by A. J. Jacobs
red ginseng
asparagus
walnuts
All are alleged to boost the sex drive, some with bioflavonoids to open up the blood vessels, others by raising testosterone, and still others by mimicking pheromones.
I laid them all out on a tray and brought them to Julie while she was watching Mad Men. A devoted wife, Julie took a bite out of each one, save the peanut butter (she hates it). She continues watching Mad Men. It’s been ten minutes, and so far she hasn’t ripped off her bra and jumped on top of me.
After the show, we go to the bedroom. I’ve brought a water mister and I spritz the air in our bedroom with a special concoction.
“What’s in that?” asks Julie.
“This scent causes the biggest increase in blood flow to women’s privates, according to one study.”
Julie sniffs the air. “I can’t place it.”
“Good and Plenty and cucumber,” I say.
Earlier, I’d soaked five pieces of the candy and three slices of cucumber in a glass of water, then poured it into the sprayer.
“Someone actually tested that? Good and Plenty and cucumber? That’s the combination they came up with?” she asks.
“That’s what the science says.”
“What about Mike and Ike and turnips?”
“It’s under review.”
She’s not annoyed, just incredulous. Unfortunately, Julie might be right to be a little skeptical. When I later asked Rockefeller University odor researcher Leslie Vosshall about it, she said, “Ah, the famous Good and Plenty study. Well, it hasn’t been replicated. It’s not one of the most pressing issues in biomedical research.”
Here’s the sad news. Almost all existing aphrodisiacs are scientifically dubious. There’s a whiff of evidence that daily ingestion of red ginseng can boost libido a bit. One meta-analysis says that maca powder and saffron might also be effective. But overall, science hasn’t yet cracked the code. They may soon. But not yet. Earlier this week, I’d e-mailed Dr. Helen Fisher for aphrodisiac advice. Fisher is a Rutgers professor, the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, and the expert on this topic. She wrote me back:
There are only a couple true aphrodisiacs: testosterone, and perhaps dopamine.
There is no evidence at all that any particular food or liquor stimulates sex drive. But testosterone does. This is the hormone of sexual desire. And these days, it is available by injection, patch, or cream.
Doctors often prescribe a dopamine agonist instead, though. Dopamine [a neurochemical associated with pleasure] does seem to stimulate sexual desire, but not directly. It probably does it by triggering the activity of testosterone, as these two chemical systems tend to stimulate each other.
So if you are really thinking of a “natural aphrodisiac,” go do something thrilling together. Novelty, danger, and excitement all drive up dopamine in the brain.
Skip the food and take a vacation together to somewhere new. The novelty will do what oysters and peanut butter never will.
A vacation isn’t on the horizon right now, not with the kids anchoring us to the apartment. So my brainstorm? Julie loves roller coasters. Roller coasters are exciting. The iPhone has a remarkably lifelike roller-coaster game.
When I show her the iPhone app, Julie gives me a look that says, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I appreciate the thought, but that’s not going to work, so you can put it away now.” I put it away.
“Okay, then. Let’s go burn some calories,” I tell Julie.
I know. Not exactly the eighteenth sonnet.
But I wanted to remind Julie that sex can be legitimate exercise. I even had the data to back it up. Two weeks ago, I bought a gadget called a Fitbit—a black, french-fry-size, motion-sensor device you clip to your waistband. It links to the Internet and keeps track of calories you expend.
To help with the calculations, Fitbit’s website has a list of activities along with the estimated calories burned per hour. It’s a long list. We’re not just talking about walking, running, and jumping rope. They’ve listed any activity you can think of.
Vacuuming? That’s 238 calories per hour.
Shuffleboard? 204 calories.
Cooking Indian bread on an outside stove? Also 204 calories per hour.
I show the printout to Julie, as we sit on the bed. She reads:
Sexual activity—passive, light effort, kissing, hugging—68 calories.
Sexual activity—general, moderate effort—88.
Sexual activity—active, vigorous effort—102 calories per hour.
“Moderate effort sounds good,” says Julie.
I agree. We’re not vigorous-effort types anymore.
Besides, she points out, if we want a workout afterward, we can always groom a horse (408 calories an hour).
I won’t go into detail about our exercise session, but suffice it to say, we fell pretty far short of the hour mark. So depending on how much you believe Fitbit’s stats—which, frankly, seem a tad low to me—we didn’t break 88 calories.
Even sadder: The following month—despite the big plans and the dopamine and the scent of Good & Plenty—Julie and I fell back into our old subaverage schedule. We’re just not motivated enough. I pledge to seek professional help. Before the end of the project, I plan to see a urologist.
Checkup: Month 7
Weight: 158
Blood pressure: 110/70
Cans of steel-cut oatmeal consumed this year: 11
Average hours per day wearing noise-canceling earphones: 10
Pounds lifted on squat machine (15 reps): 150
To paraphrase James Brown, I feel moderately good. Every day, I look at the digitally aged photo of myself and try to honor Old A.J. I’m eating a little better. The cravings for sugar and salt still wash over me, but they’re weakening. (And because I’ve weaned myself from salt, my palate has changed. It’s more sensitive. When I break down and have a potato chip, the saltiness is overwhelming, as if I’m emptying a shaker on my tongue.)
At the gym, Tony tries to work me hard enough to make my glasses steam up. “That was a lens fogger,” he’ll say proudly, after a set of fifty squats.
I’m trying, with moderate success, to control my stress. So I’m self-massaging every day. That is not a euphemism. Studies show that rubbing your own shoulders decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So I rub myself while riding the bus or reading the paper.
My family, though, is becoming impatient with the project. My sons are annoyed that I won’t eat cupcakes with them at birthday parties, opting instead for a plastic bag of carrots. They keep asking me why it’s so important to me that I be healthy.
“It’s so I don’t get sick,” I tell them one day as I spoon my steel-cut oatmeal. “So I can stay around and be with you for a long, long time.”
“So you don’t die?” says Lucas.
“Right. So I don’t die.”
I had been avoiding the D-word. But the kids cut right to it. My boys are well aware of death. My twins finish every story they make up with the same phrase: “Then everyone died. The end.”
It works no matter the subject. “And the octopus went to the circus. He saw the lions and tigers and had some cotton candy. Then everyone died. The end.” Or else, “Curious George climbed up the tree to get his kite. He got his kite. Then everyone died. The end.”
I don’t think they are being macabre. They are just looking for a tidy way to wrap up a complicated plot. It’s effective, if a tad deus ex machina.
At the same time, they are starting to get concerned about this notion of death.
A few days ago, Lucas told me, “When I grow up, I want to be a character in a book so that I never die.” That broke my heart, and made me want to warn him to avoid his own stories.
Around the same time, Zane begged me to put him on my shoulders so he could touch the ceiling in every room of our apartment. I told him I couldn’t do it right then, but I would later that evening when I got home. “B
ut what if you die before you get home?” he asked. I put him on my shoulders. He’s a smart negotiator, and I’m a sucker.
Today, over our Sunday Chinese dinner (which I don’t eat, of course), Zane asked me the dreaded question about what happens to people after they die.
What do I say? I don’t want to patronize them and say we’ll all go to heaven, since I remain agnostic about an afterlife. But I don’t want to stress the possibility of a Yawning Void of Nothingness. That could devastate them. A friend of ours has a six-year-old son suffering through a premidlife crisis about his impending lack of existence, saying things like “I know God doesn’t exist because He doesn’t talk to me. So when I die, I’ll be nothing. And I don’t want to be nothing.” Long crying jags follow.
I decided that admitting my ignorance was the best way to go.
“No one’s sure what happens. Some people think it’s like you go to sleep for a long time, but you don’t dream.”
They seem to be processing that one.
“And some people think we go somewhere called ‘heaven,’ which is a wonderful place.”
“I hope that one is true,” says Julie.
“And some people think we won’t ever die.”
Julie shoots me a look.
“There’s a man named Aubrey de Grey, and he’s got a looong beard.” I draw my hand from my chin down to my stomach. “And he’s a scientist. And he says that soon we will be able to keep our cells from getting old. Cells are tiny pieces of us and they sometimes make garbage, and we just have to clean up the garbage. And maybe that would make us live forever.”
“Like infinity years?” asks Jasper.
“Right,” I say. “And there’s another scientist named Ray Kurzweil who thinks we may be able to upload our brains into a computer and live forever that way.”
“But we don’t have to worry about any of this for a long time,” says Julie.
Julie thinks I’m doing crazy talk. She tells me so later: “You’re giving them false hope. You’re feeding their delusions of immortality.” Maybe she’s right. But I’ve been steeping myself in books about the life extension movement. I’ve been reading about telomeres and sirtuins. I’ve read how some scientists think the humble lobster may hold some clues to immortality, since aging doesn’t inflict damage on lobster cells. If not for outside forces like disease and predators, the average lobster might just keep on crawling along the bottom of the ocean for centuries.
The science of indefinite life extension isn’t totally fringe anymore. It’s not like Yeti or cold fusion. It’s only partially fringe. So what’s wrong with a little happily-ever-after, especially if it’s got a little cutting-edge medical theory behind it?
Chapter 8
The Nervous System
The Quest to Hurt Less
I HURT MY SHOULDER the other day. I hurt it while lugging a sheet of drywall out of my apartment. At least that’s what I tell people. Because I don’t want to hear their sass when I tell them the truth. Which is that I hurt my shoulder kayaking. On Wii.
Yes, smirk if you must. Go ahead and marvel at my athletic ineptitude. It wasn’t even a manly video game like Wii football or Wii rugby. It was recreational boating. But listen, I was paddling hard, trying to get a real calorie-burning workout, swerving around the yellow buoys, and, well, the damn Wii remote has no resistance. So I strained my shoulder. And let me add, I’m far from the only Wii victim. A simple Google search reveals dozens of articles on the problem, including one written by an orthopedic surgeon who recommends pre-Wii stretching.
And, in case it helps my cause, the shoulder is an easy part of
the human body to injure. It’s a ball-and-socket joint, meaning it’s got the widest range of motion, and the most chances for muscles, tendons, and ligaments to get tugged in the wrong way.
My shoulder injury has prompted me to devote this month to researching—and ridding myself of—pain. The first lesson: Thank God I was born in the age of painkillers. The majority of Americans are accustomed to living relatively pain-free lives most of the time. This situation hasn’t been the case for most of human history. Pain has long been our constant, horrible companion.
Just contemplate the awful spectacle of surgery without anesthesia. If you read the absorbing book The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom, you learn that doctors refused to tell their patients what day surgery was scheduled for. They simply showed up at the patient’s house on a random Tuesday or Thursday for a surprise operation. Otherwise, the patients would commit suicide the night before. It was that bad.
Thernstrom quotes Fanny Burney, a British novelist who had a mastectomy in 1810 (performed, incidentally, by Napoleon’s chief surgeon). Burney gave us the most vivid surviving description of predrug surgery. You might need anesthesia to read it:
[It was] a terror that surpasses all description . . . when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves . . . I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! . . . When the wound was made and the instrument withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp poniards . . . when again I felt the instrument, describing a curve, cutting against the grain, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand, then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.
Even after anesthesia was invented, it wasn’t always used. Suffering, you see, was natural. When I wrote my book on the Bible, I read about the bizarre nineteenth-century controversy over women giving birth under anesthesia. Some felt it violated God’s commandment “Women will give birth in pain.”
Nowadays, pain has receded from our lives a bit. But we have a long way to go. Chronic pain—meaning pain that lasts several months—afflicts 70 million Americans at a cost of $100 billion to the economy, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health Pain Research Consortium. We haven’t yet found a suitable treatment for chronic pain. Pills sometimes work—but they tend to be addictive.
Reading about pain, I’m reminded, once again, that I want a refund on my body. Everybody should get one. Send this fleshy bag of bones and muscles back to the factory!
I’m not saying the body isn’t amazing in many ways. It is. I could marvel for days at the design of the ear, and how it converts puffs of air into a Haydn concerto.
But at the same time, the body has many deeply embedded bugs. We’re the result of ad hoc evolution and outdated hardware. And pain is one of the cruelest, most primal systems.
Pain is so unsubtle. Couldn’t evolution have found a better way to alert us that we stubbed our toe? Rather than this sensation that makes us curse the day our mom and dad met at the college cafeteria? What about just having the toe throb gently? Or turn green? Or play a little ragtime number? I’d pay attention. I swear.
Pain is annoying and unnecessary, like getting an e-mail in all caps. It’s like a six-year-old who alerts you every fifteen seconds that he wants Hungry Hungry Hippos for his birthday. Yes, I understand. Message received.
Maybe when we were slugs, we needed pain’s brutish alarm system to pay attention. But now that we have cerebral cortices, pain should have been phased out.
Not to mention that pain is ridiculously unreliable. Thernstrom describes this problem with a wonderful metaphor. Think of pain as a guard in a watchtower. He rings the bell when he sees enemies. Problem is, the guard is “erratic, lazy, easily confused, fearful, a poor multitasker, and sometimes just deluded.” Sometimes he’ll ring the bell for no reason. Sometimes he keeps ringing the bell long after the enemies have been killed.
Pain can erupt with no cause, linger for years, even appear in a phantom limb. And here’s one of pain’s most sadistic qualities: If you suffer from chronic pain, it often doesn’t ebb as the body heals. It often gets worse. Pain begets pain. The neural pathways become smoother, the message stro
nger. It’s a positive feedback loop that serves only to increase our misery.
Sharp Relief
My shoulder pain has gotten bad enough that I’ll try anything to cure it. My general practitioner taught me some physical therapy exercises, which I do at home, using a pole as a very light barbell. No improvement so far. Julie gives me a massage every night as she reads her historical novels, which is somewhat helpful.
I’ve tried a makeshift Buddhist approach—instead of fleeing from the pain, I concentrate on it with a Zen, nonpartisan mind-set. I say to myself, “Now that’s an interesting sensation. The burning. The throbbing.” I overthink the pain. But this strategy works better with short-term pain—a thumb jammed in a drawer, for instance—than it does with my lingering shoulder ache.
So today, I’m trying out new strategy: acupuncture. I find a place a block away—in New York, an acupuncturist is never more than a five-minute walk from your house.
And now I’m in the waiting room in the basement of a building. The door to the waiting room is propped open with a watermelon-size Buddha. I’m getting a whiff of that unmistakable Alterna Health scent. I can’t pinpoint it—jasmine? frankincense? spilled kale juice?—but I always smell it at non-Western medical practices.
I fill out my forms and browse the pamphlets, which are clearly targeted at another gender. Example: a gluten-free tonic called Zenopause.
The acupuncturist calls me into her office. She introduces herself as Galina. She’s a solid Russian woman in her sixties with bangs, a thick accent, and a white robe covered with words such as “Calm” and “Relax” in both English and Chinese.
“What brings you here?” she asks.
I explain the pain in my shoulder. She nods, jots down a note. Then she asks me questions for ten minutes straight, scribbling more notes.
“Do you sweat?”
“Yes.”
“Which places?”
