If you haven’t yet found a partner for cuffing season and your DMs are empty, you can take solace in the fact that you don’t have to deal with the latest sex trend that has doctors concerned.
However, if you have paired up with someone, unlike a certain individual whose disastrous dating profile went viral, and you’re seeking to enhance your performance with a trending product, take notice of this advisory.
From TikTok, which seems to be the source for discovering trends these days, comes the report that young people on college campuses are using something referred to as ‘honey packs’ or ‘honey packets’.
A packet of honey might sound harmless, but it’s not as straightforward as it appears.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) describes a ‘honey packet’ on its website as ‘a product promoted and sold for sexual enhancement’.
The TikTok account ASU Chicks featured college students who admitted to using the product, with one student claiming to have consumed four packets in a single night and 28 over a week.
However, both the FDA and multiple medical experts are urgently warning against the use of these ‘honey packets’.
The FDA has issued a public notice advising consumers not to ‘purchase or use X Rated Honey for Men’.
The notification states: “FDA laboratory analysis confirmed additional samples of X Rated Honey for Men contained tadalafil, the active ingredient in the FDA-approved prescription drug Cialis, used to create erectile dysfunction.”
Cleveland Clinic explains that Tadalafil ‘works by increasing blood flow to the penis, which helps to maintain an erection.’
The FDA warns: “FDA’s approval of Cialis is restricted to use under the supervision of a licensed health care professional. This undeclared ingredient may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs such as nitroglycerin and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels.
“People with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heart disease often take nitrates.”
This warning is echoed by other medical professionals.
Dr. Peter Leone, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases, told USA Today that tadalafil can also have negative effects when mixed with alcohol, increasing the likelihood of ‘getting dizzy’ or ‘passing out’. While he supports ‘people having good sex and sexual pleasure’, he emphasizes that there are ‘safer ways of doing it.’
Dr. Jesse Mills, a health science clinical professor and director of the Men’s Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles, adds: “For a college student, if they already are having difficulty achieving an erection and maintaining it for intercourse, then that’s a big health problem that needs to be addressed.
“But if they think that it’s just going to help them last longer, help them party harder, then it’s probably not going to work unless they really believe in it − in which case, anything works, because the placebo effect is incredibly powerful.
“If any college student is having questions about how well they’re performing sexually, they should be evaluated by a sexual health specialist, and we can determine how much of it is something physiologic that we can treat or how much of it is something that we need to address from a more psychological standpoint.”