male, semenSome time ago I read that pineapple juice makes your semen taste sweet. I tried it and it worked.
But my question is how does that work? What is in pineapple juice that makes semen taste sweet?
And are there alternatives that work as well?
To the best of my knowledge (having been trained as a sex educator, and this topic was indeed part of our training), there's, as Psychology Today puts it, "no authoritative research on this subject".
In particular, I don't know of any research as to the mechanism of action, with respect to your question of "how does that work?".
That said, there's a fair bit of anecdotal report that various things can influence the taste of things. From the above article:
... many women insist that diet has major impact on the taste of semen. Former porn actress, Annie Sprinkle, who tasted hundreds of men's semen, says vegetarians taste best, that eating fruit and drinking fruit juices a few hours before sex improves the taste, and that smoking, alcohol, meats, and asparagus make semen less palatable.
Also of note: it would technically be a change in the taste of the ejaculate or semen, not the sperm itself. Sperm make up a small percentage (about 2%) of the overall volume of the ejaculate, and the taste is likely elsewhere, e.g. in the fructose and vitamin C - both of which can be found in pineapples, apples, and various other fruits. This is speculation on my part, but perhaps recent consumption of such sources allows the seminal vesicles, the prostate, and/or the bulbourethral glands to add more of these substances to the semen, thus altering the taste.
Fact 1:
The liquid, of what semen is made, must come from somewhere. This “somewhere” is your blood.
Fact 2:
What ever we eat and drink either stays in the gastrointestinal tract and will be excreted through the rectum (maybe after it was transformed by bacteria living in your guts), or it will be resorbed into your body. And being resorbed means, that (at least as first step) it becomes part of your blood.
In your veins, all the molecules, that passed this barrier circulate through your body. Fat, sugar, proteins, water, alcohol, maybe some medication, this all is in your blood. But also lots of other molecules circulate through your veins after a meal, until they are converted into other molecules in your liver (the first station blood from your stomach has to pass), or excreted by your kidneys as part of urine.
Fact 3:
Pineapples contain two molecule that are responsible for it’s characteristic taste and smell. They are named “ethyl butyrate” and “butyl butyrate”. Both belong to a group of substances, that are called “fruit esters” because chemically they are esters, and because all of them intensively smell like ripe fruits. (Some of them smell like apple, strawberry, oranges, apricots or other fruits, and a mixture of ethyl butyrate and butyl butyrate just smells like pineapples).
Those molecules are rather small (compared to other organic molecules), so they easily can pass from your stomach and bowel into your blood, and later into the liquid from what semen is produced. This can go much faster than it’s dismantling in the liver or excretion by your kidneys.
So this is the way how the taste of your food comes into your semen.
Also note:
There is a German magazine with the name “Men’s Health” (yes, it has an english title, but it is all in German: http://www.menshealth.de ). And about 15 or 20 years ago they asked some couples to test how food influences the taste of semen. As far as I remember it was about 10 couples who noted for a period of many weeks, what the male parters ate, and how their sperm tasted afterwards.
They reported, that coffee, onions and garlic produced the worst taste. When the men ate no meat for a longer period of time, the semen tasted better. The best taste was produced when they drank fruit-juices, and among those juices pineapple-juice was the winner.
This is of course not a scientific research, because it did not meet all conditions that are necessary for a scientific research, but I think it is good enough to refer to when talking about the taste of sperm.
There have been many informal tests on the subject, and it definitely does seem to work. My personal experience is along the same lines of this couple, and there are a bunch of other semi-authoratative sources to be found including academic text-books, and this book (p44-45) by sex educator/therapist Terri Hamilton.
It is actually pretty obvious that it would happen when you remember that the aroma of garlic and onions is also noticeable on the sweat of people, and seminal fluid is secreted from just another gland in the human body. The fact that it's an unsurprising finding, I suspect, is the reason there are no studies in peer-reviewed medical journals to be found. I thought the following analysis from an interview with sex therapist Barbara Bartlik was spot on:
The foods we consume are digested by the body and carried through the bloodstream to various glands and tissues, including sweat glands, the prostate and seminal vesicle (where seminal fluid is created) and the Skene’s glands and vaginal wall (where vaginal lubrication is created.) The smell and taste of food molecules we ingest can be released through the secretions produced by these glands and tissues, resulting in a noticeable difference in our body fragrance and flavor.
Diet modifications may improve the taste and smell of your secretions, but you would probably have to give up some of your favorite foods--like garlic and red meat--and ingest unrealistic amounts of foods that may make you smell and taste better, like pineapple and vanilla, in order to see a positive result.
From The Science Behind How We Taste and Smell. Down There.
There has even been a patent claim (US 6485773-B1) that proposes a product aimed at improving the taste of semen. The primary ingredient of it is Freeze-dried Pineapple Powder (38-41%), with some other ingredients that are reported to improve taste too. Treat this as an interesting fact, the product really may not work at all, no independent studies have been done.
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