Get your sex questions answered by Dr. Reina Marino and other experts at Be Well Boot Camp.
 Food and sex—they’re our two favorite things (am I right?), and Reina Marino, an MD and integrative-lifestyle-medicine expert, is bringing them together for a workshop at Be Well Boot Camp. It’s all about how to boost your sex drive naturally—through diet, exercise, et al. But since it’s sometimes a tad embarrassing to ask the nitty gritty questions about sex, we talked to Reina to get the ball rolling and find out how to avoid between-the-sheets awkwardness and boost your sex life naturally.
Check out the Q&A below, and get your tickets for Be Well Boot Camp to hear more from Reina and other experts! She’s part of our “Food and Sex” panel at noon.
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Ramp up your a.m. exercise with this easy trick.
• Kudos to you if you’re bright-eyed enough to work out in the morning. I’m just not, no matter how how hard I try (Ugh. Snooze button.), so I’ll take this opportunity to pass on a bit of science-proven wisdom that you might find useful, even if I don’t: If you work out on an empty stomach in the morning, you can burn more body fat than if you eat breakfast before exercising. Researchers at Northumbria University in the U.K. made the discovery using a small group of male athletes who were asked to run on the treadmill first thing in the morning; half ate breakfast beforehand, and half didn’t, running only on fuel from dinner the night before. They found that men in the latter group burned almost 20 percent more body fat than their breakfast-eating peers. “Exercise increases the total amount of energy we expend and a greater proportion of this energy comes from existing fat if the exercise is performed after an overnight fast,” study author Javier Gonzalez says. “Our results show that exercise does not increase your appetite, hunger or food consumption later in the day and to get the most out of your session it may be optimal to perform this after an overnight fast.” Read more over at ScienceDaily.
• Guys, if you’re worried about your sperm count, I have two pieces of advice: exercise more, watch T.V. less. A new study found that moderate to vigorous exercise boosts sperm count, while moderate to vigorous T.V. watching lowers it. More here.
• All of your sex questions answered—by science. Thank you, Blisstree.
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A survey confirmed the anecdotal evidence you've heard for years.
 It sounds like an episode of Sex and the City (with Samantha at its center, of course), but researchers at Indiana University say exercise-induced orgasms (EIOs) are in fact the real deal. For years, female gym-goers have whispered about having big O moments during workouts, but until now no one’s actually confirmed that they exist.
The research team surveyed 370 women ages 18 to 63 who said they’d previously experienced EIOs. Arousal was most commonly reported during core workouts, rope or pole-climbing exercises, spinning and weight lifting, but lesser EIO activities included yoga and running. Forty percent of the women reported having EIOs on more than 10 occasions (!), and most said they sort of came out of the blue—no sexual fantasizing required.
“These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm,” said study author Debby Herbenick of IU’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion in a press statement.
While the study wasn’t able to determine how common EIOs, the authors report that it only took five weeks to recruit the pool of subject. So … you do the math.
‘Fess up: Have you experienced an orgasm while working out? Tell us in the comments.
>> Related: What Men and Women Really Want Out of Relationships
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Researchers found that addictive behaviors can be quelled with sex (at least in fruit flies).
 So say you’re a guy, and you’re in a bar, surrounded by hot-looking babes, and you keep trying out your best lines on them, and the ladies keep shooting you down. Would you drink more than your buddy who managed to score?
Why yes, you would, assuming you were both fruit flies.
That’s the conclusion of fruit-fly scientists at the University of California San Francisco, who set up an entomological Ladder 15 in their lab. They exposed male fruit flies to females who didn’t respond to their advances. After a few days of this, the males were more likely to choose food that contained alcohol than were males who’d had sex. The researchers went a step further, identifying a chemical in the teeny-tiny fruit-fly brains that regulated this behavior, known as neuropeptide F. The less sex the flies had, the less neuropeptide F was present in their brains, and the more likely they were to imbibe.
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And what happens then? They get pregnant.
Maybe I don’t remember what it’s like being a teenager, but God help me if I was this clueless: A new government study found that an overwhelming number of sexually-active teenage girls were surprised when they got pregnant. About half admitted they weren’t using any birth control whatsoever, and a third said they opted for no birth control because they didn’t believe they could actually get pregnant, anyway.
Has MTV’s Teen Mom taught these kids nothing?
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Men who think they're hot think women think they're hot—only most of the time, we don't.
I’m beginning to think someone really should teach a college course for men on women. We already know that women make men stupid. So combine that with the research study du jour below, and we can deduce that men are a species wholly and completely incapable of understanding women.
Okay, okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not all that far off. The latest research from a team in Massachusetts found that men often overestimate both a woman’s desire for them and their own attractiveness to women. The latter applies to guys who believe they’re hot when, well, they’re just not; guys who women actually find attractive tend not to think this way.
There’s more: the more a man thinks a woman is attractive, the more likely he is to overestimate her interest in him. Women, the study found, tend to underestimate men’s interest in them in general (hence the basis for all those sticky love-triangle-based romantic comedies).
Ladies, take heart: the study looked at male and female undergraduates only—college kids—so let’s hope and pray that these less-than-lovable traits in our counterparts wear off with age. Pretty please?
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And by "too many," I mean more than zero.
Every once in a while, I stumble over something so unlikely, so unexpected, that it changes how I see the world. Today was one of those whiles. It seems some researchers in Brazil decided to examine whether having sex with animals increased men’s risk of developing penile cancer.
I would not have thought these researchers could have come up with enough study subjects to enable them to form any conclusions in this matter, since I’ve reached the ripe old age of 55 believing that having sex with animals was … well, rare. More rare among men than, say, being out of work. Or being circumcised. Or wanting to get married. And yet this scientific study showed that the percentage of guys in Brazil who are having sex with animals (or “SWA,” as the researchers coyly dubbed it) is exactly the same as these percentages, give or take a point: 35 percent.
One third. Of men. Having SWA.
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The federal government shot down a request to make Plan-B One Step an over-the-counter drug.
Despite support from FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the federal government has shot down a request from the manufacturers of Plan-B One Step to make the pill available as an unrestricted over-the-counter contraceptive, reported in this article from the Huffington Post. The change would have meant that girls of any age could purchase the drug without a prescription, just like condoms or spermicide. Health and Human Services decided today, however, to keep the current rules in place: You have to ask the pharmacist for the medication, and girls under 17 need a prescription to do so.
Advocates for either side present some strong arguments. Those who want to make the pill more accessible argue that it should be an option for any girl of child-bearing age as a tenet of basic health care. Opponents say there’s high potential for misuse, and that making the drug so readily available could encourage teens to become lax in sexual responsibility. Plus, the doctors appointments required for girls under 17 could help “screen for sexual exploitation.”
What do you think? Should Plan B be an over-the-counter drug? How is young is too young to purchase it?
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But still twice as much as you do, study shows
 We know what you're thinking about, sir—or do we? Image from BananaStock • Ah, yes. The ol’ men-are-crazy-sex-driven-pigs stereotype. The one where you think all a guy does is eat, breathe and think sex. Well, you’re wrong—sort of. New research, which gauged in quantitative numbers just how often men and women think about sex, found that, on average, guys think about getting you between the sheets 18.6 times a day. Women, it turns out, think about sex about half that amount: on average, 9.9 times a day. But here’s something to note: Men also thought about food with about the same frequency, and their sleep-related thoughts clocked double digits, too, with 11 thoughts a day. For women, food thoughts equaled 15 a day, while thoughts about sleep totaled 8.5 (mine would be much, much higher on the latter, me thinks). So, no. Your man isn’t thinking about sex at every waking moment. Stereotypes be damned.
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Even thinking about women makes men stupid. Man, men are dumb.
Thank God we have scientists who are studying stuff like this. Researchers at a Dutch university have proven that men become cognitively impaired when they interact with a woman over the phone or on the Internet. What’s more, men become cognitively impaired if they even think they’re about to interact with a woman over the phone or on the Internet. Suddenly, so much in life has become more clear.
To no one’s surprise, the same findings did not apply to women interacting, or thinking about interacting, with men.
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