: The First Guide to America’s New Cardio-Enhancing Supplement and Breathe Well, Be Well: A Program to Relieve Stress, Anxiety, Asthma, Hypertension, Migraine, and Other Disorders for Better Health. Dr. Fried lives in New York City.

Lynn Edlen-Nezin, Ph.D., is director of behavioral science and vice president of strategic planning and research for Grey Healthcare Group. She is a graduate of the doctoral program in clinical health psychology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and completed her internship at the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s—Roosevelt Hospital Center. She is an American College of Sports Medicine certified personal trainer. Dr. Edlen-Nezin has contributed to several books, and her articles have appeared in magazines including Self and Seventeen, as well as in the New York Daily News. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1

What’s Under the Hood

Pushing Freud Out of Bed

The sexual needs of men and women may differ categorically, but there is considerable overlap, particularly with regard to function. And in terms of our understanding of sexual function, science has come a long way, baby.

Drs. Masters and Johnson were the first to bring sex science into the bedroom more than thirty years ago. They carefully mapped out and described the hydraulics and the mechanics of the “sexual act.” Based on their daring and astonishing scientific observations, they showed how men and especially women go through distinct stages of sexual arousal before one can insert “tab A” into “slot A.”

It took many years for the mechanics and physiology of sex to seep into psychiatry and sex therapy. Armed with theories about the Oedipus conflict and other assorted obscure neuroses, conventional psychological wisdom fought Masters and Johnson tooth and nail. Men, but more often women, were made to feel that their sexual problems were “all in their head.” This bias kept many patients from ever admitting they were suffering from sexual dysfunction.

Even today, many of us have little to no knowledge of the basics of sex and sexuality. Despite the sexual revolution and easy access to information about all aspects of sex, a recent article in Cosmopolitan magazine (October 2003) featured instructions on how to “find your G-spot” (Rush, 2003). It seems that even among the well educated, savvy, and sophisticated, there is a dearth of important knowledge about sexual landmarks.

This is a book about enhancing sexual vitality and performance by extracting the constituents that fuel it from three selected food categories. This is not a book about reproductive biology. However, as experts in the health and behavioral sciences, we are often astonished at how little many people know about their sex organs and how they work, and how often that ignorance impedes their sexual satisfaction as well as their emotional well-being.

This next section is a guide to the most relevant anatomical and physiological details of our sexual equipment. Knowing how our sexual organs work will also help you understand how and why the program offered in Great Food, Great Sex works. Here are the knowledge and the power to make you an expert in keeping the necessary plumbing in tip-top shape.

In the long run, satisfactory sexual performance depends mainly on maintaining proper cardiovascular function so that when you are sexually aroused, blood flow to the sex organs increases as needed to engorge the tissues of those organs. For men, this is experienced as an erection, while for women, it may be perceived as warmth and lubrication of the vaginal tissue. The biochemical sequence that translates amorous arousal into physical arousal creates a cascade that’s similar in men and women, but by no means identical.

In addition to visible changes that occur during sex, complicated chemical activities go on in the body. An extremely basic explanation of the key steps in sexual arousal (omitting a number of intermediary enzymes that play a key role in this sequence but add little to our understanding of the sequence) is as follows:

The brain releases acetylcholine (ACh) as a result of sexual arousal. The bloodstream carries it to the blood vessels in the sex organs, where it signals the vessel lining, the endothelium, to release a gas, nitric oxide (NO). NO then causes the endothelium to release a vasodilator substance, cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). cGMP relaxes the blood vessels and causes increased blood flow to the sex organs for erection in men or engorgement in women.

ACh v NO v cGMP = physical arousal

After sex, the enzyme phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) deactivates cGMP:

PDE5 v cGMP + post-arousal

As you will see below, this is the sequence for penile erection in men; a very similar sequence is involved in lubrication and vaginal and clitoral engorgement in women. Engorgement is an obvious prerequisite for men in attaining an erection, but also directly contributes to pleasurable sensations in women.

the all-important endothelium

Arterial blood vessels carry oxygenated blood from the lungs to body tissues. They range in size from large arteries down to smaller arterioles and finally to capillaries. Capillaries connected to the venules carry deoxygenated blood back to the lungs. Venules are the smallest of the veins in the body.

Arteries are made up of muscle rings and three major wall layers. Most important to us is the endothelium, the inner cell lining of the vessels. It is this cell lining that determines the way that the vessels control blood flow by their ability to expand or to constrict.

The endothelium responds to a number of the so-called action hormones (noradrenaline and others) that may constrict them to increase blood pressure. But most important, the endothelium produces the gas nitric oxide to relax the blood vessels and increase blood flow to organs ranging from the heart to the sex organs.

The endothelium can be considered to be the business end of the blood vessels, and its control by NO is the discovery that resulted in the awarding of the 1998 Nobel Prize to three American scientists. No one knew before that event that the endothelium was anything but a sheet lining the inside of blood vessels. No one even knew that it served any biological purpose—much less that it actually controls the blood vessel. The endothelium is so critical to blood flow that capillaries are nothing but a tubular structure made up entirely of endothelial cells.

As you’ll read in detail through this book, the Great Food, Great Sex eating plan is built around three Food Factors that each supply the body with the ability to synthesize NO. Yet as powerful as these Food Factors are, they cannot compensate for inadequate hormone levels. Conversely, hormone levels may be adequate and sexual dysfunction may still occur if there is inadequate NO for this reason:

Sexual function requires an adequate arterial blood supply to the endothelium. If the neurochemical message does not reach the target, or the endothelium is too damaged to respond, the sequence is in vain. Damaged endothelial tissue results in impaired blood flow to the genitals during sexual arousal.

Our typical American diet is particularly damaging to the endothelium, and this impaired blood flow is the principal culprit in sexual dysfunction in men, and also in women up to menopause (Bernardo, 2001; Park, Goldstein, et al., 1997).

Medical science has made enormous strides in finally unraveling the mechanism of sexual arousal and response and also what causes damage to it. One of the principal culprits is elevated serum low-density lipo- protein (LDL) (bad) cholesterol and its frequent result, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).

Scientists from the University of South Carolina have found that impotence is a very compelling reason to avoid cholesterol: Men with lower blood levels of the bad LDL cholesterol or higher levels of the good high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol are less likely to develop erectile dysfunction (ED) (Nikoobakht, Nasseh, and Pourkasmaee, 2005). In a similar study, men with total cholesterol levels over 240 mg/dl had nearly double the risk of ED, compared with men with readings around 180 or less. The researchers concluded that atherosclerosis impedes blood flow to the penis and thus constitutes a primary cause of impotence.

It is evident now that antioxidant-rich foods protect the body from the oxidation of LDL cholesterol. There is also overwhelming evidence that arginine can both lower serum levels of LDL cholesterol and even reverse the process of plaque deposition. The Great Food, Great Sex program supplies generous amounts of NO, antioxidants, and arginine—the three Food Factors the body needs for maximum sexual vitality.

the owner’s guide to male sexual anatomy and function

We are living in an era of impressive lifestyle-altering pharmaceutical breakthroughs in the treatment of impotence. To understand how and why these products work (the same principles upon which the Great Food, Great Sex program is based), it helps to know how an erection actually comes about.

The anatomy of the penis is somewhat complex. Think of the structure as three cylinders of sponge-like tissue. Two are corpus cavernosa; a third cylinder is the spongeosum. In order to have and maintain an erection, the cylinders need to fill with blood. Blood is pumped into the penis under body pressure. The expanding chambers compress the veins in the penis, slowing blood outflow.

The urethra is the inner tube that carries the urine and the ejaculate (a combination of semen and various other glandular fluids). The knobby head of the penis is called the glans. Blood flows to the penis by two very small arteries that come from the systemic aorta, the main artery that courses downward from the heart. These arteries are the same size as the arteries to your finger. If these blood vessels become blocked, blood cannot get to the penis. High-fat, low-vegetable, and low-fruit diets contribute directly to blocked vessels.

All three chambers of the penis are lined with endothelial tissue, as are arterial blood vessels. You might even think of these chambers as enlargeable blood vessels.

When you feel sexually turned on, the brain releases the neurotransmitter substance acetylcholine (ACh) into the bloodstream in the sex organs. Then:

•ACh then causes the endothelium in the blood vessels and in the spongy penis chambers to produce an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) that helps to produce the gas nit...