Your love life could be boosted by getting your 5 a day

For many years those unlucky in love have perhaps wondered what the secret(s) is to achieve and maintain a happy, healthy and active love life.

Obviously there are medications such as impotence drug Viagra or premature ejaculation treatments Priligy and Stud 100 spray, which can all provide a huge/satisfying boost between the bed sheets.

However, according to the findings of a new study, getting your 5 a day portion of fruit and vegetables can not only benefit your health in a number of ways, it can also improve your love life.

In particularly, the study suggests that people who consume plenty of fruit and vegetables emit a radiant glow which makes them more appealing to potential partners. The researchers behind the study think that over time we have generally associated bronzed skin with good health, and this glowing good skin that is given off from a high fruit and veg intake may subconsciously help to pick out a good mate and avoid the unhealthier of society.

For the study, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, researchers from York, St Andrews and Cambridge University snapped photographs of 20 men and women, manipulating them to produce four different versions.

One version depicted faces radiating a golden glow, clearly showing the advantageous effect of eating plenty of fruit and veg, whilst another version of the pictures showed a significantly less healthy complexion of the results of steering clear of the salad bowl!

The third and fourth sets also had differing tones of skin, but with faces that were changed to abstract pictures, unidentifiable as human.

Volunteers were then drafted in to view the pictures and judge how ‘attractive’ they deemed the images to be.

Yellowness of the abstract images appeared to have little impact on each person’s opinion, but interestingly the more golden faces were rated as better looking.

This would hint that yellow is maybe not a colour we particularly find attractive in general, but provides information as part of a person’s skin tone.

York University researcher Dr Carmen Lefevre said: “This suggests we use it in other people as a quick of who could be health and, perhaps more importantly, who may be unhealthy.  You don’t want to touch someone who has an illness you might catch.”

For those who really do not like their greens, there is good news in that even eating a small amount can have an impact.

Dr Lefevre, who is working up to eating five-a-day, said: “Other work we have shown that eating one or two more portions makes a visible difference after only four weeks.”

Her work may explain to some extent why people sometimes describe others with a tan as having a ‘healthy glow’.

Dr Lefevre added: “Some other work that our lab has done indicates that people prefer a tan to no tan. However, they seem to prefer the carotenoid colour more than a tan. Eating more fruit is better than going in the sun.”

Of course, there are a multitude of reasons to get your 5 a day intake of fruit and vegetables, besides looking more appealing to the opposite sex! Here is a detailed list of the 5 a day benefits, and information on what counts as one of the portions.