Unexpected but true: nutritious diet may help your bones more than exercise! A recent study details a correlation between nutrition, muscle mass, and training, and the results, published in PLOS One Journal, are very informative and exciting.
The researchers from the University of Michigan analysed how exercise and nutrition impacted mice. To test the hypothesis, the researchers put the mice through an eight-week program, where they exercised and either consumed a regular diet or a mineral-supplement diet. After the eight weeks of training, the scientists checked out the difference in bone mass. Once the mice received their medical assessment, they continued with their same diet and did not train for another eight weeks.
After the final evaluation, the researchers discovered that the mice who did not exercise but still continued to consume the mineral-supplement diet kept their bone mass and strength.
Coauthor David Kahn says, “The longer-term mineral-supplemented diet leads to not only increases in bone mass and strength, but the ability to maintain those increases even after detraining”. He continues to discuss how this analysis could be groundbreaking news for us since exercising becomes more difficult to do as we age, whereas a healthy diet may be easier to manage.
If you are looking for foods that will help to benefit your bones, you may want to consider consuming more sources that are abundant in vitamins and minerals, such as broccoli, eggs, nuts, kale, potatoes, fish, lentils and so much more! You can check out this informative list which details which foods contain which vitamins and minerals how many grams you - depending on your age and gender - should eat a day.