Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

The pedometer doesn’t just spur us to move, though it certainly does that. It changes the way we think about movement. What was once a chore becomes a game. The other day, I spent half an hour looking for Lucas’s missing stuffed elephant. Normally, that would be half an hour of frustration and snarling. Instead, I focused on the fact that I notched five hundred steps. Give me more missing stuffed animals! You got any keys I can search for? I’ll take anything on.

My treadmill desk gets me past the ten-thousand mark most days. But Julie doesn’t go down without a fight. She marches in place while making coffee or talking on the phone.

We were walking to the park the other day, and I noticed that she was taking quick, tiny, ballerina-size steps. “I’ve got shorter legs than you,” she said. “I’ve got to play to my strengths.”

She’s enjoying the competition. We’re getting along so well, I figure I’ll devote the next month to another joint activity.

Chapter 7

The Genitals

The Quest to Have More Sex

IT’S A DEBATE THAT’S BEEN around almost as long as sex itself: Is the act of intercourse healthy for you? Or will it kill you?

Weighing in on the “sex is dangerous” side were, naturally, Victorian-era experts. Not all Victorians lived up to their repressive stereotype, but others did so with enthusiasm. One of my favorite characters from the encyclopedia was the chastity-obsessed nineteenth-century health guru Sylvester Graham. Graham disapproved of lust and sex in general, with masturbation as his white whale. Touching yourself, he argued, leads inexorably to insanity, weakness, and death.

His prescription? Logically enough, bland foods. He believed the key to lowering the nefarious sex drive was a tasteless, spiceless diet. Which is how Graham came to invent one of the first health foods: the graham cracker, a snack that was originally made with wheat germ, wheat bran, and a little honey and was intended to quell the passions in hormonal adolescent boys. (I can’t speak for the original, but the modern bran-free version doesn’t seem to work so well in this regard. At least based on the following anecdotal evidence: I ate a lot of s’mores in high school.)

Graham was on the extreme end, but he represents a prevalent strain of sexaphobic thinking. A friend gave me a 1901 book called What a Man of Forty-five Ought to Know. It was a gag gift (I’m approaching forty-five, though not there yet), but it was a fascinating read. The book soberly warns that middle-aged men will “find that the act of coition is generally followed by a period of lassitude or weariness more pronounced and more prolonged than anything he has previously experienced. Nature is thus sounding her warnings and admonishing the individual of the importance of the utmost care in the use of a secretion which can now ill be spared, and which is of utmost importance in vitalizing every department of the physical economy.” I’m pretty sure this means stop humping.

On the other hand, history is filled with experts who argued sex is a key to robust health. The Taoists in the eleventh century believed sex resulted in the joining of the Energy, and could even result in immortality—especially if the men didn’t ejaculate. Frankly, that seems a high price.

Other experts have said it’s dangerous not to have an orgasm, especially for women. Physicians from the time of the ancient Greeks right on up to the 1950s believed that noxious fluids built up inside unmarried women, causing “hysteria.” The solution was a vigorous between-the-legs massage. In fact, as Mary Roach points out in her excellent book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, the earliest vibrators were sold not to women but to doctors to help relieve them of their manual labor.

Also on the pro-sex side: noted medical theorist Ernest Borgnine. I was watching the ninety-four-year-old Poseidon Adventure actor on a morning talk show, and the host asked him the secret to his long life. He replied: “I masturbate a lot.” So there you go. QED.

Recent science has come down on the side of sex as healthy. For the most part, that is. It has to be the right kind of sex: consensual, of course. And not so acrobatic that it results in broken body parts (penis fractures occur in about a thousand energetic men a year in the United States). And if you’re out of shape, there’s a slightly higher risk of heart attack in the hours after sex.

But overall, frequent orgasms have multiple health benefits. Among them, according to Rutgers University researchers: lower stress, and decreased rates of heart disease, breast cancer, and endometriosis. A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that men who ejaculated twenty-one or more times a month had a lower prostate cancer risk.

Also longevity. One British study concluded that two or more orgasms per week cut your risk of dying from heart disease in half. Another claims that Protestant ministers live longer than Catholic priests. Of course, it’s always best to take epidemiological studies like this with a grain of Himalayan crystal salt. (Also, no disrespect to Dr. Borgnine, but most of the data focus on two-person sex.)

Sex almost certainly helps a relationship. When you have an orgasm, your brain pumps out the attachment chemical oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. In fact, semen itself contains oxytocin, which is thought to have an effect on women’s postcoital moods.

Oh, and don’t forget about curing hiccups. In Bonk, Roach cites a report in the journal Canadian Family Physician called “Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups.” It was a case study of an Israeli man whose four-day hiccup spree vanished after sex with his wife.

And if that’s not enough, sex is just plain good exercise. There have been a handful—not a lot—of studies on the aerobic benefits of bedroom behavior. In one study, ten married couples tested out different positions. It wasn’t the