The Viagra Fruit?

Turns out watermelon may be more than a delicious, summertime lunch accompaniment. It may be a love accompaniment as well.

According to researchers, watermelon delivers the same kind of effects that taking a Viagra pill does. Really! 
Researchers from the Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center at Texas A&M University believe this to be so after determining that watermelon contains more citrulline than previously thought. How citrulline is related to Viagra is a bit convoluted, so stay with me.

Citrulline is an amino acid that is converted into arginine when it’s digested. Arginine produces nitric oxide. It is this nitric oxide that helps blood vessels dilate, the same kind of blood vessel dilation that occurs when taking a Viagra pill.

Though citrulline is a non-essential amino acid, thus capable of being manufactured by the body, it’s found in a number of fruits, vegetables and nuts, including cantaloupe, cucumber and walnuts. It’s most prevalently found in watermelon, though. In fact, the Latin word for watermelon is citrullus.

So, will this finding cause mass sellouts on watermelon at your local grocer or farmer’s market? Probably not, especially if you take other studies on the topic into consideration.

For instance, a 2007 study in the journal Nutrition found that despite volunteers’ drinking three eight ounce glasses of watermelon every day for three weeks, arginine levels increased a mere 11 percent. That’s a lot of watermelon juice for such a small increase!

While this new finding on the benefits of watermelon is, shall we say, titillating, the watermelon provides more for the body than improved sexual performance, limited though it may be. The high amounts of potassium, lycopene and beta-carotene in watermelon targets many different kinds of people who have, may have, or have a history of specific health problems. These people include those with hypertension (potassium-rich diets helps reduce high blood pressure), those who smoke (eating food sources high in beta-carotene helps reduce the risk of lung cancer) and those with a family history of prostate cancer (lycopene is believed to be particularly good at combating this type of cancer).

Again, as the good doctors and researchers have said in their comments to news outlets and newspapers, this finding doesn’t mean that watermelon is the equivalent of Viagra. In fact, the researchers don’t even know how much watermelon it would take to produce the same kind of results that Viagra offers. However, this finding adds more fuel to the fire, more grist to the mill that natural foods found in your garden patch has the same properties, functions and effects as manufactured pharmaceuticals – without the side effects.