how can you prevent erectile dysfunction I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and in today's video I'm going to cover the five things you can do today to help prevent erectile dysfunction in the future so make sure you listen to all five and help future you first and foremost you want to treat your underlying health issues so if you have high blood pressure get that under control if you have diabetes get that under control if you have high cholesterol get that under control very simply fix those issues first because without fixing those issues you
will not be able to reverse your erectile dysfunction and it's just going to get progressively worse next up exercise so there's been a number of studies that have looked at exercise in fact there's been 11 randomized controlled trials comparing people who either get no instruction to people who are instructed on doing some sort of aerobic exercise intervention or resistant exercise intervention and they compare those and that allows us to see head-to-head when you take people who are very similar if there's really a benefit and these studies ranged in duration from anywhere from 2 months to
2 years and they include different types of supervised aerobic exercises um they may have provided resources and counseling and typically they were doing about 30 to 60 Minutes of aerobic exercise somewhere between 3 to five times per week they typic typically did things like walking five times a week at least uh with a V2 Max of 55% which means that you should be able to which is sort of like Zone 2 cardio which means that you should be able to take a walk and have a conversation with somebody but they would know that you're exercising
it's not such a leisurely stroll that somebody can't tell the other exercises they tried were things like cycling treadmill use but they made them do it like I said for three to five times a week and generally they called it moderate intensity so what they found ultimately was that aerobic exercise resulted in statistically significant improvements in erectile function compared to people who didn't do any aerobic exercise and it was generally greater in the men who had more severe Ed so if they had more severe erectile dysfunction you were going to see a much greater Improvement
in erectile function versus someone who had mild Ed and that makes sense because if you have mild aded you have less room to improve whereas when you have severe Ed you have a lot more room to improve and so they did see a significant Improvement in all three groups mild moderate severe Ed everyone saw an improvement and Exercise Works because it improves blood vessel function and it allows those blood vessels to improve their nitric oxide production when you have healthier blood vessels they release more nitric oxide which is the ignition for erections and if you
incorporate resistance training you're also going to see improvements in your testosterone now I've talked about exercise and testosterone in a full video on YouTube make sure you check that one out if you want to learn more about it because I go over what exactly types of exercise have been studied and what you can expect in terms of improvement now in addition to those things exercise tends to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation which are both contributors to worsening erections next thing you can do which is completely free is sleep now I think sleep is the most
underutilized treatment in medicine for a lot of different conditions but even for erectile dysfunction now in small studies they've looked at sleep and they've shown that improvements particularly in Sleep Quality meaning that you're having uninterrupted sleep you're getting good amounts of deep sleep or REM sleep and you're sleeping for sufficient periods of time usually 7 hours or more means that you're going to have better erections now as I mentioned these studies are pretty small and observational but ultimately sleep has really good evidence in terms of improving testosterone quite significantly and not only does it improve
testosterone and sexual function it's also going to impact your ability to perform the next day improve your mental Clarity your sharpness and your overall mood so there's so many reasons to work on sleep and I've had a couple videos on sleep on my YouTube channel so check those out now what about food everybody wants to know what should I be eating so a 2020 study in jamama which is a very reputable medical journal looked at diet quality and dietary patterns associated with erectile dysfunction now this is again correlation but they looked at men from 1998
to 24 so it's a long period of time and they looked at what's called food frequency questionnaires the men were between the ages of 40 and 75 and they had to fill out fill out these food intake questionnaires and so they had 21,000 th men who were on average 62 years of age and they were followed for about 10 years to see what they were eating and how that correlated with erectile function and they found that men who had the highest score related to the Mediterranean diet meaning they were following that they had the lowest
relative risk of incident erectile dysfunction meaning they were the least likely to develop erectile dysfunction compared to those who had a lower score meaning had poor dietary quality based on this question this Mediterranean diet score now this was true for men who are younger than 60 60 to 70 and even over 70 years so it doesn't matter how old you are when you start eating a healthy diet if you can commit you will see improvements it was more impressive if you started younger so if you were younger than 60 it was a 22% lower risk
of developing Ed if you were between 60 and 70 it went to 18% and if you were over 70 it went to 7% % now the best studied diet in terms of healthy diet is the Mediterranean diet so what is the Mediterranean diet well it emphasizes things like plant-based Foods fruits vegetables whole grains nuts and legumes it uses olive oil as a primary fat source and nuts as I mentioned earlier and consuming fish and poultry in moderate amounts and limiting red meats and they tend to use more herbs and spices rather than Salt now I
think the key is to really avoid processed foods and focus on whole natural ingredients now what about specific types of foods like you'll see all these articles online and like these are the five foods you want to eat and actually there's some data behind certain types of foods so one is called flavonoid rich foods and these are a type of what we call polyphenol and they're abundant in a variety of plant-based Foods they have lots of antioxidants and they tend to reduce inflammation and lower the risk of a variety of diseases and these can include
things like apples citrus fruits grapes onions tea dark chocolate and kale and so in one study looking at the same group of men that they did in that prior study about the meditranian diets called the health professionals follow-up data looked at 255,000 men and they found that those who had a higher intake of these flavonoid rich foods had a significantly lower incidence of ere retile dysfunction this study was not as remarkable in terms of outcomes as the Mediterranean diets and so what they found was that it reduced your risk of developing Ed by about 9%
if you had a higher intake of these flavonoid rich foods what about other sort of food items or things that can help one is omega-3 fatty acids and these are typically from fish and they can help increase nitric oxide availability if you don't eat fish you can try taking Omega-3 supplements another food that often comes up is watermelon and the reason watermelon comes up is because it is a rich source of something called citrine and citrine is an amino acid or a protein building block that's metabolizing our bodies to Arginine and arginine is a precursor
for nitric oxide again remember nitric oxide is the ignition for erections so a small study found that if you drank somewhere between 3 to six cups of watermelon juice per day for 3 weeks it resulted in an increase in arginine levels in the blood however they didn't specifically look at erectile dysfunction so if you like watermelon by all means go ahead and have it but if you don't don't force yourself to so bottom line what can you do to prevent or reverse Ed so one increase your physical activity try to have 30 minutes a day
or 150 minutes a week week of moderate intensity aerobic activity next if you are overweight losing weight has been shown to improve erectile function so try to lose 5 to 10% of your body weight if you are overweight next improve your diet what you want to aim to is increase your consumption of fruit and vegetables whole grains and legumes limit your red meat and processed foods and reduce your saturated fat to at least 10% or less of your entire calories increase your intake of monounsaturated polyunsaturated fatty acids and stop drinking sugary drinks so try to
drink water or diet drinks if you have to have something that's a little sweet but try to avoid things that have added sugar avoid excessive alcohol consumption try to drink less than seven drinks a week and ideally none if you want to follow the newer data that shows that there's really no safe amount of alcohol consumption based on cancer risk lastly quit smoking and don't do any recreational drugs if you're going to do recreational drugs be sure not to do them chronically or in excess thank you guys so much for watching if you enjoyed this
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