Please pardon the errors, this was transcribed by a computer… gotta love artificial intelligence!
Kevin English: [00:00:00] Here's a question for you. Why do we eat? On the surface, it seems like a simple question. We eat because it's biologically necessary for our survival. But for us humans, it's a bit more complex than that. We eat for a number of reasons. We eat for social and emotional reasons to celebrate big occasions or a solace when we're depressed or anxious.

Some of us have religious or ethical guidelines for eating. Many of you listening to this podcast, eat to fuel your fitness goals. Powerlifters bodybuilders, endurance athletes and CrossFitters all eat in a prescribed manner to fuel their activity. Many of us eat in order to lose or gain weight. If you're at all interested in health and fitness, then you care about your nutrition and would like the way you eat to help you achieve your body composition or athletic goals.

Or perhaps your goals aren't as ambitious. Maybe you just want to eat healthier in order to be healthier. Today, we're going to talk about another reason to eat. To optimize your sexual health.

Hello and welcome to the over 50 health and wellness show. I'm your host, Kevin English. And I'm a certified personal trainer and nutrition coach. I created this podcast to explore themes and topics vital to help the aging. Join me each week as we meet subject matter experts and inspirational men and women to discuss not just how to survive as we age, but how to thrive, how to live our strongest, most vital lives into our fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond.

My guest today is Christine Delosure. Christine is an acupuncturist and herbalist who specializes in sexual health. She holds master's degrees in acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine and counseling. And she's a certified holistic nutrition counselor. She is the author of the book titled diet for great sex food for male and female sexual health.

Which uses scientific evidence to uncover the best dietary habits for great sex merging modern science with traditional Chinese medicine. I asked Christine where her journey of traditional Chinese medicine, nutrition and sex began.

Christine DeLozier: [00:02:22] So it all started with the nutrition piece. I've always been obsessed with A natural way of living nature. so I've always felt the best approach to health is, first and foremost, through the foods we eat and, trying to stick as close as we can to what mother nature intended.

Then later on came the Chinese medicine. The more I learned about Chinese medicine and acupuncture, the more blown away I was by how much it's able to accomplish in the body without the use of any pharmaceuticals or anything that has the potential for more serious side effects, that sort of thing.

So I. I went to school and I studied acupuncture. I went into private practice and along the way in my, early in my practice, I chose to specialize in sexual health. So the way that came about, you know, most acupuncturists, we. Treat a lot of back pain, a lot of headaches, a lot of neck pain, that sort of thing.

And one of my patients that I had been treating for back pain came in and just asked me if I could do anything to help him have stronger erections. And I said, you know what, let's give it a whirl. It's not something I treat all the time, but it's something that I, you know, I learned in an acupuncture school, we certainly learned about sexual health.

So we did that and he had great results. He came back the next treatment and, and he had reported to me that, you know, this has been something that's, that has been an issue with him and his wife and after the treatment, they had a really great sexual experience and then as, as we continue to treat him, he got better and better results.

He was really happy. And then I ended up having similar results with a few more patients that I treated and I thought, you know, this is something that really has the potential to bring a lot of value to people's lives. And it's something that's really difficult to treat. So I decided to specialize in sexual health.

Kevin English: [00:04:20] Okay. let me back up and pick some of that apart a little bit. You had mentioned that it was the food first, that was kind of your start, right? On this journey that you've just always had this affinity for healthy food and optimal health nutritionally. Where do you think that came from?

I mean, was it, was that something that your parents instilled into you or where did that come from?

Christine DeLozier: [00:04:39] Okay. My mom was a single mom. She was a single teenage mom and she had to work like three or four jobs always to support us. So. we grew up eating frozen dinners. We grew up eating a lot of processed foods, a lot of junk food, a lot of stuff that we would, you know, from a can, that sort of thing. So, no all of my whole childhood was spent actually building up plaque accumulation in my blood vessels, including those leading to the genitals, which is definitely not what we want for great sex.

So no, that's not where it came from. I just have always loved nature. I loved, I really cherished my time outdoors as a kid and, I don't know. I just had an affinity for nature, so that's kind of where my, philosophy came from. And I'm a foodie. I love food. I love the aesthetic of food. I like taking pictures of it.

I love cooking. and so it's just something I'm naturally motivated to do. I just like it. So you know, I do actually have a history, a background in, sciences while I was trained to be a research scientist, and then I didn't actually pursue a career in it, but I did train. So I know how to read research.

And I spent a lot of time trying to discover for my own knowledge, are there foods out there that will help people have better sex? You know, when I'm working with my patients, Is there something that's supported by science to tell them to do so that it will support their treatment goals. So I always ask my patients what they eat.

And when I looked at the, the medical literature, I found that the answer was absolutely yes, food has a very, very strong impact on, on how we experienced sex. You know, it influences how well our blood vessels are delivering blood flow to the genitals. It affects how strongly in quickly, our nerves are firing.

And that equates directly to pleasure. You know, when, when our partner touches us the better our nerves are functioning, the more pleasure we'll experience, and then thirdly sex hormones. So food affects that whole entire trifecta of great sex. If you will.

Kevin English: [00:06:46] Yeah. So you talk a lot about that. Yeah. Holy Trinity, or that trifecta of great sex and that being hormone balance, nerve integrity and vascular health, which you just briefly mentioned, all three of those. I do want to deep dive into each of those, but before we go there, you wrote this a book called diet for great sex.

And I think in your intro, you say, who should read this book? And you said anyone who would like to have the best sex possible through the most natural means possible. And I think that probably encompasses all of my listening audience right now. So what gave you the inspiration to write this book?

Christine DeLozier: [00:07:22] it hadn't been done before. And I've read a lot of great diet books, so I have a lot of, I do read a lot of great diet books. I'm really into that. I let it read a lot of science books, but I hadn't found something like this that actually laid everything out, how our diet directly equates to, , to sexual function and what specific foods that actually have some substantial body of evidence to support it.

So everything in my book is based in science, it's based on what the medical research and nutritional research says. So. Yeah, so I thought it was exciting. I was really, I was like, Oh, this is cool. I have, nobody has written this. This is something that would be directly beneficial to my patients.

Every time I meet a patient, I always spend, a lot of time telling them what they should eat. And this was a way for me to tell them what they should eat thoroughly, you know, I can't possibly do this in an hour long session, you know, I need a whole book to, to do this. So, so that's what I did.

Kevin English: [00:08:23] Yeah. And I suppose to your point there, you're right. This is a unique book. There's a lot of books on sex. There's a lot of books on nutrition, but to my knowledge, this is the only book certainly that I've read that combines the two.

And as I was reading through this, it occurs to me very quickly that the diet principles or the nutritional principles that effect great sexual response are the same that would affect just holistic, healthy, active people. Right. So let's dig into this a little bit. We all know that hormones that's the most obvious one, right?

Let's start there. We all know that hormones affect sex. That one's pretty obvious. Talk to us a little bit about hormones. What the sexual hormones are and how diet affects hormone balance or imbalance.

Christine DeLozier: [00:09:12] So instead of thinking of it, like, you know, we have our sex hormones and these are the ones that affect sex. It's more like a symphony, you know, so you've got your testosterone. We all know that's a player in libido and sexual function for males and females. We've got our estrogen and again, important for male and female sexual health, but then there are numerous, there are countless other hormones and they all interact in this carefully orchestrated symphony And when you throw one of them out of balance, horrible is or rarely out of balance in isolation. It's usually many of them that are out of balance. And again, food very much affects this. You take one dietary practice that's very common and that's eating a lot of processed sugar that wreaks havoc on our sex hormones.

it makes us what we call Leptin resistant. And that's a hormone that will later affect our sex hormones. It affects our sex hormones. It affects our overall hormones. And so it disrupts our sex hormones indirectly. If that makes sense. Other things as far as dietary practices that that disrupt our sex hormones is the amount of fat we eat and we eat way too much fat in our diets.

And again, that disrupts our sex hormones. There are ways though that we can help rebalance our sex hormones in the short term and in the long run, you know, even. Just one thing for example, leafy greens, leafy greens are one of the best things you can eat for sex. Because not only do they have tons of minerals and vitamins that, you know, strengthen nerve conduction improve vascular health, but they also actually directly reduce cortisol levels.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, and we're all under a lot of stress and cortisol, disrupts testosterone. So that's going to directly affect libido. It affects sexual function, it affects you know, every aspect of sex.

Kevin English: [00:11:13] And so to your point, you're talking about specifically leafy greens and That's helping us to reduce our cortisol and cortisol, if I'm not mistaken is kind of a, it's a stress hormone. Is that right associated with stress it's associated with inflammation. These are all bad things, right?

And you had mentioned also of course, things to avoid being  high, fat, high sugar, which unfortunately is a big part of the standard American diet. But aside from leafy greens, what are some other nutritional practices we can participate in to help balance that you had mentioned?

There's the short-term as well as the long-term to help bring our hormones balance.

Christine DeLozier: [00:11:55] so for the longterm, you know, do everything I say in the book for the longterm. I mean, they, you know, kind of all of the chapters focused on kind of one aspect, whether it's the hormones or the, the nerves or the vascular, but yeah. Pretty much all of those practices affect the other two categories as well.

But you know, if we talk about the short term, the food, the food we even affects our testosterone and our sex hormones immediately following a meal. So. For example, you had high sugar meal, your testosterone will sharply declined right after. So if you're having a date night with your partner, the last thing you want to do is have a really fatty meal.

It's going to, first of all, it's going to dump your testosterone. And secondly, it will stiffen your blood vessels immediately, you know, within the couple hours following eating. So something like salmon and the high omega-3 fats actually have the opposite effect on blood vessels. So they actually make them more elastic following, eating.

Another thing that, dumps testosterone is a high sugar meal. So, the sugary sweets we'll leave those aside even for a date night, you know, I mean, in the long-term they disrupt hormones, but even in the short term they disrupt hormones. So if you're going to have a night with your partner, Avoid something really sweet and really fatty.

And instead have some of the other things that we'll talk about that improve blood flow in the short and long-term.

Kevin English: [00:13:15] Okay. That's yeah, so already we're getting some great advice here. So for date night, and I think this is probably common for a lot of people might be that rich high fat meal followed by an assumption. Sugar filled dessert, two things that are not going to serve us that evening on that date night.

So thanks for sharing that. And just to talk a little bit more on the fact cause you had mentioned, and you know, a piece of salmon might be a good choice and the reason being it's got that high concentration of Omega three fatty acids, right? Can you talk a little bit about the difference between good fat and bad fat, so to speak and its role on sexual health and sexual function?

Christine DeLozier: [00:13:53] sure. So in general, total fat in general will have an effect on blood vessels, regardless, according to the research, regardless of the source. If you're having too high of fat, even if it's coming from good fats, like nuts and avocados and things like that, you still will have some vascular effects that are undesirable for sex.

However, those are better. And we definitely want to include those in our diet. The worst fats for your blood vessels are of course, the trans fats. And the worst fats are the ones that are the most processed, even oils are very dense fats that, that aren't great for blood vessels.

your best source of fats are again, are going to be something like your omega-3 rich fats, your PUFAs and your muhfuckas, you know, so your motto and saturated, fatty acids, your polyunsaturated, fatty acids, those in research have a better effect on the vascular system.

Kevin English: [00:14:47] I think that for a lot of us, a date night, often involves going out to a restaurant, right where our chances are pretty low of our food, not being prepared with. vegetable oils. Right? So we'll get around to talking about what we should eat for a date night, but for now let's, let's move on.

Let's move on from hormones and understanding that hormones in this nervous system and vascular system and all of these things are, they're not independent of one another. They're they're working in concert. Just like you had mentioned your hormones. It's not so much of any one hormone. We think testosterone and estrogen.

And typically we think sexual health and function, but it's. I think you called it a symphony of hormonal balance. And we certainly want to eat for that balance, both short-term and long-term. In terms of the nervous system, you had written that as we age, our nerve impulses, they grow weaker and slower and they take longer to respond to stimuli.

And what this means for sex is that the communication between the genitals, the spinal cord and the brain is not as good, which can result in less arousal and less pleasure. And for those of us folks over 50 if we eat more antioxidants and Omega threes, we can improve some of that nerve conduction.

Does that, is that a fair way of saying that

Christine DeLozier: [00:16:04] Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That the damage that happens. So it's not just where, you know, it's not just aging. What it is, is oxidative stress. It's all of that accumulated accelerated stress from our lifestyle, from our diets the way that we treat our bodies, our exposure to environmental toxins, it all causes oxidative stress on our nerves and slows them down.

So there's been lots of research showing that antioxidants will in fact speed up nerve conduction. So it's probably the best thing you can do to make your, genitals more sensitive to your partner's touch.

Kevin English: [00:16:40] okay. So now, now we're getting somewhere. Okay. We all want that. What are some good examples of healthy antioxidants? What foods should we be eating to get some of these antioxidants into us?

Christine DeLozier: [00:16:52] Well, of course, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Berries are a great source. Leaves are a great source. One of my favorite foods for antioxidants are mushrooms. In fact, they wrote a whole chapter on mushrooms because I love them. They're kind of amazing miraculous health food and they're so fascinating the way that they operate on the body, they have tons of antioxidants.

antioxidants are going to help that whole trifecta of great sex, they help everything. And also the coolest thing about mushrooms is this, There is a lot of research that's you know, moderately we've focused our research efforts, more and more on the microbiome and just how much it affects every aspect of health.

this balance is delicate balance of microbes in our digestive tract. And of course, we have these microbiomes throughout our body with a microbiome on our skin and our ears on, you know, our nasal passage in our digestive tract. So we see in research that this microbiome affects everything.

It even affects your risk of cardiovascular disease. There was one study, for example, that showed that you can actually, if we have a group of mice, that's at high risk of cardiovascular disease, we can actually transfer that risk by just transferring their feces into a new group of rats, those new group of rats their digestive tract is then populated with these microbes that will increase their risk of cardiovascular disease.

so this microbiome it's huge. And the research that I saw there, loads of studies on this too, showing that the benefit of mushrooms is they actually act on the microbiome, improving the diversity of the microbiome and improving the populations of beneficial bacteria and reducing populations of pathogenic bacteria, which is

so amazing. And each mushroom has a different action and it affects different microbes in the digestive track. So it's so cool. It's fascinating. And then on top of it, they have all these other benefits as well. So mushrooms are my favorite antioxidant.

Kevin English: [00:19:00] Yeah. And I certainly wanted to ask you about mushrooms cause you, do you have a whole chapter on it and some folks may not know that mushrooms actually are not plants. They're clearly not animals. They're their own sort of kingdom. So what are a few of your favorite mushrooms?

Christine DeLozier: [00:19:17] Well, let's see. Okay. I just actually made a, my mom was sick and I made a soup for her. What I made sure that I include was oyster mushrooms. It's one of my favorites. But even white button button mushrooms improve the diversity of, the microbiome. The cheapest ones, you know, the cheaper grocery store mushrooms, but I like, I like oyster mushrooms because they're one of the few foods that actually has vitamin D

in it, you know, so there's some new research on that. That's not typically listed as one of their nutritional benefits, but there's new research showing that they do have vitamin D. And so I made my mom a soup that had some oyster mushrooms in it. It had some white mushrooms and that, you know, they have that immune benefit as well as, some of the other things.

and then my favorite fun mushroom is chaga. Chaga is so delicious and it's fun. And it's, you know, I just love to have it. It's actually a fungus that grows inside the bark of Birch trees. And also some other trees. I harvest it here and in where I live sometimes, and it's these big Woody chunks.

It doesn't actually look like a mushroom. It looks like these like black and like Woody chunks with this black substance on it. It was used as a coffee substitute in world war two, because it has this delicious vanilla flavor. You boil it and it, it extracts this caramel colored. It looks like coffee.

It looks about the same, the same color as coffee has a nice villain, Ella aroma. And what I like to do with it is I either put a little spoon of honey in there. Or I'll throw some fennel, some cinnamon, some cardamom and some other spices in there, some clothes maybe. And I whisk it up with some honey and maybe some almond milk or something.

And I have it either ice, if it's in the summer or hot in the winter as a nice a chai latte.

Kevin English: [00:21:15] if I'm not mistaken, that sounds familiar. I think that recipes in your book, is that

Christine DeLozier: [00:21:18] It is. Yep.

Kevin English: [00:21:19] mushroom latte. Yeah. Okay. So certainly Oyster mushrooms are something that are fairly accessible. I know that you can go online and buy a kit and grow your own. So, and they're probably in some of your local grocery stores, certainly button mushrooms.

When we started getting into things like chaga and cordyceps and some of these other more exotic ones, how does one go about procuring or finding these? Is that. Yeah, that's part a and then part B is I know that, for example, some of these mushrooms now there's this in the kind of the health and wellness space, these things are being powdered and sold as supplements.

Is that a good option for somebody who doesn't have a local resource to get some of these mushrooms fresh?

Christine DeLozier: [00:22:01] so the best way to get these, I usually get them through Etsy. You can get them through Amazon too, but they're a little bit more. And they're you know, it's like a company that makes them, but if you get a month at sea, a lot of times there are people who forge them wild, and then they package them that like small time, small scale and you can get them at a better price.

And they're really good quality chaga as well. It's that's the cool thing about chaga is that you can reuse it. So you boil up these things and then you save the chunks and you can reuse them like five, six, seven times. It just takes a little longer to boil them every single time. So that's what I would get them.

They, they do have supplements and I would say some of the supplements are good. One of the things mushroom companies that I, that I order from in my practice is host defense. They have a really high quality product for supplements of mushrooms. And I think they are. I think they are good.

They can be good. I always like to get things from food most just because a lot of times you're getting the maximum profile of what that species, that organism has to offer.

Kevin English: [00:23:09] yeah, that's well said and a hundred percent agree. Now you had mentioned was it post-defense

Christine DeLozier: [00:23:14] host, host defense.

Kevin English: [00:23:16] host defense.

Christine DeLozier: [00:23:17] Yep.

Kevin English: [00:23:18] And I'll drop that in the show notes for anybody who wants to take a look at that. Okay. So we've talked a little bit about hormones. What we should should not eat probably there for optimizing our hormones for great sex.

We've talked a little bit about the nervous system about antioxidants, the criticality of that on our nervous system and how mushrooms can be our best friends and that area certainly want to encourage folks to explore some of that. That leaves us with our vascular system. So we know that damaged blood vessels, constricted blood vessels just don't deliver

blood flow very well, and they don't deliver blood, I suppose, to sexual organs as well. What we want is this rich, nutrient, this nutrient rich blood to get to the right place at the right time, I suppose, in terms of of a sexual response. Talk to us a little bit about our vascular system and again, what we should and should not eat to optimize our vascular health.

Christine DeLozier: [00:24:20] Sure. So, first of all, let me tell you that blood flow, we all know that it's important for male sexual health and for strong erections, but what most people don't realize is that it's equally important for female sexual function and sexual pleasure. Lubrication comes following blood flow. So it's actually a by-product of blood flow and also clitoral sensitivity

and pleasure actually do improve with better blood flow for females. So that's important. Of course, the cruel joke that nature has played on human beings is this the blood vessels to the clitoris and to the penis are among the smallest in the body. So any plaque accumulation shows up there first, in fact, erectile dysfunction is one of the first signs of cardiovascular disease.

So those get clogged first. And what happens is they're just, there's less blood flow. one of the few foods that it has actually been shown to reverse plaque accumulation to a certain degree. You know, so cardiovascular disease is something that's considered to be progressive and area versable, but they're actually finding modern lead that leaves.

there, actually some doctors. treating patients for type two diabetes and for cardiovascular disease, with the plant-based diet and they are giving them loads and loads of leaves every day. And seeing some reversal in plaque accumulation. So especially if you're early on in the game, you know, where, where you're still having you know, where you still have sexual function, maybe it's, maybe it's not as good as it was before and you're catching it early.

you could get some really great benefit from eating a lot of leaves and that would be like a, a nice leafy green salad every single day. the foods that I would say would be best for vascular health and for employees improving blood flow to the genitals and, and therefore the sexual benefit of that would be changing our lunchtime routine to being a salad.

And maybe a big yam or some squash every single day. And there were a couple of reasons for that. The first of which is that leaves are naturally high in nitrates. And this promotes vascular health. They're also high in tons of minerals that are important for vascular health, as well as they have zinc, which again, we talked about how it reduces cortisol and also they have these micronutrients which reduce inflammation and just, you know, overall they're, they're good for vascular health.

So that's number one. Number two are potassium rich foods like baked potato with the skins on it, big Dan with the skin squash. There's actually not a long list of high potassium foods. So we're talking about an orange banana mango again, not a long list and each of these has about 20% of the RDA.

So the reason for this is this. Humans used to take in about 10 times as much potassium in our diets as sodium. Now, moderately, we take in about 10 times as much sodium as potassium, and this is wreaking havoc on our blood vessels, potassium softens this delicate inner lining of blood vessels. So it improves the elasticity of them.

And it also counteracts some of the stiffening effects of sodium. the worst part about that is that when we take in excess sodium, our bodies deal with it in part by flushing, potassium. So it even further interferes with our potassium. So having a nice potassium source, you know, have a couple of those fruits and vegetables that we mentioned every day.

And that combined within the. The other sources of, less resources at potassium, and you can get a decent amount along with kind of trying to keep your salt low. If that makes sense.

Kevin English: [00:28:17] no, it certainly does. And to your point, I think you, you had mentioned that it's probably ancestrally. We were biologically built for a one to 10 ratio of sodium to potassium if I heard that right. But unfortunately in our modern world, that's probably reversed. Now it's more of a 10 to one sodium to potassium.

And going back to our example of date night often is at a restaurant. I know that when we cook here at home, there's not big. Salt users. And it's amazing some restaurants when you go out the biggest flavor profile and pretty much anything you, order is salt. We, we just salt everything as Westerners.

And it's also fascinating that you mentioned that The smallest blood vessels are those leading to our genitals. And they're the first to start to get the ill effects of this constriction. Okay. So keeping cut on that mineral and micronutrients train for just a minute.

Talk to us little bit more about some of these other. Minerals. I know that in the book you go through and you talk a lot about I think some of the big ones would be magnesium. Zinc certainly is one that comes to mind calcium in it, in addition to the sodium and potassium

Christine DeLozier: [00:29:31] Yeah. So. when all of these minerals they're involved in every process of the body. So from, you know, every time a nerve fires, you're utilizing all of these minerals, these major minerals, calcium, magnesium, sodium potassium, and so nerve conduction of course relies on these minerals and our bodies while they

always struggle. You know, they strive to maintain this perfect balance of minerals when you're not getting enough of them in your diet. It absolutely affects your health. So I've talked to people and they've said, Oh, well, you know what? Not having enough potassium doesn't matter because your body maintains these precise levels of sodium and potassium and inches flushes out all the excess sodium.

So you're fine. And with other middle-ish all of these. All of these minerals. If our bodies do still maintain function, even at sub optimal levels of these minerals, but it certainly still affects our health. It definitely affects our vascular health, our nerve health, our hormonal health. It affects everything.

And so I should say though, that I, I personally feel like the best way to get these minerals is through diet. I think it's really hard to kind of play God and figure out or play mother nature and take supplements that are in these optimal ratios. All these minerals compete with one another.

So, calcium can interfere with our iron absorption. Magnesium can interfere with calcium absorption. You know, zinc can interfere with magnesium absorption. They all, they all compete for binding sites in the body.

And when you load up on one of them, you can inadvertently give yourself a deficiency in another. So trying to play the supplement route with minerals can be tricky. I mean, Having said that a lot of us, many of us don't get enough of these minerals in our diets. And so, you know, so if somebody wanted to supplement can take a multi-mineral, it, it should be more broad and balanced though, if you're going to do that because these minerals, it's basically this complex sequence of chemical reactions involving all of these,

all of these minerals, you know, that's how our body operates. Every time our heart contracts, when even, you know, Paracelsus the muscular contractions that move food from one end to the other, they all rely on these, on these minerals.

It's just like, okay, so we have these distinct pieces. You know, we have the vascular system, the nervous system and the hormonal balance. But of course, every substance produced by the body is controlled by our nervous system, ultimately. So, they're all kind of mutually influential and every nerve contraction depends on this adequate balance of minerals.
Kevin English: [00:32:19] Yeah, and I, I love how you bring up the topic of supplementation and how, individual supplementation, which is, it fits our culture. Right. We have this instant gratification kind of mentality, but clearly getting our micronutrients, minerals, vitamins, et cetera, through whole foods would be the preferable way.

And then if there's, for some reason, you can't get that working with your, practitioner to come up with a Supplementation plan. And I think you also brought up a great point when you talked about the body and you were describing mineral balance, how the body will maintain function, but you made the distinction between functioning, just getting by and not shutting down versus

optimal health. And that's really what your book is about. It's about optimal health. It's about you didn't call it just having sex. You had, you called it having great sex, which means that you're going to have to have this optimal, great diet, right. You're going to have to have all of these systems, this hormonal system, this nervous system, this vascular system, all, firing together to work optimally.

So I, yeah, I love all of that. Being a bit of a nutrition nerd myself. I love it. So Christine let's switch gears just for a minute. You've got another section of your book for lack of a better word, I'll call them aphrodisiacs. Right? So most people out there probably thinking, well, okay, oysters, they've got a reputation gin saying that's okay.

You've got a reputation there. Talk to us a little bit about, since you brought up supplementation, talk to us about quote unquote aphrodisiacs. What are some good ones maybe and what are some bad ones? And maybe again, that distinction between buying that in a pill versus buying that food in a store

Christine DeLozier: [00:34:06] sure. So some of the some of the herbal supplements are. Typically on the stronger end of the aphrodisiacs, that the ones that actually work all the aphrodisiacs that I looked at in the book, I only included ones that had some kind of research to support their efficacy. Most of them didn't have a lot of research.

It's you? It was usually just like two or three studies, so it's not. real strong evidence. But they, a lot of them have been used throughout the ages as aphrodisiacs. And yeah, on the more mild end you have the culinary aphrodisiacs, but some of them were actually shown in research to have a quite immediate effect, like cloves, cloves those who used s had.

Reported more sexual satisfaction and arousal response, for example. So that one actually had a, kind of a short-term immediate effect. One of the more studied aphrodisiacs culinary aphrodisiacs is saffron. That is the one that I found the most research on. And that's when you, since Cleopatra, Sacha, you know, Cleopatra used to put like a half a cup of saffron, which is so much considering the fact that it's, you know, the statement of this Crocus

plants. So it's so such a tiny part of it that you have to pick so many of them to get a half a cup it's it's unreal. And that's why it's so expensive, but she used to put a half a cup of it in her baths to prepare for her lovers. And so it's been used for a really long time. It's still used and there's, there are plenty of studies to show that it increases libido.

People have more sex with saffron and it had such a reputation that people were, were advised against eating, don't eat any saffron dishes or, you know, any rice, if you traveled to the middle East, because you're going to get horny. And then I hear you going to do something that you regret.

So some of the herbal ones. So Spanish fly, actually, it's not herbal it's animal. It's the blister beetle. And it's basically mashed up blister beetles. Unfortunately, the problem with it is that it can be dangerous. It does work. I mean, it basically, it irritates the, the urinal genital tract so much that you get a lot of blood flow to the area.

So it will lead to, stronger erection for guys and, and more blood flow for women. However, the amount that you need to have an effective dose is dangerously close to the amount that's a toxic dose. And for that reason, lots of people throughout history have died using it. So it's not, it's not one that I would recommend for sure.

Then there's things like horny, goat, weed, that has some research to support its use. It's an herbal, it's an herbal supplement. And so I would recommend if anybody's interested in trying those, that they consult somebody who knows herbs, you know, somebody who may have, have a degree in it. You know, most acupuncturists, a lot of acupuncturists have also studied traditional Chinese herbal medicine as well.

Kevin English: [00:37:02] okay. Yeah. That's so that's fascinating. You make a distinction between culinary, aphrodisiacs and herbal aphrodisiacs. And until I encountered your book. I never, I mean, I know Saffron's expensive now. I know why. And cloves, those are two that probably, if you said quick name, a couple aphrodisiacs, most folks I'm guessing would not guess those.

And yet there they are kind of at the top of your list. And I. I think we've all probably heard of Spanish fly. And again, until I read your book, I had no idea what it really was. Nor did I know that the effective dose was dangerous, close to the toxic dose. So probably one to, to stay away from there is some gems to be mined there, right in that space of again, of, food and some foods having some short term effects as well as long-term optimal health effects.

Right.

Christine DeLozier: [00:37:52] Yep. Yeah, absolutely. And they're fun, you know, fun to play with, you know, when you're making dinner and just trying to incorporate as many of these aphrodisiacs as possible that the stories were really fun too, that the stories behind a lot of the aphrodisiacs and their use were on as well.

Kevin English: [00:38:07] and you have a lot of those in your book and you're right. It's, it's fun to kind of read some of the history of these things. And even some of the Wars that were fought over over some of these things. Very interesting. All right. Well, we've mentioned your book a couple of times, and one thing that struck me as I read through the book we have the very straightforward, this is what you should and shouldn't eat and why for great sex, but you take a very holistic approach to sex.

And in addition to the diet, you talk about the importance of things like exercise, sleep. And of course the biggest turn-on of all is being kind and nice to one another. You even have some worksheets in there for couples to increase sexual awareness of each other. I think we've pretty well covered

why diet is critical for great sex, but talk about some of these other more holistic lifestyle pieces.

Christine DeLozier: [00:38:58] Sure. So in Chinese medicine, there's no distinction made between the psychological, the emotional and the physical. We treat all at the same time and they're all inter connected, you know? So. Emotions are, can both be a symptom of an, a cause of disease or of health and, you know, having a history as as a counselor, as I do, I, it was something that I really wanted to include because in our culture, we're more self-centered than ever than we ever have been in the past.

And we're more self-centered than other cultures in comparison. So when we think so much about ourselves, it's really difficult to have enjoyment in life, period, not just in sex. This, this focus on ourselves and our own pleasure and our own happiness and our own comfort and all of these things. It really takes the beautiful essence of life out of the equation.

And that's, you know, our what we have to give, it's just like what JFK said, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And it's the same concept. Ask not what your partner can do for you, but what you can do for your partner.

And there's truly so much joy in giving and to have fully enjoyable sexual experience we must think of our partner's pleasure, just as much as we think of our own. And for that reason, I talked a little bit about that in the book about kindness and also about specific techniques. You know, many of us, maybe we want to please our partner, we want to focus on their pleasure, but we don't have the tools in the technique, you know, and maybe some people are afraid to ask.

So I have a whole chapter on male oral sex and female oral sex and just Very clear tutorial on, on that.

Kevin English: [00:40:48] Yeah, you can kind of think of the book as being your toolbox for a great sex, right? With the cornerstone being diet, let's get that cleaned up and dialed in. That's going to make a huge impact, but you have other knobs and levers, and certainly things like kindness and being aware of your partner and your partner's needs, wishes, desires, et cetera, learning to get pleasure from

giving. Certainly there's, there's great joy in that. and like you said, even just some, some techniques that people may not be aware of. So you, you do you spell all that out incredibly well. So let's build a date night menu. Let's let's do that. In fact, if you don't mind, start with a breakfast.

If we're, if we've got a big date night coming up. And we're excited. we want to have great sex. which we have for breakfast. Let's do an example menu for throughout the day.

Christine DeLozier: [00:41:37] sure. Okay. So let me just give you some overarching principles for your day. And that's going to be, you're going to want to try to keep your fats low and keep your refined sugars low. You don't want to give yourself a big spike, in glucose because that will reduce testosterone. So you wouldn't, you, we want to eat foods that will

improve blood flow and not eat foods that tank testosterone. There's not much evidence and believing. I've tried to find evidence on foods that actually have an immediate impact on nerve conduction velocity. And I haven't found any. So, so that's not in that date night picture. It is in your overall long-term health, health picture.

so a good breakfast is going to be something like berries. And if you want to throw in some Omega three, maybe some berries and some walnuts is a good choice. Because berries are going to do two things. The berries have the this certain type of antioxidant called polyphenols and polyphenols were shown to improve blood flow within a couple hours of eating it.

So that would be a good breakfast choice. Most of our, you know, date night efforts do focus on like a couple of a couple hours prior to sex. So that's where the research lies is in this kind of two hour window. So if you're gonna have a afternoon delight then yeah, have a nice Berry and, Walnut breakfast.

If you're going to have you know, post lunch our lunch will be maybe a big, huge green leafy salad because the salad, it has naturally occurring nitrates, which will immediately have a dilate, you know, dilate blood vessels. And you'll also get the benefit of having some potassium in there. And so you have this immediate benefit on the elasticity of your blood vessels from a salad and then your baked potato or your baked yam again, has been shown in research to improve arterial function within a couple hours of eating it.

So for, for dinner, what I would say is this, if you want, let's say you want to really get into a nice culinary adventure for your date night menu. We might start with I have a recipe for this in my book. It's called sex juice. And it's, you can juice either beets or celery. Both of them are really high in dietary nitrates.

So they'll dilate your blood vessels that actually athletes use that a lot. Too, you know, as like you know, to improve performance. And so you'll start off with something like that. Then for your main course, you might have something like roasted acorn squash, and you can put some of those aphrodisiacs spices on and you can put some cloves on it or some cinnamon, some nutmeg nutmeg is another aphrodisiac spice.

Throw some of that on there, have a nice leafy green salad with it, and you can throw some, you can make some dressing. Oh, there's lots of dressing, aphrodisiac dressing that you can make. One of them, one of my favorites is this. You chop up some onions, you score some lime juice on it, lemon or lime juice on it.

And you put a huge handful of dill and pepper in it. Not too much salt because again, the salt stiffens your blood vessels, but it's a really delicious, delicious dressing. And dill is another. Aphrodisiac. So the, the other one is vitamin C, you know, so you get that score to the lime vitamin a high vitamin C meal or foods were shown to improve mood.

Not him. It doesn't make you horny, but it might improve your mood. It improves mood and that, you know, is going to make you more so more, responsive to, just being aroused, that sort of thing. So you squirt your lime juice on there, then you might have some maybe steamed beets or other steamed vegetable and The, the protein, if you're plant-based again, you might do something like walnuts. if you do eat animal products, then you might want to do something like wild salmon, which again is going to have your Omega threes. And that will improve vascular elasticity within a couple of hours of eating it.

And then for dessert, instead of a sugary snack or a sugary dessert, you're going to have something like maybe Raspberries with mango or, you know, and you could even have a few walnuts on top. That sort of thing. It's actually really good. It tastes really good. It's a nice dessert. The thing about it is you got to train your body.

the research that I saw was this because of how much fat. Yeah. And sugar. We eat, we've rewired our brains to require more of it before it'll release dopamine and dopamine means pleasure. It means this is the pleasure we get out of food. So when you eat healthy for a couple of weeks and reduce the fat and the sugar, it rewires your brain to actually get pleasure out of healthier foods.

So that's in a nutshell.

Kevin English: [00:46:29] Yeah, that's interesting. And that mirrors my experience in terms of last part, where you're talking about rewiring your brain. As I went on my own personal nutritional journey's I cleaned up my diet. I've made no secret that I have to force myself to eat vegetables.

And certainly in the beginning, that was, true. I, I don't crave vegetables. But as I ate healthier and cleaner, I felt better. And that in itself can motivate myself to keep continuing, but you're right. I, became more hardwired so that I'm less and less desiring this high-fat or for me, the salty snacks were the really tough one to let go of was the sugar that lasted a short amount of time, the high fat that it's kind of in the middle, but those salty things I did crave for a while and it took a while to rewire my body.

So. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing the ideas for a date night, breakfast, lunch, and a dinner. So folks, if they really want to explore that you have a lot of great recipes in your book. And again, that book is diet for great sex food for male and female sexual health by Christine Delosure.

So Christine what's what's next for you? What's on the horizon.

Christine DeLozier: [00:47:39] Well, I'm just promoting my book right now. And so I've been so obsessed with my book that I'm, I haven't, I haven't really thought much beyond that. You know, I'm still treating patients in private practice, promoting my book. And the great thing is I've got this nice tool now that I can share with my patients when they come in.

So I can actually give them the book and say here, eat like this, you know, that'll support our treatment goals. So yeah. Yeah. That's about, that's about it.

Kevin English: [00:48:03] okay, great. And when did the book come out?

Christine DeLozier: [00:48:06] October,

Kevin English: [00:48:07] Okay. Yeah. So, and we're recording this now in March of 2021. So it's just a few months old and it's available basically anywhere. Right? I grabbed it on Amazon. So your favorite bookseller, you can, you can get that. And I would personally highly recommend anybody

who's a into nutrition to grab this and certainly anybody, especially this over 50 crowd, that's looking to optimize your sexual health, your sexual experience. This is a great resource, highly recommend. So Christine, before we go, where would you like people to connect with you? What's the best way for them to reach out?

Christine DeLozier: [00:48:40] Sure you can reach me on diet for great sex that com or I'm also on social media, under diet for great sex.

Kevin English: [00:48:49] okay. And that's, that's pretty easy to remember. Well, Christine, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom with us. I had a great time. I really enjoyed reading the book, really enjoy talking with you and I wish you all the best in all your future endeavors.

Christine DeLozier: [00:49:04] thank you so much, Kevin. That was, that was a lot of fun.