What Are the Best Muscle-Building Foods?
The foods you eat and the type of exercise you include can help you prevent muscle loss. Maintaining muscle is key to maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle at any age.
After age 50, muscle mass, specifically muscle in your legs, decreases by 1-2% each year, and strength by 1.5-5% per year, per the 2019 revised European consensus of sarcopenia published in Age and Ageing. This age-related muscle loss, called sarcopenia, can be reduced or prevented with two fundamental lifestyle changes: consuming the proper foods and including resistance training. Here we share foods to include to improve muscle mass, and we look at the impact that resistance training has on our muscular and bone health.
How to Eat to Gain Muscle: The foods you consume have a major impact on your body’s ability to maintain or build muscle. Including enough dietary protein plays a big role in building and maintaining muscle mass. A 2018 study published in Nutrientsfound that in order to gain muscle, individuals would need to consume 1.6 g/kg of body mass in protein each day. For someone weighing 150 pounds (68. kg), this would equate to 109 grams of protein each day.
Excerpted from Eating Well
