More meat less sex?

A sexy PETA ad featuring scantily-clad models fondling crudites was banned from the Super Bowl by NBC:

'Veggie Love': PETA's Banned Super Bowl Ad

While this may seem like a defeat for pro-vegetarian groups, Freakonomics suspects that, at $30 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad spot, PETA got exactly what it wanted:

"Maybe G.M. should try the same ad strategy as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): get your commercial banned from the Super Bowl. PETA made a sexually explicit commercial that NBC wasn’t comfortable with — one that, just maybe, PETA knew NBC wouldn’t be comfortable with? — and got lots of press without having to actually run the ad."

But what about PETA's central claim, that vegetarians have better sex? New York Magazine looks at some of the evidence:

"Beyond the overenthusiastic veggie love and flagrant sexism in the banned PETA Super Bowl ad, we were also dubious of the notion that vegetarians have better sex. Slate allays our fears with facts: “Vegetarian diets tend to correlate with higher rates of zinc deficiency, which is closely associated with lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives. Vegetarian women are also more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), a condition that's usually accompanied by low testosterone, vaginal dryness, and poor libido.” Not so sexy. The cornerstone of PETA’s argument is that eating meat makes you “fat, sick,” and therefore “boring in bed.” There’s some truth to vegetarians weighing less, on average, but the “journal Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that overweight women might, in fact, be slightly more [sexually] active,” Slate notes. If PETA is claiming that vegetarians make better sex partners because they're hotter than meat-eaters, we’d like to point out that Victoria's Secret models like Gisele enjoy a little meat. According to Churrascaria waiter Marcio Lorenzi, they're partial to chicken hearts."

I guess that's one theory we can put to bed.