Tuesday, January 29, 2008

I'm Honestly Just Curious

At our recent meeting, one of the Society members suggested writing an article investigating whether or not foods or other substances actually affect the flavor of semen. We joked about conducting a large blinded experiment, but jokes aside I wanted to know the real information. With that in mind, I hit the Internet.

Sadly, I didn't find much. Well, that's a lie: I found a lot. I just didn't find much that was useful.

First off, Snopes doesn't have an article on this. They do have several other articles involving semen, but none regarding flavor.

My next step was Google. I found a boatload of articles on what to eat or not eat to improve semen flavor, but most of them are uncited. In fact, many just seem to be using the argument from sex-columnist authority.

However, a few pages in my search stood out.

This one cites its source—in a way. The page displays an image captured from a book (click for a larger image on the native page), and that book is cited at the bottom of the page. However, the image itself contains a citation to a different source, and it's only a parenthetical reference. I could not track down the full reference, so as of now this chart remains anecdotal.

A BBC program conducted an experiment (with video, if you're interested). I think it might have been a little... poorly controlled.

There's a product on the market that claims to sweeten a man's semen. They present no scientific research, but the patent application (apparently for the same product) says the 27-couple market research was "highly positive." I bet.

Two sites referred to scientific tests (or the dearth thereof) on semen flavor. This WikiAnswers page mentions the lack of research before diving into the anecdotes. Dr. Drew calls the semen-flavor claim a "myth" and makes reference to people who have studied this. However, he provides no names or references, so this has to be chalked up to anecdote as well.

As of now, everything I've found has been anecdotal (with the exception of the BBC experiment). Since I'm not a person knowledgeable in medicine, Google's pretty much as far as I go. Well, I did do a Google Scholar search, but nothing interesting came up. So I ask you the reader, do you know of any evidence on this subject? Has anyone scientifically studied semen flavor?

1 comments:

Prazzie said...

Wait, I'm on it. I just approached a friend on msn with
"Prazzie says (3:14 PM):
hey!
Prazzie says (3:14 PM):
would you like to do some SCIENCE?"

;)