It turns out that Popeye was right - spinach really will make you strong. Author Joe Friel in his books The Cyclists' Training Bible and Cycling Past Fifty asserts that kidney function gradually changes as we age, causing us to have a net loss of nitrogen, and with less nitrogen we produce and maintain less muscle. The lack of nitrogen basically causes our blood to become more acidic, and Coach Friel states that "the key to reducing, even avoiding, this situation is to lower the blood's acid level and increasing its alkalinity."
With that in mind, he recommends some nutritional changes to get your body's natural acid/alkaline balance back in line. It's pretty simple - in general, fruits and vegetables increase alkalinity. Fats and oils have a pretty much neutral effect. It's everything else that helps to cause the problem. That means that "grains, meat, nuts, beans, dairy, fish and eggs" can be problematic - if you eat too much of these at the expense of fruits and vegetables (note that these are many of the same culprits in most of the anti-inflamation diets).
Of course if you're set in your ways and can't stomach a drastic change in your diet, the simple shortcut is to at least eat more of the most alkaline foods out there. And it turns out that spinach is at the top of the vegetable chart and that raisins (and presumably grapes?) are at the top of the fruit chart. With that in mind here are a few spinach recipes to try out:
For more information on nutrition and age related muscle loss, check out The Paleo Diet for Athletes, which is co-authored by Joe Friel and Loren Cordain (author of The Paleo Diet).
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