(Cinnamon for Erections, written by Jason Brick)
Folks have taken cinnamon to help with weight loss for a long time.
Recently, though the rumors have been spreading that you can use cinnamon for erections too.
That passes a “surface scan” since many of the mechanics in your body that keep weight down also contribute to sexual health.
But how much good can cinnamon really do? Isn’t it just a spice?
Let’s take a look….
Cinnamon Improves Blood Lipids
What it Does
Cinnamon in sufficient doses seems to do some great stuff for your blood lipids (blood fats & cholesterol).
For those who missed the memo, there are three primary lipids in your blood…
- LDL cholesterol: the supposed bad cholesterol we’ve been avoiding for decades.
- HDL cholesterol: the supposed good cholesterol you started hearing about in the 90s.
- Triglycerides: lipids related to your blood sugar. These are linked to insulin, hypo and hyperglycemia, and provide a warning for the onset of type 2 diabetes.
This topic is up for debate right now, but generally for overall health, you want low levels of LDL and triglycerides, and high levels of HDL.
A lot of foods can do one or the other, but cinnamon is one of the few supplements that lowers LDL and triglyceride while leaving HDL levels unchanged.
We know this from a 2013 study in Iran, where researchers in a double-blind trial with fifty patients suffering from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
After 12 weeks, the study group had significant decreases in LDL and triglycerides, while their HDL levels were not impacted (source).
Why Should You Care?
You care about this because improved blood lipids protect you from all kinds of serious circulatory problems. For example: high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Your penis cares because good circulation = good erections.
You get hard because your member fills with blood. If your blood flow is weak or compromised, your erections can be slower, softer, or shorter-lasting.
Anything that protects your circulation protects your erections.
Cinnamon Increases Insulin Sensitivity
What it Does
Cinnamon also reduces your serum glucose (the amount of sugar in your blood). This is good because it keeps your pancreas healthy.
Too much serum glucose creates a situation called “insulin resistance,” which works like this:
- Your body gets a bunch of sugar, from soda or a candy bar. Ice cream. Whatever.
- Your pancreas pumps out a bunch of insulin to help you process it.
- If you do #1 too many times, your body needs more of #2 to effectively process the sugars. This spirals upward in the way an alcoholic’s tolerance increases over time.
- If #3 happens too often or for too long, the stress on your pancreas damages it.
The end result of #4 is type 2 diabetes.
The triglyceride findings in that study we just talked about demonstrated how cinnamon reduces the blood sugar levels responsible for insulin resistance. But wait! There’s more!
In 2000, a study reported in Agricultural Research Magazine found that cinnamon directly reduced insulin resistance even in patients who had already developed type 2 diabetes (source).
The reduction was significant enough that the researchers suggested cinnamon extract or oil could point the way toward a way of reversing or curing the condition.
Further research into why this is true suggests that cinnamon slows how quickly your stomach processes food.
Slower food processing means your pancreas can put out insulin at a slow, steady pace. This improves insulin sensitivity by reducing the maximum amount of insulin in your system at any given time.
Why You Should Care
In case you missed the memo, diabetes is bad for you. It shortens lifespan and quality of life, and leaves you at risk for blindness, loss of limbs, gangrene infection, and heart or circulatory troubles.
It’s also specifically bad for your erectile health. The function and health of your smaller blood vessels is one of the first things to go when diabetes takes hold.
Guess which blood vessels are responsible for long, strong, powerful erections? That’s right: the ones diabetes hits the soonest and the hardest.
Cinnamon Lowers Fasting Blood Sugar
What it Does
To understand why this is important, you have to understand what fasting blood sugar is.
Testing your blood glucose (blood sugar levels) at any given time can yield artificially high numbers if you, for example, just drank a Coke or ate a Kit-Kat.
Fasting blood sugar is when you measure your blood glucose after not eating overnight. It’s the baseline for several health measurements.
A fasting blood sugar level that’s too high is an early indicator of type 2 diabetes, and it works both ways.
By that I mean that high baseline blood sugar can cause diabetes, and it an early sign of diabetes. Bottom line: you don’t want high fasting blood sugar.
And guess what reduces fasting blood sugar?
If you didn’t guess cinnamon, scroll back to the top and start all over again.
Multiple studies have found a direct relation between cinnamon dosing and reduced fasting blood sugar.
Just one example was conducted in 2013, at schools in California and Connecticut.
This was a metadata study, meaning they didn’t do any of their own research, but rather examined the results of 10 studies with a total of over 500 participants and looked for patterns (source).
And yep, they found patterns in the data showing that cinnamon dosage reduced fasting blood sugar significantly in people with type 2 diabetes.
All ten studies showed some degree of reduction, with some showing impressive results in some populations.
Some, but not all, of the studies, also saw a reduction in levels of hemoglobin A1c — a specific marker for and indicator of full-on diabetes.
The researchers suggested some possible explanations of the inconsistent results, but nobody has examined this systematically.
Even with the hemoglobin question still in the air, the general impact of cinnamon on fasting blood sugar is well-established.
Why You Should Care
Remember what I told you earlier about diabetes, and how bad it is for you? Remember all the things I said it did specifically to your erectile and sexual health?
Yup. That applies here, too.
BTW, this blood sugar research is behind the idea that cinnamon can help prevent weight gain and accelerate weight loss. Sugar and blood sugar levels are closely tied to excess weight.
Cinnamon Kills Yeast and Bacteria
What it Does
You may have heard about “gut flora.” It’s the bacteria living in your stomach that helps you digest food, along with many other things that go beyond the scope of this article.
When your gut flora is all good you’re good. When it’s out of whack, it can cause all kinds of problems.
A variety of studies have looked at how cinnamon impacts bad gut flora, and its impact as a general antibiotic or antifungal.
In 2012, Chinese researchers treated patients suffering from Candida infestations of their intestines (source).
The researchers gave the patients cinnamon oil, then examined Candida cells in their stool. Those cells had been destroyed.
The same team later treated 60 patients whose Candida infestations had not been cured by drugs, with 72% of the patients having no Candida whatsoever after two weeks.
The remaining 28% all saw reduction in the Candida significant enough to suggest they would be Candida-free with longer treatment.
A 2011 study investigated how sixteen different oils worked against Candida. Though many oils had some impact, they found that cinnamon oil was the most destructive to the yeast and it killed bacteria as well.
This led researchers to suggest cinnamon oil as a potential agent against hospital-borne infections, even those resistant to conventional antibiotics.
Further research discovered that cinnamon’s impact as an antibacterial and antifungal is due to the active ingredient cinnamaldehyde, which directly attacks many microorganisms.
At this point, the question isn’t “does cinnamon kill yeast and bacteria?” That question has been settled.
Science is now asking “which yeasts and bacterias do cinnamon oils kill the most effectively?”
So far, that list includes:
- B. cereus
- C. jejuni
- E. coli
- Enterobacter
- H. pylori
- L. monocytogenes
- Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis
- P. aeruginosa
- P. fluorescens
- P. vulgaris
- V. cholerae
You’ll notice three of those words — tuberculosis, cholera, and e. coli — are infections that have plagued humans for centuries. And little old cinnamon can help fight them off.
Research continues to identify new cinnamon-sensitive infections every year.
Why You Should Care
Generally, healthy gut flora and freedom from serious infection are good for your overall health. Good overall health means better erections…but wait! There’s more!
In 2013, a team led by Professor Jane Danska at the University of Toronto found a direct link between sex hormone production and healthy gut flora (source).
Using rats, they investigated what happened to their gut flora when sex hormone production was blocked, and what happened to the sex hormones when gut flora was changed.
Their research found that changing one changed the other, suggesting a complicated interrelationship.
More research is needed to find out how that interrelationship works but it’s clear that balanced gut flora at least helps sex hormone production and by extension, healthy erections.
Which takes us to…..
Cinnamon Boosts Testosterone
What it Does
Cinnamon is really, really good for your testosterone production. We know this because of a whole series of studies that show direct and indirect evidence of this effect.
Researchers studied this by giving subjects cinnamon, cinnamon oil, or cinnamon extract. They then took blood tests and examined organs to determine the results.
An incomplete list of what this research shows cinnamon can do for sexual health includes:
- Direct increase of testosterone levels, up to 134% of a control group
- Improved semen quality
- Greater semen quantity
- Increased testes weight and size
- Greater number of leydig cells
Like with some of the gut flora research, most of what we know about this, we know because we’ve seen it in rodents.
But the link between gut health and sex hormone production has been clearly demonstrated, so it’s just a matter of time before we have some solid human data on this subject.
Why You Should Care
Testosterone is the most important hormone in a man’s body when it comes to powerful erections, libido, and almost every other aspect of sex and sexual health.
More testosterone = more, better, stronger, longer-lasting erections…and more cinnamon = more testosterone.
It really is that simple.
Cinnamon for Erections: Conclusion
Remember back a few years ago when all the kids were doing the “cinnamon challenge” and eating whole teaspoons of cinnamon basically on a dare?
Yeah. Don’t do that. That’s stupid, and bad for you.
That said, if you have very low testosterone or severe erectile dysfunction, don’t try to get enough cinnamon by just adding it to your food.
You’ll need to take more than that to make the differences you need for sexual erectile health.
You can get cinnamon tablets and cinnamon oil supplements, and take them like your other erection supplements.
Aim for 2000mg daily. I recommend one with breakfast, two with lunch, and one with dinner. To increase the impact, combine with this erection booster when you take your morning dose.
Important note: make certain you buy the ceylon variety of cinnamon and not the cassia style.
Cassia contains high levels of coumarin, which is a liver toxin.
In the amounts you’ll be taking initially, you’re at serious risk for liver damage if you consume too much cassia cinnamon.
Turns out liver failure is bad for your erections. Who knew?
