SOME may scoff at the notion that spinach 鈥� despite containing nutrients 鈥� builds muscles, but Popeye may have been on to something. A steroid found in leafy greens ramps up protein synthesis in muscles.
A team led by Ilya Raskin of Rutgers University in New Jersey extracted phytoecdysteroids from spinach. When they placed the liquid extract on samples of cultured human muscle, it . Rats were also slightly stronger after a month of injections of the extract (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, ). Unfortunately, you would need to eat more than a kilogram of spinach every day to gain equivalent amounts of the steroid.
