While some foods are clearly very sexy looking (tomato cleavage, the butt of a pear, a single cherry, anything that oozes) and folklore has long entertained us with tales about the aphrodisiac qualities of foods like oysters, chocolate, and snails, it’s only rarely that, as a dietitian, I can come up with anything professional to say about the relationship between food and sex.

One thing I know to be true: Healthy is sexy. But I didn’t learn this in any of my nutrition classes. I learned it years later, when a boyfriend twelve years my junior said, “Healthy is sexy, and you’re very healthy.” At the time, I didn’t really hear what he was saying; I was too busy fretting over my impending old age and comparing my height, weight, and hair color to every other woman I saw who appeared to be in her early forties.  But after years of counseling both men and women to eat well and get fit for the right reason—to be healthy— I realize he had a point.

Food plays a very important role in how healthy you are and how healthy you will be ten, twenty, and thirty years from now. And your sexual health is determined, in great part, by your overall health. Some might even say that sexual health is one of the most important aspects of good health. Sex is probably one good reason why, given the choice, most people would rather have good health than more money. A healthy sex life represents vitality and continuity, whereas, money is just money. If you lose it all, you can probably get some or all of it back.  Not so true of your health.

There’s no reason to believe that any one individual food or supplement will prevent or cure chronic disease, lengthen your life, or boost your sex drive.  And it’s not possible to measure the direct effect of any food or food group on sexual prowess or satisfaction. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the type of diet you choose to eat on a regular basis can strongly influence your reproductive success as well as how long and how well you live. A healthy diet may not help you work up a sexual appetite, but it does support the biological system that drives and enables your sex life.

For example, two recently published studies conducted at infertility centers in Alicante and Murcia, Spain, showed that men who eat more fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy products have higher quality sperm than those who eat large amounts of meat and full-fat dairy and less produce. The researchers think that might be because a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is high in antioxidants. Those same substances that fight heart disease and cancer might also improve sperm count and mobility.

Which I take to mean that a healthy diet actually does directly contribute to a productive sex life because, though it may not be the only reason, our most primal reason to have sex is to reproduce. No matter how you look at it, healthy is sexy.