Welcome to the libido lounge where we focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food. Hey. Doctor Diane Mueller, your libido doc here. And in today's episode, we are gonna talk about how and why a low libido is oftentimes a very important early sign of cardiovascular disease and more. Stay tuned. Alright. So let's jump into this very important topic.
So depending upon where you are with your relationships, with your sexuality, you may wind up going through periods of low libido and say things to yourself like, I'll deal with that later. I'm too overwhelmed. Or the thing that I hear a lot is libido is just not my priority right now. Now you'll hear me talk on other episodes about why getting your libido back is so important, how it influences so many things.
But it's important for me to throw this particular episode in very early on in this podcast because this episode could potentially save lives. And I say that because libido issues, sexual dysfunction issues are oftentimes the first sign of some sort of cardiovascular disease that people have not found yet. Now this is a little bit more commonly talked about in men because it's very commonly known that with erectile dysfunction in men that this can be a blood flow issue. Right?
So a lot of the ED drugs work is by changing the vascular, sending more blood to the erectile tissue of the penis, and therefore, leading to an erection. Right? But for women, there's actually a very similar mechanism happening. And this is why sometimes women can even take drugs like Viagra or Cialis and have more sensation during intimacy is because it for many women, changes in libido, changes in sex drive are also related to a lack of blood flow to the feminine erectile tissue.
And basically, it's a female version of erectile dysfunction. And so what's happening is if you're experiencing a lack of blood flow to the tissues, whether you are a penis owner, whether you are a vagina vulva owner, no matter who you are in this world, right? If you're experiencing a lack of blood flow, then what is happening is this is representative of blood flow throughout the entire body.
It's not like the body just says, well, I'm just not gonna send blood to the erectile tissue, but I'm gonna send plenty of blood to the rest of the body. It's not how it works. So what can happen sometimes for humans is that when these erectile issues or these libido issues come up and they go see their doctor, they oftentimes will run some of the basic things, see that there's plaque, see that there's a blood flow issue, maybe there's high blood pressure, maybe there's high cholesterol.
Those are actually not always and oftentimes, they're very poor markers of what's going on in vascular health. And so one of the things that unfortunately can happen is that you can have changes of libido. Whether you're a man or a woman, you can have these changes in libido. And when you have these changes in libido, what winds up happening is you might go to a doctor. You might get put on a certain medication, but there's not further investigation done.
And maybe you get some very basic lab work such as cholesterol, and it's just it's called basically good. So what I want you to know from this episode is if you're having libido issues, they strongly could be blood flow issues if you're a female or a male. And in either one of these cases, you wanna make sure that you are getting good workup done on your cardiovascular system.
So you can go and you can get a heart CT to see what's going on there, and that can give you some insight on into some of the cardiac problems. One of my favorite tests is called a CIMT. It's a carotid intima media thickness, and it's basically a ultrasound.
And it's essentially where they're taking an ultrasound of the carotid artery, and what they're doing is they're looking for plaque because the carotid artery represents basically, it's very similar to plaque on the rest of the arteries throughout the body. So the point of this is and the reason, like I said, where I wanted to make this video, which is less focused on all the sexy, yummy, juiciness of everything we talk about on this channel, and we will get back there in the next episode.
I promise, promise, promise you. But what I don't want you to miss out on is this early warning sign that says, hey. There could be a carotid you know, or there could be an arterial problem, a cardiovascular problem. So it's a good time to get a CIMT done. Another marker, a blood marker that tells us a lot about what is happening on the arteries is way better than standard cholesterol markers. It's called the apolipoprotein b as in boy or apo b for short.
And that's a blood marker that's been shown on lab work to be very similar to, say, running the blood test and you actually correlate it with what you're seeing on on this carotid ultrasound, and you really see it line up. So one of the simplest things, of course, if you see that you have a problem, you obviously want to take care of the problem. Right? So you wanna get more blood flow. A very common natural thing that works very, very well is increasing nitric oxide.
Nitric oxide is a component in the body that basically it's a molecule that causes the blood vessels to dilate, sending much more blood flow to the tissues all over the place. So good for cardiovascular disease, but also good for your reptile tissue. Again, it doesn't matter what kind of human you are, what your gender is, none of that. It's just that we're gonna send more blood flow to the rectile tissue. That is what we're doing there. Right?
And so from that standpoint, we really want to make sure that we are speaking in ways and we are considering ways of getting your blood flow going to that tissue. So nitric oxide is how you're going to increase that blood flow. Then, of course, the question is, well, how are you gonna increase nitric oxide? So what I want you to know is there's a product there's a protein molecule, an amino acid, it's called citrulline. Citrulline is amazing at increasing the nitric oxide in the body.
You'll also see some companies out there giving arginine. Arginine is another protein molecule that will increase blood flow in the body, send more blood to your tissues all over the place, of course, to your rectal tissue as well. But arginine does not hold up in the research as well as citrulline as far as the effectiveness. So if you're reading online, like, how do you increase nitric oxide? How do you improve your blood flow? How do you get more blood to your rectal tissue?
Really encourage you to stay away from the arginine. You're gonna most people get much better results from using something like citrulline. So if you do see certain cardiovascular markers show up, I really such as the APOB, and you really need to work on your blood flow from that standpoint, you can use nutrients such as red yeast rice coupled with co q ten. You always wanna do those two together. One of my favorite cardiovascular things ever is the herb hawthorn.
I have seen hawthorn work and help people with heart palpitations, with blood pressure issues, with a ton of cardiovascular types of problems, angina. You know, you always wanna make sure you're working with a doctor who can make sure that everything is okay with your heart and your cardiovascular system. But I've seen some of these very basic remedies work extremely well for people.
And then, of course, you wanna make sure that another thing you're really considering from blood flow is exercise because exercise is moving and pumping your blood. And guess what? When we decrease our our oxygen in our tissues, when we go into the anaerobic type of exercise, our body releases this molecule. This molecule is called VEGF, but we don't need to get crazy medical here. So what this special molecule does is a special molecule will cause new blood vessels to grow.
And when new blood vessels grow, you get to oxygenate your tissues more. And what we're talking about with your erectile tissues working is we're talking about more blood flow. So new blood vessels growing will increase blood flow. Right? So from that standpoint, a great way of getting new blood vessels to grow is exercise. And getting yourself into that anaerobic state can really help with this where you're just completely breathless. Right? That's gonna help a ton.
So that's where your, you know, your high intensity interval training and those types of methodologies come in. Remember that there's no exercise plan that's best for everybody, but we're really talking about, okay. Well, let's get your libido working, meaning let's get your circulatory system working. We wanna make sure we're maximizing that blood flow, and exercise is huge, huge, huge, huge, huge for making that happen. So we never wanna forget about the basics.
Another very basic thing that a lot of people don't think of is electrolytes. And so electrolytes are things like sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium. And so a lot of people that I find are on standard American diets are oftentimes eating too much sodium, which obviously can cause blood pressure problems.
But people that tend to go very, you know, far down the health food movement and are eating extremely clean diets with no processed food or very little processed food, it is oftentimes or oftentimes not eating enough sodium. So about, 2,400 is what the standard sodium level is recommended in conventional medicine. And, again, you know, check any of this out with your doctor because I don't know your health situation, so this can't be medical advice.
But I do find in my clinical practice that a lot of people do feel their best when they're eating more than that and sometimes even double that. But, again, you need to be monitored if you're going, you know, since some of these other, you know, more detailed nuances.
But even if you're staying within those recommended guidelines, if you're not, you know, if you're not going, say, outside of that, a lot of times people that are eating very clean are not eating enough sodium, and that can actually, impact blood flow as well. It's like sodium is one of these things that you don't want too little. You don't want too much, and you wanna have proper levels of potassium, magnesium, and calcium.
All these different electrolytes will actually impact your vasculature and impact your blood flow as well. So remember that feeling. I talk about this on other episodes of the libido lounge like that. Feeling of being turned on, that feeling of, like, sex feeling good. Right? That in part is necessary. Like, blood flow to the erectile tissue is necessary for that to really feel really good and amazing. Right?
Because when blood flow flows, for example, for women, when blood flow flows to the erectile tissue of a woman, what winds up happening is that's part of where the lubrication is occurring. So lubrication, we need hormones for sure. And so hormone balance is absolutely a huge part of it. But lubrication also occurs because we have blood flow to the area, and that's triggering the lubrication cascade.
So sometimes people are only focusing on hormones, and hormones do play a really good role and an important role, but your cardiovascular system and the health of your cardiovascular system is a really important component of things. So I have a summit coming up where I interview doctor Joel Khan, who is an amazing researcher around he's amazing doctor. His focus is on the cardiovascular system, and we talk about this exact topic in detail.
So make sure you look out for that summit that is coming up. And please do take a moment to share this, share this libido lounge with your friends and your family and and spread the word. I like I said, I I will talk way more about sexy topics in episodes to come, but I just wanted to make sure because this is a key thing to keep it keep people safe and prevent things that are like these cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.
And your libido is oftentimes as early warning sign that something else is out of balance. So I wanna make sure that while we're gonna talk about all the fun, juicy, sexy stuff that comes with sex, that I'm also putting in some basic foundational material to keep you healthy and educate you and keep you well about some of the other things like cardiovascular disease that a low libido can mean. Thank you for listening to the libido lounge. Please don't keep me a secret.
Please share this with your friends. You can find me on YouTube, on Instagram, as well as how to work with me at mylibidodoc.com.