Pleasure has a bad rep.  It connotes hedonism, selfish behavior, narcissism, and abandonment of higher principles.  No gold stars for pleasure.  No pain, no gain is part of our national consciousness.  And if eating butter gives you pleasure, and you give in, you are probably obese as well as weak willed.

Here and now, let’s begin to clean up pleasure’s linguistic back eye.

What if I claim that acts of pleasure can actually cure  many of life’s ailments?

A whole bevy of books and research studies indicate that our brains and bodies respond to pleasure in astonishing ways.  Positive ways.  Not only do pleasurable experiences keep us healthy; pleasure actually cures serious conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, and  even cancer, according to Thomas R. Blakeslee, the author of “The Attitude Factor” (published by Thorson’s).   His claim is based on a German study that is largely unknown.

The German study goes so counter to modern thinking that it is still largely unknown 12 years after completion.  This study involved 3,000 elderly German residents of Heidelberg.  The study commenced in 1973 to determine if there was a relationship between pleasure and health.  It terminated in l995.

The participants “who reported the most pleasure in their lives (by their own definition of pleasure) proved 30 times more likely to be alive and well after 21 years than the people whose whoopee factors were the lowest……The more pleasure the people reported, the healthier they were likely to be”, according to Peter Shimer, writing in Mode Magazine in November of 2000.

An additional book with similar findings is “Molecules of Emotion” by Candance B. Pert, Ph. D., a research scientist from the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D. C.  She says your body and my body  are “hard-wired” for pleasure.

Hard to believe.