A recent study published in Circulation: Journal of American Heart Association found that erectile dysfunction may actually be a strong predictor of cardiovascular disease. Since drugs that treat ED do not address the underlying cardiovascular causes of the problem, some men may think they are healthy when in fact, they are at risk for more serious heart conditions. According to the National Institute of Health, approximately 5 percent of 40-year-old men and 15 to 25 percent of 65-year-old men suffer from long-term erectile dysfunction (ED).

• Eat for your heart – Choose a diet that is high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and low in unhealthy saturated fats.
• Exercise often – Aim for 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least 5 times a week, but even 10 minutes of daily exercise will provide cardiovascular benefits.
• Avoid cigarette and cigar smoke – Smoking and second-hand smoke inhalation are deadly to the cardiovascular system.
• Relax and de-stress – Emotional stress can affect physical health. Ways to improve the mind, body, and spirit connection include periodic journaling, meditative breathing and reading inspirational books.
• Take whole-food supplements – Omega-3 fish oil capsules, Vitamin D, and B-complex vitamins have shown to positively affect cardiovascular health.
• Check blood pressure and cholesterol – Getting regular check-ups help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and erectile dysfunction.

This list was suggested by ChicagoHealers.com.

All it takes, apparently, for this level of fertility, not to mention longevity, is a daily diet of three litres of milk, half a kilo of almonds and half a kilo ghee (clarified butter). Ramajit Raghav and his wife Shakuntala, 59, gave birth to their son Karamjit in November 2010.

The proud father, who was a wrestler in his youth, puts his virility down to his high-calorie diet.

“I had visited a quack in the village and he gave me some tablets but I didn’t take them and threw them away.”

[From Man is 'world's oldest dad at 94' | The Sun |News]

If his wife’s age is also true, it in itself, is a news item.

We had earlier reported the oldest new dad as Raymond Calvert at 79 in Lancashire, England which the Sun reports as the oldest new father in England who fathered a child with a woman 54 years his junior. The Sun Newspaper reports that the previous world record holder was another Indian, Nanu Ram Jogi who fathered his 22nd child at the age of 90 in 2007.

You may be in an awkward stage where things are less than ideal after having kids, but that’s no time to indulge in what you think are idle fantasies, say researchers at McGill University, according to a story in Mens Health magazine. Thinking about the after effects of cheating, rather than the cheating itself, can help you avoid temptation they say, based on a study of of men who looked at pictures of attractive women versus a control group who studied academic problems. By focusing on what you can do to protect your relationship, you’re more likely to avoid temptation than letting your imagination go wild.

It’s going to happen whether you want it to or not.  You’re going to have to have the “talk.”  And if you’re smart about it, you’ll realize that it’s not one talk, but probably many over the years as your kid goes from asking completely naive biology questions to clamming up around you whenever the subject comes up.

Here are a few tips you should keep in mind.

1.  You probably can’t remember either how babies are made. So, for God’s sake, do some reading so you don’t feel yourself jumping to the details of the parts you do understand. Especially when talking to young kids, you want to only answer the parts they are curious about at their age, and not about the stuff they’ll only want to know when they are in their teens.

2. Use the media. For better or, mostly, worse, the media is full of inappropriate references.  With little kids, we mostly wince and try to ignore them, hoping our kids will let them slip by, like random words of Chinese thrown into a sentence. However, at some point that you’ll recognize, you can use these references to check your child’s understanding or need to know.

3. Talk to them an not at them.  Try to keep things two-way, and take a break if the conversation falters since that likely indicates you’ve done enough talking for now.

4. Talk your age.  When it’s time to have a sex talk, it’s also time to dispense with words like pee-pee and boobies.  Likewise, you also don’t want to use slang to refer to genitals. Stick with old standards like “penis” and “vagina” and you’ll at least take one awkwardness out of the equation.

5. Get over your own embarrassment.  Now is not the time to worry about your own issues with sex, or think about the raunchy ideas you have connected with the subject at hand.  Focus the mind on helping your kids get the age-appropriate information they need without coloring it with editorializing that might confuse their understanding at this point.

Related articles

• How to Talk to Your Kids About STDs (aolhealth.com)
• ‘Dad, Do You and Mom Have Sex?’ (omnipotentpoobah.com)

Not really on-topic, but always amazed at how predictable we men are. I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often actually. Could be a new approach for the Pentagon.

Police say on August 7, the man inserted a card into a cash machine in central Paris to withdraw money when two young women approached him and asked for money. The women waved a newspaper at the man in an attempt to distract him, but the technique didn’t work.

[From French robber steals cash by baring breasts - CNN.com]

Short take: he paid 300E for a really, really good robbery story.

You gotta laugh at the Psycho Girlfriend episode (4 min) as she gets pregnant and her attitudes toward sex immediately change. Laugh-out-loud funny until you start crying.Note: some not unexpected salty language given the subject matter.

Dr. Louann Brizendine has written an important commentary at the CNN.com website, proclaiming, “Let Men be Men.” Men and women should read the column. Men to confirm our own self-knowledge, here recognized by an avowed feminist, that there’s nothing wrong with the way our brains work in regard to sex, because we are wired that way.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the male and female brain is that men have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain. Not only that, but beginning in their teens, they produce 200 to 250 times more testosterone than they did during pre-adolescence.

If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day. But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day. This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.

[From Love, sex and the male brain - CNN.com]

At the same time, Dr Brizendine goes on to talk about the changes the male body goes through after childbirth, including massive decreases in testosterone, which makes dads more willing and able to help with the baby.

A man in hot pursuit of a mate doesn’t even remotely resemble a devoted, doting daddy. But that’s what his future holds. When his mate becomes pregnant, she’ll emit pheromones that will waft into his nostrils, stimulating his brain to make more of a hormone called prolactin. Her pheromones will also cause his testosterone production to drop by 30 percent.

This translates into higher auditory acuity and the ability to hear a crying baby in the middle of the night. I can attest that before we had our babies, I could sleep through most things, including crying babies on airplanes. Now, I’m the one who hears the kids cries and whimpers in the middle of the night, while my wife often slumbers on.

Dr. Brizendine suggests that moms worried about leaving their kids with dad (if that is possible in the year 2010), consider that dads’ brains align more with fatherhood with more contact with baby. As we often say at GreatDad, baby bonding does work and moms and dads should take every opportunity to get physically close to the baby, especially if feeling ambivalent about parenthood.

Note: Dr. Louann Brizendine is a member of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the National Board of Medical Examiners, and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. She is founder and director of the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic. She wrote “The Female Brain” and, just released, “The Male Brain.”

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Here is a reporter’s query from a national magazine doing research for an upcoming story on sex after pregnancy. Rarely do you see such frank talk about sex after pregnancy, albeit posed as questions. This query, quoted below, poses questions that a lot of men ask themselves. Sex after pregnancy is a topic almost never discussed between men, lost as it is in all the changes including loss of sleep, heightened sense of responsibility and pride of fatherhood.

I would like to hear from moms with newborns (as well as moms with older children, for comparison) about how they feel or felt about sex for the first year or two after childbirth. In particular, I’d like to know:

• Did your desire diminish or disappear entirely? (FYI, this is totally normal; hence this story…)
• Did you expect to feel the way you did about sex after the baby? Did anyone prepare you for this?
• Did your partner’s interest in sex change at all?
• Did you realize that couples who have sex less than 10 times a year are considered to be in “sexless marriages” (which would mean many postpartum couples are indeed in sexless marriages)?
• If you find yourself with a baby and little or no sexual desire, when (if ever) would you seek help? Or do you assume this is something that will remedy itself as your child grows older? Moms with older children are invited to weigh in with their wisdom/experiences, particularly if they experienced a sexual lull but have managed to overcome it.

I hope this is an extensive story. The changes in the dynamics of a couple’s relationship with the addition of kids are important to explore. Otherwise, all involved continue to have different expectations of what is “normal” for other couples in their evolution from adolescents to adults to parents. The worst thing for a marriage is a nagging feeling that changes aren’t inevitable and that your particular situation is different than everyone up and down the street.

We’ve written before about the books 365 Days and Just Do It. Our advice was to buy them and leave them where “someone” might see them, give them a read, and hopefully pick up the challenge at the same time.

A week after the Rev. Ed Young challenged husbands and wives among his flock of 20,000 to strengthen their unions through Seven Days of Sex, his advice was — keep it going.

Mr. Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of “congregational copulation” among married couples on Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed. Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible, emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.

“Today we’re beginning this sexperiment, seven days of sex,” he said, with his characteristic mix of humor, showmanship and Scripture. “How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!”

[From Pastor’s Advice for Better Marriage - More Sex - NYTimes.com]

Now here’s a pastor who has an idea that might entice a lot of dads back to church.

Here’s a link to send to your spouse, especially if you’re ready to try anything to get “sex” back in the phrase “sex life.” Mrs. Young (obviously a pseudonym), in her most recent column, as she always does, refers to the sagging love lives of new parents. She suggests reading such recent books as
365 Nights and Just Do It, both books on couples who made planned effort to have sex every day for an extended length of time. If you mentioned these books to your wife as well, you likely got the same nonplussed reaction I did. It sounded more like a desperate trick than a real romantic plan for greater intimacy.

Well, maybe then, this “challenge” from Cookie Magazine is more in the range of at least conceivable. First of all, it’s coming from a “girl magazine,” so it might have more street cred than if you leave a copy of Men’s Health lying around so that she sees their promotion of every other day ejaculation for a healthy prostate. Second, there’s a prize attached! Three days in Jamaica just for having sex seven times in seven days. Of course, the prize is a sweepstakes that will be won by some woman who has entered the contest without performing the requirements, but you don’t have to tell her that.

win a trip to jamaica! Enter for a chance to recharge your love life with a three-night stay at Jake’s in Jamaica. Airfare provided by

Air Jamaica. Also, take the Mrs. Young Sex Challenge Survey! [From Community: Cookiemag.com]