So this is all about erections and nitric oxide.
If you ever tried to inhale nitric oxide, you probably know that you will end up in the hospital in short order.
Nitric oxide is extremely toxic.
It is actually poison.
You can’t get near it, inhale it or have it on your skin without getting really hurt.
And yet, nitric oxide is well known to be useful.
It’s thought to be necessary for penile erections.
Nitric oxide is also an important signaling gas used by all muscles –especially the heart.
Remember how for a long time people would take those nitroglycerin tablets?
People would take the tablets when they were having angina symptoms for their heart.
They’d tuck a tablet under their tongue per the doctor’s orders.
Nitroglycerin tablets affect nitric oxide production in the body.
So the nitroglycerin would increase the nitric oxide, and it would improve the heart’s function.
And that’s how they work.
But nitric oxide can also be a poison when the body makes it.
Nitric oxide is kind of an emergency gas for the body.
It’s used in extremely small quantities for important functions — but you don’t want too much of it.
Nitric oxide is produced in the body by an amino acid called arginine.
Arginine is taken by a lot of bodybuilders.
It’s also taken by other men in various male supplements.
The supplements are supposed to help increase nitric oxide.
And increasing the nitric oxide is supposed to make erections more sustainable and harder.
But nitric oxide is not a good thing — and neither is arginine.
If you look in any of my information products, you’ll notice that none of them recommend or include any arginine.
Arginine creates nitric oxide.
But nitric oxide is not healthy in the body, except in the tiniest quantities.
When researchers accidentally discovered Viagra, it was being proposed as a heart drug.
But they discovered it had an effect on penile erections.
Ever since then, Viagra has inspired Big Pharma’s search for more drugs like it.
And of the drugs like Viagra are drugs that are known as nitric oxide synthase inhibitors.
That is, they temporarily allow nitric oxide to build up in the penis.
This build-up of nitric oxide causes erections.
These are known as nitric oxide-dependent erections.
I, for one, frequently consume various supplements that are designed to get rid of nitric oxide.
Yet my erections are very strong and long-lasting.
There has to be another mechanism in the body, which allows good erections and does not involve nitric oxide.
How else do you explain why some people don’t have a lot of nitric oxide but enjoy great erections?
As it turns out, there are several other kinds of erections.
We mentioned the nitric oxide-dependent erections earlier.
Another kind is nitric oxide independent erections.
These seem like a better type of erection when you realize that too much nitric oxide is harmful.
Results from this exciting study point to a way to have great erections without nitric oxide.
As the researchers point out, erections happen when muscles lining the arteries to the penis relax.
And the caverns in the penis relax.
Then blood can flow into those caverns, and the result is an erection.
There are even valves that keep the blood from going back into the body once it’s in the caverns.
All along, nitric oxide has been the focus.
As I said, nitric oxide is a kind of an emergency measure for the body.
It’s used to relax smooth muscles including the muscles lining the arteries in the heart.
These researchers note that there is another mechanism for erections.
And this mechanism has not been studied much.
a potential alternate avenue for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.
Let me explain what they’re talking about.
They found that there is another way of relaxing the arteries and the caverns in the penis.
The body uses it for other types of erections, not the nitric oxide -dependent erections.
This is the Rho-kinase pathway.
Okay, you don’t have to worry about Rho-kinase, and I’m not going to go into all the technical details.
But the point is that it involves calcium and relaxation of the arteries and the caverns in the penis.
It leads to very good long-lasting erections WITHOUT nitric oxide.
Normally, Rho-kinase causes contraction of smooth muscles.
It’s essentially the anti-nitric oxide.
However, when Rho-kinase is prevented from working, the smooth muscles lining the arteries and the caverns in the penis can relax.
This allows blood to flow in and causes an erection.
It’s an erection without nitric oxide.
At some point, researchers got tired of writing out Rho-kinase, so they call it ROCK.
But remember, to get rocky, we are looking to prevent Rho-kinase, or ROCK, from doing its thing.
We are looking for a ROCK inhibitor.
Fortunately, we have our Indian friends to thank for some ROCK inhibitors that might work.
Plus, these are fully natural.
They didn’t actually test these herbs on real people.
But they tested it with isolated erection chambers for rats.
Which is kind of weird, but it is somewhat of a test.
However, many of these herbs have been consumed for thousands of years with safety.
The Methanolic extract of Terminalia chebula was found to be most potent.
The traditional use of plants like Butea frondosa, Syzygium aromaticum, Butea superba, Chlorophytum borivilianum and Mucuna pruriens, as aphrodisiacs and for male sexual disorder (MSD) might be in part due to the ROCK II inhibitory potential of these plants.
Meanwhile, you can try some of these herbs yourself if you want.
As our last stop on this fascinating journey, here’s a study that tested one of these herbs:
Researchers gave rats this extract, and they studied their erections.
And they found that the erections were quite wonderful when they were taking the extract of this herb.
In fact, the researchers are very certain that this is a very good herb for erectile dysfunction.
The extract increased sexual activity/function, improved the quality of sperm production, and increased the level of smooth muscle, while it decreased the collagen level in the rat penile tissue
If you read this carefully, you see that this ROCK inhibitor is all kinds of wonderful.
Not only does it increase erections, but it also helps decrease penile fibrosis.
That’s the collagen buildup in the penis that may cause ED as we age.
With all of these research, it’s clear there are alternatives to drugs that work on the nitric oxide pathway.
We would expect that any ROCK inhibitors would be a reasonable alternative to the current bunch of erection drugs.
Citations
Antagonism of Rho-kinase stimulates rat penile erection via a nitric oxide-independent pathway
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v7/n1/full/nm0101_119.html
Screening for Rho-kinase 2 inhibitory potential of Indian medicinal plants used in management of erectile dysfunction.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23043981
Erectogenic and Aphrodisiac Effects of Butea frondosa Koenig ex Roxb. in Rats: Involvement of Enzyme Inhibition
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2013/874894/
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