• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

It’s finals week, and while you may be stressing out or just getting some pre-spring break partying in before your finals actually begin, don’t forget to eat.

As counterintuitive as it seems, the quality of your diet is linked to the quality of your sex life.

So while it may seem easier to make a quick trip to the vending machine and cram down some sugar rather than sitting down and having a good meal, the latter is important – not only for your physical well-being – but for your sex life.

Watching your diet shouldn’t be difficult: There are many foods that enhance libido, including vegetables, fruits, seafood (oh, those oysters), lean meat and (God forbid) chocolate. These foods are important for your health regardless of whether you are having sex (yes, I insist that chocolate is healthy), but now you just have a little more incentive to eat them.

There are a few tricks to aid you with your eating choices. With the vegetables it’s pretty easy to tell what will boost your energy in bed – anything phallic in shape is a thumbs-up.

If you think about this too much, eating becomes an excruciatingly sexual experience (stop thinking about it). These libido-enhancing vegetables include asparagus, celery, corn, cucumbers, carrots, eggplant and more.

With fruits there is no simple way to know which ones will give you erotic superpowers, but because most of them should at least somewhat increase your hunger for sex, while decreasing your appetite for calories, I’d say eat them all. Specifically, the tomato (it’s a fruit – don’t argue with me), fondly known as the “love apple,” which has long been sought after for enhancing libido.

There seems to be a trend with the fruits that are often mistaken for vegetables. The avocado (a fruit) also has a reputation for inducing sexual prowess. It’s sexual history dates back to the Aztecs, who used it as a sexual stimulant. Their name for the fruit, ahuacatl, means “testicle,” which is due in part to its shape (there’s that shape thing again), but also to its sexual character.

Other foods that boost sexual health include beans, leeks, parsley, peppers, soy beans, spinach, truffles, turnips and watercress. Now you know why girls always order salads.

While some foods, such as garlic and onions, may increase your appetite for sex, they will probably have the opposite effect on your partner. Though it’s easy to fix the breath aspect with some toothpaste and floss, your diet effects more than just your breath – what goes in must come out.

Garlic and onions have been known to affect the taste of semen and vaginal secretions. So if you’re expecting someone to head south, I suggest you abstain from the garlic bread and onion rings.

In the same way that garlic and onions are known to negatively effect the smell of your bodily fluids, other foods have a positive contribution to make. Specifically pineapple, which is rumored to make semen taste sweet. So if you’re really pushing the swallowing side of the spit v. swallow debate, I suggest you make sure to feast on some of this fresh Hawaiian fruit.

And while it’s a good idea to eat all these foods on a regular basis, if you want to emphasize the sexual quality of these foods, they’re easily turned into a dinner for two. Or you could make use of the knowledge that chocolate not only has aphrodisiac qualities, it is also easily melted. I’ll let you be creative. (The mind is such a dirty thing.)

But if you’re ready to get really kinky, get your hands on a range of sexy candy products available from http://www.temptationsdirect.co.uk, including Cream Filled Willies (milk chocolate filled with praline), Naughty Nipples (mint chocolate nipples with a cream filling) and Jelly Boobs and Willies (pretty self-explanatory).

And it doesn’t end there: Body Butter, which is made to spread on a body, not bread, and then licked off, comes in a variety of flavors, from warm cherry to Valencia vanilla. I feel a creative mixture of flavors is in order.

And the best yet – Spermies. “These peach-flavored gum sweets are shaped just like giant sperm, and they are so tasty, they’re the only spermies no one would ever spit out,” said the advertisement. I might feel the urge to chew on these loudly in the front row of women’s sexuality, if only I was in the class.

It would be so nice if everything, from math to novels, was a sex booster. But this consistent link between food and sex makes biological sense. Both food and sex are linked to the limbic system in the brain, which generally controls emotion.

The punch line – good food means good sex. Bon appetit.

If you still haven’t stopped thinking about phallic vegetables , e-mail Lara at lloewenstein@media.ucla.edu.