I’m one of those weird adults that eats vegetables not because my mum tells me they’re good for me but because I genuinely enjoy them. Give me some carrot sticks, stir-fried broccoli and tomato paste on pizza (that’s healthy, yeah?) any day and I’ll happily chomp down.
I also love me some spinach. Gone are the days where I had to pinch my nose and force forkfuls into my mouth. I do admit though, there’s a part of my brain that still only eats it because I’m convinced it will “make me strong like Popeye.”
Yes, that’s another excuse my mum would use to get little 5-year-me to eat my greens.
I’m old enough now to know that Popeye is just a cartoon and that eating canfulls of spinach to build instant muscle mass is both impossible and straight up gross.
At least, that’s what I thought up until this morning. I’m still pretty sure canned spinach would be gross, but I’m less sure about the spinach not making you strong angle. New research from Freie Universität Berlin has found there’s a naturally occurring chemical in spinach which acts like a steroid.
The chemical, ecdysterone, can increase muscle mass and improve athletic performance when taken in large doses. So…Popeye was right after all.
During the experiment, some of the participants were given placebos, others were given ecdysterone capsules containing the equivalent of up to 4 kilograms of raw spinach a day.
The participants taking the supplement saw their physical strength increase three times as much as their placebo-taking counterparts.
“Even more relevant with respect to sports performance, significantly more pronounced increases in one-repetition bench press performance were observed,” the study’s abstract states.
In English that means that people who took ecdysterone could progressively lift heavier weights. For this reason, the researches recommended to the World Anti-Doping Authority’s (WADA) that the chemical be added to their list of banned substances.
That technically means that it would be illegal for athletes to eat spinach.
Where was this excuse when I was a kid?