Sex does the body good

The best that modern science can say for abstinence is that it's harmless when practiced in moderation. "Saving yourself" before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoe-down or the big bakeoff may indeed confer some moral advantage; but physiologically it does zip.

Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female. (This assumes that you are engaging in sex without contracting a sexually transmitted disease.)

In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare people of similar age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. Other studies (some rigorous, some less so) purport to show that having sex even a few times a week has an associative or causal relationship with the following:

Immunity booster

Sex can also boost general health by stimulating the immune system. A study carried out in Pennsylvania, for example, showed that sexually active university students produced more of the bacteria-fighting antigen IgA than those who didn’t have any sex.

Scientists have speculated that this could be because sexually active people are potentially exposed to more infections, so their immune systems are primed to deal with them.

Quality, not quantity, seems to be important, however: people who had very frequent sex had lower IgA levels than those who had no sex at all.

This, according to Dr Carl Charnetski, who carried out the study, could be because people who were having very frequent sex might have been in relationships that were causing stress, which can make IgA levels drop.

The association between health and the nature of sex is perhaps backed up by a Japanese study in which 19 out of 42 people who had had a stroke during sex were being unfaithful at the time.