One of the facts of life is that we all get older. I will be eighty-three on my next birthday and have been interested in men’s health for most of my life. When I was five years old my forty-three-year-old father took an overdose of sleeping pills. He had become increasingly depressed because he couldn’t support his family doing the work he loved.
Luckily, he didn’t die but was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital north of our home in Los Angeles. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to help other families like ours.
I went off to college at U.C. Santa Barbara and was a pre-med student majoring in biology and psychology. I later was accepted at U.C. San Francisco medical school but soon found medicine too elitist and narrow in its health focus and transferred to U.C. Berkeley where I earned my master’s degree in social work.
Later I returned to graduate school to engage in more in-depth study of the issues facing men and their families. I earned a PhD in International Health and for more than forty years I have specialized in in the emerging field of Gender-Specific Medicine and Men’s Health.
I have written seventeen books including international best-sellers Male Menopause, Surviving Male Menopause: A Guide for Women and Men, and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.
I recently interviewed Dr. William Brant about his own work in healthcare. Dr. Brant is a board-certified urologist specializing in erectile dysfunction, low testosterone, and other men’s urologic conditions. Dr. Brant works directly with patients navigating these concerns and offers expert commentary on the broader trends shaping men’s sexual health today.
One of the issues Dr. Brant and I discussed is how difficult for men to sort through the barrage of information that bombards them, some good, some inaccurate, and some dangerous. This is particularly true in the supplement and neutraceutical realm.
“What I tell men,” says Dr. Brant, “is to remember the adage, keep it simple.”
He went on to say,
“Make sure you are getting a quality product and try to avoid duplicating ingredients to prevent overdoing it. Try to stick with ingredients that have evidence behind any purported benefits. And try to stick with a simple system that gives you what you want, but nothing more.”
Ads for supplements are everywhere, but don’t be fooled.
“I don’t think everyone needs supplements,” says Dr. Brant. “For example, it bothers me when teenagers and young men are taking all sorts of things because, in general, this age group is already optimized and so, at best, they have expensive urine and at worst they are throwing off the homeostasis of what should be a perfectly balanced system. I often see teenagers and guys in their early twenties who may ‘brag’ about their sexual stimulants and ED drugs whereas I think, why do you need these? What else is going on that makes you feel the need to do more?”
As most of us guys in midlife and beyond well know, sometimes we need help staying healthy and active as we age.
“As men age, our modern life conspires to slowly grind us down,” says Dr. Brant. “The most obvious role for supplements is rounding out a diet in which we lack the necessary elements. But less obvious is that our bodies cannot tell the difference between life-threatening stress and life stress. So, we are revved up, constantly on guard and not allowing for restoration. It’s hard to sift through the evidence for various supplement components, but some have reasonable evidence of both safety and efficacy.”
Dr. Brant concludes saying,
“The men’s sexual wellness category is crowded with quick-fix, performance-driven pills that promise instant results, rely on stimulants, or frame sexual health as something men only address once something feels ‘wrong.’ As a result, many men either avoid the category altogether or cycle through products that won’t actually support long-term health.”
If you would like to connect with Dr. Brant and his work you can reach him at menssexualhealthutah.com
For those who would like to read more articles about men’s health, you can visit me at
