Sowing Your Oats with Avena Sativa

There are countless stories about man learning from the animals. In the case Avena Sativa, aka Green Oats or Wild Oats, the evidence comes straight from the horse’s mouth.
 
Imagine a time before drug manufacturers, before pharmacies, even before hospitals.  Imagine a time when societies were not yet formed and people were scattered across the land, left to fend for themselves by working the land, raising animals, and growing vegetables to sustain them.  Now imagine you are this farmer, holding dominion over your gardens, your cows, your horses and chickens. 
 
All day long you work the fields of corn, wheat, and some unknown green grass that grows thin and plentiful.  Instead of a Lexus or a Honda, or even a John Deere tractor, your carriage is your horse or maybe just a lame mule.  He struggles without incentive to plow the field for you and the whole enterprise is just one great monotonous exercise in unimaginative labor, survival.
 
Then one day you notice that your horse (we’ll call him Willy, just for fun) begins to slow down, eat less, and whinny his dissatisfaction more often.  He becomes stubborn, digging in his heels, and soon comes the morning when you come out to greet him, plow reins in hand, and he just plain runs away.  “Enough of this puckey,” Willy seems to say,

I quit.

What do you do, Farmer John?  Sweet-talking animals only works in the movies, but out here on the farm it just doesn’t cut it.  Next you try some kicking and screaming and cussing at Willy, but that doesn’t work either.  Finally, you decide to try some dietary changes.  You give ol’ Willy a few precious carrots out of your garden, but even these treats have lost their pizzazz. 
 
Then one day it happens.  All hell breaks loose.  After grazing in that strange patch of seemingly ordinary green thicket, ol’ Willy just goes berserk, snorting and a stomping and a chasing the mares around the barnyard, wild-eyed crazy… What’s gotten into Willy?  Why, by God, he’s not just happy, he’s downright horny!
 
The next day you entice Willy with a handful of the same stuff and he comes to you, eats it from your hand, and plows the field harder than he’s ever plowed before.  It’s a miracle!
 
Except it’s not… it’s just the way a farmer solves a problem.
 
Another story, this one true and shorter, I promise.  My wife has two horses.  One is a hot-blooded thoroughbred named Mo.  Sometimes Mo likes to be ridden, sometimes she is so rambunctious it is all but impossible to so much as put a harness on her.  In these times, my wife brings out a bucket of oats.  As soon as Mo sees the bucket of oats, she comes running and whinnying like no one’s business.
 
The reason is because oats (Avena Sativa) are clinically proven to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn allows the sexual organs, including the prostate and kidneys, to function better.  Oats contains an amorphous alkaloid, which acts as a stimulant of the motor ganglia, increasing the excitability of the muscles, and therefore causes in people (and horses) sexual and physical excitement.
 
“But,” you ask, “what does that mean, Farmer John?”  It means, parasympathetic nerves are present in all of your organs and help your body better respond to environments and nutrients to ensure that the body can do its job.  One example for men is the prostate gland’s parasympathetic nerve controls the contractions of your ejaculatory valve, triggering a release of semen leading up to and during orgasm. Problems such as premature ejaculation or inability to achieve a satisfying ejaculation may be the result of a weakened prostate.  In short, you heal the nerve, you help the prostate, you have better sex.

Other factors that allow Avena Sativa to work its natural magic on your body:  Even though it does not contain hormones or necessarily trigger more hormone production, Avena Sativa works by freeing previously bound-up testosterone in both men and women.  Bound up testosterone is key here because only free testosterone is active in promoting heightened sexual response.  Especially in aging people, testosterone becomes bound in various compounds (namely protein molecules) in the body.  As more testosterone is freed up to do its natural work, the body and mind become more open to sexual thoughts and functions, and the libido increases.
 
In addition to these libido-enhancing qualities, Avena Sativa is good for the kidneys and for regular bowel function.  And as we have learned through Western, Traditional Chinese, and Ayurvedic medicines, healthy kidneys and regular bowels are essential to proper functioning of the sexual organs, not to mention the simple act of getting in the mood.
 
Additionally, Avena Sativa has been the subject of more studies from respected organizations in the U.S. than just about any other of its more exotic herbal counterparts (Tongkat Ali and Catuaba, to name only a couple).  Researchers at The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, based at a California State graduate school, have studied the effects of Avena Sativa for decades.  This and similar studies have shown that regular ingestion of wild oats have resulted in an increased libido for fully 70% of men and 76% of women.  For the men, along with a heightened sex drive, the results included greater firmness of erection, increased stamina, and more powerful orgasms, including multiple orgasms. 
 
However, because women tend to have more receptors for testosterone in their brains than men, it was discovered that women may need and increased amount of Avena Sativa, or a combination of oats and other herbal agents such as Saw Palmetto, to experience the same results as their male counterparts.
 
I don’t know about you, but when I first began thinking about oats in preparing to research this article, my thoughts immediately turned to the plump, graying, bi-focaled actor Wilford Brimley.  This is because (as anyone who has read my articles here on Herballove.com will attest) I am a pop culture junkie.  You may remember Wilford Brimley from the Quaker Oats commercials, acting the sage old grandfather here to remind us to put something good in our bodies at breakfast time. 
 
You may also recall that Wilford Brimley is the actor who discovered the fountain of youth in the film Cocoon, which granted he and his geriatric buddies a return to the sexual capabilities of their youth.  Is this merely a coincidence, two jobs for an otherwise out-of-work and aging actor?  Of course… but then again, Bob Dole was the first celebrity to do an ad for Viagra, and at some point one has to wonder if these snicker-inducing testimonials aren’t rooted in something more than just a paycheck.  Why not endorse wheat grass juice, or potato chips, or even Trojan Condoms?
 
Regardless, there’s something undeniably comforting to the notion that when seeking a supplement to rejuvenate our sex drives, the answer may not lay in a visit to the doctor’s office, a prostate exam, and a smattering of blood tests, and a prescription prone to side-effects.  The answer may lay in something as simple as a bowl of oatmeal.  Or, even more effective but no less natural, a concentrated form of Avena Sativa and maybe just a pinch of Saw Palmetto for her.
 
So the moral of the lesson is, if you want to sow your wild oats tomorrow, eat your wild oats today.  Like Farmer John, you may be surprised at the results.