Healthy Cardiovascular System, Better Erections
Taking care of your vascular health extends your life and has benefits in the bedroom. Here’s what to eat and take.
The more blood you get into your penis, the better your erection. We’re talking about sexual vascular health, or, more accurately, overall vascular health. If the heart works well and the pipes are clear, erections are strong.
This association between cardiovascular health and erectile function is so strong that the inability to attain a powerful erection is sometimes interpreted as one of the first signs of heart disease.
The Pro-Sexual Diet
No, we’re not talking about eating oysters or any bogus aphrodisiacs. A pro-sexual diet has largely to do with establishing and maintaining blood vessel health: a healthy, pliable endothelium throughout the entire body and not just in the penis. Supplements like niacin and fish oil do wonders for endothelial (inner lining of blood vessels) health, but they can only take you so far. What you need is a diet jam-packed with polyphenols.
Polyphenols are chemicals found in plants, collectively called phytochemicals. There are at least 500 of them, but possibly as many as 8,000, and they have amazing effects on the animals that eat them.
The Classes of Polyphenols
There are two broad classes of polyphenols – flavonoids and nonflavonoids.
The flavonoid group breaks down into six dietary groups:
- Flavones: Found in abundance in citrus fruits, celery, and parsley.
- Flavonols: Rich sources include broccoli, blueberries, and kale.
- Flavanones: Found in citrus fruit and mint, among other places.
- Isoflavones: Commonly found in vegetables and fruits in general.
- Flavanols: Apples, grapes, teas, and cocoa are rich sources.
- Anthocyanidins: Found in blueberries, blackberries, and eggplant.
The non-flavonoid group breaks down into four different classes:
- Stilbenes: The well-known compound resveratrol (found in high amounts in Rez-V (on Amazon)) is a stilbene. It and its cousins are commonly found in red wines, apples, pears, plums, peaches, and other foods.
- Phenolic Acids: These are found in coffee, teas, cherries, blueberries, and a bunch of other fruits.
- Lignans: Rich sources include kale, broccoli, berries, and whole grains.
- Other polyphenols: This non-specific category includes ellagic acid from berries and curcumin (on Amazon).
For optimum endothelial function, ingest representatives of all of these polyphenol groups. However, different foods have different polyphenols in different concentrations. There probably isn’t one food that has optimum amounts of all of them. That’s why we need to diversify. We need to put less focus on counting servings of fruits and vegetables while focusing more on counting food groupings that contain different kinds of polyphenols.
The Polyphenol Food Groupings
Following are the “polyphenolic” food groupings, along with some high-phenol representatives of each group. In an ideal erection world, you’d have multiple servings of some of these groupings (fruits and vegetables) – and at least one serving of each of the other groupings – every day:
- Vegetables: Artichokes, potatoes, rhubarb, yellow onions, red cabbage, cherry tomatoes, leeks, broccoli, celery.
- Fruits: Berries, apples, apricots, plums, pears, grapes, cherries (the darker the fruit, the higher the polyphenol content).
- Whole Grains: Buckwheat, rye, oats, barley, corn, wheat, rice.
- Nuts, Seeds, Legumes: Black beans, white beans, pecans, almonds, walnuts, flaxseed, chestnuts, hazelnuts.
- Fats: Virgin olive oil, sesame seed oil, dark chocolate.
- Beverages: Coffee, tea, red wine, cocoa.
- Spices: Oregano, rosemary, soy sauce, cloves, peppermint, anise, celery seed, saffron, spearmint, thyme, basil, curry powder, ginger, cumin, cinnamon, garlic.
Unfortunately, if you’re like most men, your daily polyphenol intake consists of the blueberries in the muffin you had with your morning coffee. We get it. It takes a lot of work to eat well, let alone eat representative foods from seven different food groups.
A sensible and, in some ways, a better alternative is to ingest a scoop of Superfood (on Amazon) every day. The product is an array of 18 strategically chosen freeze-dried berries, fruits, and vegetables. The ingredients retain the identical phytochemical content, enzymatic activity, and bioactivity of fresh products.
