(07-03-11) Popeye was right - Eating spinach really can boost your muscles

by Tony Isaacs


(NaturalNews) Just about everybody who harks back a few decades are familiar
with the famed cartoon character Popeye the Sailor Man, who downed a can of
spinach to produce bulging muscles whenever he needed to get out of trouble. As
researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Swedenfound have discovered, it
turns out that Popeye was right - spinach really can boost muscles.

According to the research, which was published in the February issue of the
journal Cell Metabolism, eating a bowl of spinach every day makes your muscles
"profoundly" more efficient. Researchers found that eating 300g spinach reduced
the amount of oxygen needed to power muscles when exercising by as much as five
percent.

The ingredients which make spinach work so well are the nitrates found
abundantly in spinach. Nitrates make the mitochondria, the "engine rooms" of
cells, more efficient.

"It is like a fuel additive for your muscles - it makes them run much more
smoothly and efficiently," said the lead author Dr Eddie Weitzberg of the
Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

In the study, Dr Wietzberg fed people the pure nitrate supplements equivalent
to the amount in a plate of spinach every day for three days. At the beginning
and end of the experiment participants pedaled strenuously on an exercise bike
while their oxygen intake was measured via a tube to the mouth. At the end of
three days, the difference in energy intake was found to be between three and
five per cent - which is considered to be a significant amount.

Originally it was thought that the iron content of spinach made it a power-
food. Now scientists have found that it is nitrates which are the true energy-
boosting ingredient found in spinach and other green leafy vegetables.

"We know that diets rich in fruits and vegetables can help prevent
cardiovascular disease and diabetes, but the active nutrients haven't been
clear," said Dr Weitzberg, who also added: "It is a profound and significant
effect. It just shows that Popeye was right."

Previously Prof Weitzberg and colleague Professor Jon Lundberg demonstrated
that dietary nitrate increases levels of nitric oxide in the body with the help
of friendly bacteria. Nitric oxide helps open up blood vessels, lowers blood
pressure, and improves circulation. Nitrates appear to help stop the loss of
energy in the mitochondria due to heat loss, making the cell - and thus the
muscle - more efficient.

The new study shows yet another benefit of nitrate and the nitric oxides that
stem from them; however, questions do remain. While the new study results show
that increased dietary nitrate can have a rather immediate effect, it is not
clear what might happen in people who consume higher levels of inorganic
nitrate over longer periods of time.

It is likely much healthier to consume nitrates and other beneficial items by
eating fresh vegetables and plants (sorry Popeye, but canned spinach is much
inferior to fresh spinach). When you get valuable nutrients from whole food
sources, you not only get the natural organic form of such items, but also get
all the supporting compounds found in the natural source.

Best of all would be to consume spinach and other produce which is certified
organic. In addition to having far less of the common pesticides, herbicides
and other chemicals found in non-organic vegetables, organic produce is usually
much more nutritious - an important consideration in today's mineral-depleted
soils.

As natural health authority Jon Barron noted in his book "Lessons from the
Miracle Doctors", a bowl of spinach our grandmothers ate had eight times the
nutrition in the typical bowl we eat today.

Sources included:

http://shatterlimits.com/spinach-fo...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...
http://www.thehealthage.com/spinach...

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