A Feb. 13 Health article incorrectly said that Henry Fielding's novel "Tom Jones" was published in 1917. It was 1749.
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Spice Up Your Sex Life?
McClintock and her colleagues tested the effects of having healthy women, aged 18 to 35, smell pads laced with mother's milk and underarm secretions from women who were exclusively breast-feeding their newborns.
The researchers included only participants who had normal menstrual cycles, did not use birth control pills or an IUD and were within 30 percent of their ideal body weight. None of the women had ever given birth. None of them smoked, had sinus problems or other conditions that might interfere with a sense of smell. And none knew the goal of the study or what they were sniffing and applying. All the women chosen to participate had the same reported level of sexual desire when the study began.
  There's nothing subtle in the advertising at Faidley's raw bar in Baltimore. (By Robert A. Reeder For The Washington Post) |
Over three months, the team had half the 47 participants rub the pads on the skin under their noses daily. They were also asked to reapply the pads after a shower, after exercise and after meals -- activities that might remove the pad's contents. The women answered a variety of daily questions, including ones that rated their levels of sexual desire and fantasies. The other half used pads containing nothing and answered the same questions.
Reporting in 2004 in the journal Hormones and Behavior, McClintock and her colleagues noted that the breast-feeding compounds "increased sexual motivation of women" by up to 24 percent.
Sexual fantasies also increased. Women exposed to breast-feeding compounds experienced a 17 percent increase in sexual fantasies compared with a 27 percent decrease in the control group. The researchers also found that participants with a regular sexual partner "experienced enhanced sexual desire, whereas those without one had more sexual fantasies," noted the team.
This is the first evidence "of a natural compound that increases human sexual motivation," McClintock says. Similar results have been found in rats.
Does that make something in mother's milk an aphrodisiac?
"If you define an aphrodisiac as something that increases sexual motivation, then this compound is an aphrodisiac," McClintock says. "If you mean that it has to increase sexual arousal, then we don't yet have data that it is an aphrodisiac."
And it also confirms what common sense probably already told you: that the only reason to splurge on oysters, truffles or chocolates is because you (or your loved one) like the way they taste.
