There is tons of data on active sex life adding to your life expectancy. Google it. Masturbation on the other hand, can make you go blind and have hairy palms.

UV, my friend. Quality of life is never ever an ev calculation.

this thread is a cluster****

Don't get yourself into a tizzy.

You could offer cliff-notes on what seems to work. Please understand that we already seem inclined to believe that breathing in burned vegetation decreases life-span. I'd imagine that we all already know that very low calorie diets seem to work in other animals as long as the diets are started very early in life.

?

It is rare but not unknown and it is the only metric of any importance.

Most are just confused and get hooked up on longevity, pleasing some god or other allsorted nonsense. That's why when they argue the pros and cons of smoking and other drugs they miss out all the pros.

i'm into emergency medicine, prophylaxis is not what we are known for. ask a phd

Forgive me. Was arguing elsewhere about the nature of how mass effects the dual particle-wave duality for large objects. Got on a side-track of ultraviolet light (uv) and young women being tanned and how gingers fit into the general scheme of things.

I meant expected utility.

Hence, expected utility. Or more properly, expected enjoyment (as a continuum). These arguments get overrun by silly black or white ideals that have nothing to do with the real problem, which is "estimate your likelihood of your action making you happy or sad?" and "how confident are you in your prediction and would you like to hedge your bet."

Nicely done, Dr. Tcc1.

Same thing then. obv' its all expectation. and quality of life is the actual measure of utility - its stuff like how having more money is expected to actually improve your life.

Yep. As usual, our only possible disagreement is on the details of strategy and whether the calculations are reasonable.

If pop-sci reporting is any indication, best way to improve lifespan is probably to move to some random agrarian European village where people live to be really old and just do whatever they do.

But more seriously,

As also mentioned earlier, suicide is one of most common causes of death in young people, so taking good care of your mental health is going to increase expected lifespan.

As everyone knows, exercise is great for you, but obviously you need to be safe (like being NFL player probably lowers lifespan). I would be curious if something like road cycling or mountain biking would actually decrease lifespan due to traumatic deaths/injury.

Sex is pretty much a disaster in this respect and people who want to maximise lifespan should be profoundly celibate.

Sex and reproduction are is the most dangerous activities for all lifeforms,

Agreed. This is a point on why ev is not the important bit.

Cliffs: Suicide decreases life expectancy.

Agreed on principle though.

but quality of life sure is.

even the health freaks grasp that sex is worth more than longevity (though to prevent their heads exploding most will be in denial)

lol, yeah my post probably wasn't too ground breaking

Easily to make the point at them by asking them a few questions.

It is all about happiness, from my limited standpoint of being me. I do honor the point that avoiding suffering is probably at least equally important.

There is nothing wrong with stating the obvious when it needs to be stated.

No, no, no!

http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA297851

I showed this article to my wife and told her to take a few for the team, and she wasn't amused

The young don't need the encouragement.

Agreed that your wife isn't doing it right. By extension, you are doing it completely wrong.

Surely a lot of this is due to risks taken to get access to sexual partners as well of the risk of STDs from promiscuous unprotected sex? I can't imagine that for a healthy, faithful married couple sex could have a significant negative impact on their lifespans.

Indeed. Plus child-birth and crimes of passion..

I'm speechless.

Could you explain the science behind these bold statements?

My understanding is that sex for well nourished human beings is at best ev neutral. Notions such as sex affecting muscular development have been proven wrong.

Not sure what angle your taking here, but Im pretty sure its well documented that having a stable marriage increases lifespan. I would suspect that being active sexually is an important factor in preserving marriage.

So it would seem from the viewpoint of increasing lifespan that it would be optimal to not have sex with anyone except for the person you marry, and the guy should get a vasectomy beforehand.

(Although I do wonder if the dangers of giving birth to a child in modern society may be mitigated by the support/finances they could provide to you later in life.)

Maybe. Its true particularly for men that they tend to die rather than go to the hospital without a women to nag them. Also there is a longevity advantage in not living or sleeping alone just because there's someone to nudge you alive or call an ambulance.

I seriously doubt however that anyone has done studies of lifespan of the profoundly celibate compared to the married. Priests seem to live a long time but I dont know how many are celibate.

I thought it was pretty well-known that there is a very strong connection between active sex lives and extended lifespan.

One such study (there are numerous others that agree, too):

A study conducted by Queens University in Belfast, Ireland, found that sex on a regular basis is not only healthy for our bodies but also improves our overall length of life.

The study was published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal and tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study compared men of comparable age and health and found that men who had the highest frequency of orgasm had a death rate half that of the other men who did not orgasm frequently.

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The Caerphilly cohort study
George Davey Smith, professor of clinical epidemiology,a Stephen Frankel, professor of epidemiology and public health medicine,a John Yarnell, senior lecturer

Abstract

Objective: To examine the relation between frequency of orgasm and mortality.

Study design: Cohort study with a 10 year follow up.

Setting: The town of Caerphilly, South Wales, and five adjacent villages.

Subjects: 918 men aged 45–59 at time of recruitment between 1979 and 1983.

Main outcome measures: All deaths and deaths from coronary heart disease.

Result: Mortality risk was 50% lower in the group with high orgasmic frequency than in the group with low orgasmic frequency, with evidence of a dose-response relation across the groups. Age adjusted odds ratio for all cause mortality was 2.0 for the group with low frequency of orgasm (95% confidence interval 1.1 to 3.5, test for trend P=0.02). With adjustment for risk factors this became 1.9 (1.0 to 3.4, test for trend P=0.04). Death from coronary heart disease and from other causes showed similar associations with frequency of orgasm, although the gradient was most marked for deaths from coronary heart disease. Analysed in terms of actual frequency of orgasm, the odds ratio for total mortality associated with an increase in 100 orgasms per year was 0.64 (0.44 to 0.95).

Conclusion: Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men's health.