Impotence City, USA

It’s time to be a little silly for a change.

North Carolina has been in the news a lot because of the Democratic primary that’s being held their today. The good thing about following the presidential campaign is that I’ve learned so much about states I’ve never been to. North Carolina sounds like a dreamy place to live. Except for this factoid: Greensboro, N.C. has been designated the “most impotent city in the US” by a men’s magazine.

Can you just imagine the pundits crunching the numbers about the “impotence vote”? For example, do impotent people vote as a bloc? How can a candidate capture this all-important segment of the population? One thing would be to offer free Viagra and to mandate insurance coverage for ED drugs to all Americans.

My guess is that the impotence vote will go for Hillary. That’s because she was praised at a steelworkers rally this week for her “testicular fortitude”. Whatever you think of the lady, I’ll give her that.

Now for the details of the story:

Men’s Health magazine has ranked U.S. cities according to their impotence rates using one criterion: how many ED drugs are sold in that particular city? In this survey, the “limpest” city award goes to Greensboro, N.C. and the top prize to San Francisco, C.A. If you want to have fun, you might just want to “Go west, young man”. (Would you believe that I read another study some months ago which said the impotence rates are highest in California? That’s because that study used a different measure: they looked at how many men had gone to therapists seeking help for ED. So don’t anybody get insulted too quick. You can cook the numbers anyway you want.)

But there is a serious message in this article. It states that smoking and obesity can cause (or aggravate) ED. I was not aware that obesity raises the risk of impotence by 79 percent! So many men complain of ED after treatment for prostate cancer, but the truth is many of them have other risk factors for this condition. So it’s worth paying attention to. Here’s the article from Men’s Health:

Impotence Hits Where You Live

In this month’s MetroGrades report, we find the cities where men are most likely to go limp

It doesn’t take a degree in marketing to recognize that sex sells cigarettes,what with nearly every ad being some variation on the smokin’-hot-woman-wants-heavy-smoking-man theme. There is, however, a basic flaw in the idea that nicotine equals nooky: Studies show that smoking raises the risk of erectile dysfunction. Witness the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, home of the third-largest tobacco manufacturer in the United States — and, based on our rankings, the nation’s limpest city. In fact, at last count, there were 53 percent more people lighting up in Greensboro than in San Francisco, where guys always rise and shine.We analyzed per-capita sales of the ED drugs Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra for each city, courtesy of NDC Health. And since obesity increases the odds of impotence by 79 percent, we also considered the fat factor, tapping stats from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After the requisite number crunching, we had the hard data to pinpoint the Greensboros — and those cities that are more like bedroom communities.

1. San Francisco, CA A+

2. Colorado Springs, CO A+

3. Denver, CO A+

4. Boise, ID A

5. Oakland, CA A

6. Portland, OR A

7. Providence, RI A

8. Lincoln, NE A

9. San Diego, CA: A

10. Laredo, TX: A

11. New York, NY: A

12. Bakersfield, CA: A