Obese have worse sexual health despite less sex

(Reuters) - Obese wo­m­en have four times as many un­planned preg­nan­cies as healthy-weight wo­m­en de­spite hav­ing less sex, and obese men are more like­ly to have sex­u­al dis­eas­es de­spite few­er part­n­ers, sci­en­tists said on Wed­nes­day.


In a study show­ing how obe­si­ty can harm sex­u­al health, French and Bri­tish re­search­ers al­so found that obese wo­m­en are less like­ly to ask for con­tra­cep­tive ad­vice or use the pill, and obese men are more like­ly to suf­fer from erec­tile dys­func­tion.

With obe­si­ty epi­demics over­whelm­ing many wealthy na­tions and threat­en­ing in­creas­ing num­bers of de­vel­op­ing coun­tries, ex­perts said the public health im­pact of the find­ings was im­por­tant.

In the Unit­ed States, for ex­am­ple, two-thirds of adults are over­weight or obese.

"In public health terms, the study lends a new slant to a fa­miliar mes­sage: that obe­si­ty can harm not on­ly health and longevi­ty, but your sex life," Sandy Gold­beck-Wood, a spe­cial­ist in psy­cho­sex­u­al medicine at Bri­tain's Ip­swich Hos­pi­tal, wrote in an ed­i­to­rial on the study in the Bri­tish Med­i­cal Jour­nal (BMJ).

The re­search, led by Pro­fes­sor Nathalie Ba­jos of France's Na­tio­n­al In­sti­tute for Health and Med­i­cal Re­search (INSERM), is the first ma­jor study to in­vesti­gate the im­pact of be­ing over­weight or obese on sex­u­al ac­tiv­i­ty and other fac­tors such as sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, un­in­tend­ed preg­nan­cy and abor­tion.

The au­thors sur­veyed the sex­u­al be­havior of 12,364 men and wo­m­en aged be­tween 18 and 69 years in France in 2006. Around half of them were nor­mal weight, with a body mass in­dex (BMI) of 18.5 to 25, around 2,500 of them were over­weight, with a BMI of 25 to 30, and around 750 of them were obese, with a BMI over 30.

Com­pared to nor­mal weight men, obese men were 70 per­cent less like­ly to have had more than one sex­u­al part­n­er in the past year and two and half times more like­ly to suf­fer from erec­tile dys­func­tion. Obese men un­der 30 years old were far more like­ly to have had a sex­u­al­ly trans­mitt­ed dis­ease.

Sex­u­al dys­func­tion was not linked to BMI in wo­m­en, but obese wo­m­en un­der 30 years old were less like­ly than wo­m­en of nor­mal weight to seek con­tra­cep­tive ad­vice or use oral con­tra­cep­tives and were al­so more like­ly to re­port an un­planned preg­nan­cy.

The study al­so found that obese wo­m­en were five times as like­ly to have met their part­n­er on the in­ter­net, more like­ly to have an obese part­n­er, and less like­ly to view sex as im­por­tant for per­so­n­al life bal­ance.

Ba­jos said so­cial pres­sure, low self-es­teem and con­cerns about body im­age may help ex­plain th­ese find­ings.

Gold­beck-Wood said there was evi­dence that doc­tors find it dif­fi­cult to dis­cuss sex and weight is­sues with pa­tients, but she said they must be more pre­pared to do so: "We need to un­der­s­tand more about how obese peo­ple feel about their sex lives, and what drives the ob­served be­haviors and at­ti­tudes."