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One of the interesting side effects of consuming arginine is that it is the bodies primary source of nitrogen molecules for making nitric oxide (NO). What does NO have to do with sex? Quite simply, for men, without NO there would be no erections. By facilitating blood flow to the erectile tissue of the penis, NO produced from L-arginine can give men erections that are bigger, harder, and more frequent. Some men also report that L-arginine gives them greater endurance. Viagra is not the first NO producing drug. Over the years there have been many NO producing drugs used by desperate men. Nitroprusside, amyl nitrate and glyceryl nitrate (a.k.a. nitroglycerine) are three examples. All of them worked and all of them were dangerous. One of them (glyceryl nitrate) never really became popular due to the fact that most of women involved with the men using it developed instant headaches from the nitroglycerine. Both men and women have also remarked about the way L-arginine seems to increase their libido, or desire for sex. Women also notice that NO increases the incidence of orgasm. This is due to the fact that NO allows clitoral and vaginal tissues to enlarge and become responsive. The discoveries of some of NO's vital roles in human physiology, in fact, were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in medicine - to the astonishment of scientists everywhere, who could scarcely believe that this poisonous industrial gas (and notorious air pollutant) could play any role in the human body except to injure it. Science is full of surprises. Far from injuring us, NO - when it is made inside the body from arginine - helps regulate our blood pressure, among other functions. It is synthesized, with the help of an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase, in the vascular endothelium - that is, in the layer of smooth cells (called epithelial cells) that line the inside walls of blood vessels. There it exerts its vasodilating effect, i.e., it triggers the cellular responses that dilate the vessels when needed, so as to lower blood pressure (and, when appropriate, to facilitate erections). One
final note: Arginine is an essential amino acid (meaning that the body
cannot produce it), that must be introduced from the diet or from a
supplemental source.
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