Trying to build your muscle strength? Take a cue from Popeye and eat your spinach extract!
A new study from researchers at the Freie Universitat in Germany found that the active compound in spinach may search as an athletic performance enhancer by significantly boosting muscle strength.
Spinach is a superfood
Most experts already agree that spinach is pretty amazing when it comes to health benefits. The green leafy vegetable is rich in iron, calcium, and magnesium and has been reported to help:
- prevent asthmas
- lower blood pressure
- keep cancer at bay
- help diabetics manage their condition
But spinach extract may be so good at boosting muscle that it could actually be a threat to competition. It’s the main compound, ecdysterone has been shown to be even more potent that the steroids that have been banned in sports.
Researching ecdysterone’s effects on muscle strength
The team recruited 46 athletes who completed screening to ensure they had no prohibited performance-enhancing drugs in their system and split them into two groups. One group received a placebo for 10 weeks and the other group received different amounts of the spinach extract for 10 weeks.
Throughout the treatment, the scientists analyzed urine samples and blood samples to look for not only the ecdysterone and any biomarkers that would indicate performance enhancement.
The researchers found that the volunteers who took the spinach extract had much greater improvements in muscle mass and one-repetition bench press performance.
“These data underline the effectivity of an ecdysterone supplementation with respect to sports performance,” explains Maria Parr, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University in Berlin. “Our results strongly suggest the inclusion of ecdysterone in the list of prohibited substances and methods in sports in the class ‘other anabolic agents.’”
It’s important to remember that this is spinach extract. To get the same benefits from consuming spinach, you’d have to eat between 250 g and 4 Kg of spinach daily for 10 weeks.
