By Matilda Charles
Most of us already have experienced it: age-related muscle loss. It doesn’t matter how athletic we were in our youth, some degree of muscle loss is to be expected. Researchers have long wondered how to avoid it, and now it appears they’ve found the answer: green tomatoes and apple peels.
It turns out that both green tomatoes and apple peels contain the right molecules of ursolic acid and tomatidine, and can reduce transcription factor ATF4, which is a key in age-related muscle loss.
None of this muscle loss happened overnight. In fact, it started very subtly when we were between 30 and 40 years old. As time went on, we lost muscle strength as well as mass. By the time we hit age 65, it’s fairly obvious in most of us.
Without enough strength, we can have fractures from falls. This leads to disuse of muscles while we heal, which leads to further muscle loss, which can lead to loss of independence.
Researchers at the University of Iowa started going down the tomato and apple road once they discovered the correlation between the fruits and a lack of certain chemicals in aging muscles. Experimenting with mice, they discovered that, in two months on a special diet that promoted the missing ursolic acid and tomatidine, the mice increased muscle mass by 10 percent and muscle strength by 30 percent. That’s significant.
The next step is for researchers and biotechnical companies to turn this information into foods, pharmaceuticals or supplements that we can really use to recover our former muscle strength and mass.
Meanwhile, an apple a day probably won’t hurt.
Editor’s Note: This article does not mention the benefits of exercise for age-related muscle loss, or sarcopenia. WebMD.com says, “The primary treatment for sarcopenia is exercise.”
(c) 2015 King Features Synd., Inc.
