About a week ago, my husband started buying Good & Plenty, the sugar-coated licorice candy we ate when we were kids. “Hey, you want some?” he kept asking.
Yesterday, he confessed that the Good & Plenty was an experiment; he’d read an article that said that the smell of licorice, specifically Good & Plenty, boosted sexual arousal in women.
Dr. Alan Hirsch, a neurologist and psychiatrist at Chicago’s Smell and Taste
Treatment and Research Foundation, conducted a study involving 30 women, aged 18 to 40, and discovered that while some men’s colognes impaired women’s physiological sexual responses, some food odors increased them. The winners? Good & Plenty combined with cucumber.
Did it work on me? I’m not telling.
In related news, an ingredient in licorice has shown to be successful in fighting severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), at least in the lab. German researchers, reporting their results in the latest issue of The Lancet, say that the compound, glycyrrhizin, was effective in stopping the SARS virus from reproducing, according to an Agence France Presse account.
More on that here.