To Preserve Muscle Mass, Eat High Potassium Foods

Quick: At what age does the natural decline in muscle mass (which begins in our twenties) reach one percent a year?  Readers who answered 45 spend way too much time memorizing useless physiological trivia, but are correct. How to keep the muscle on?  Exercise is good, of course, but diet can also play a role. Researchers at the Tufts’ Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging have learned that eating foods with high levels of potassium seems to help
keep the muscle on. The Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter reports that researchers there studied 400 male
and female volunteers ages 65 or older for three years, and found that those whose diets were rich in
potassium averaged 3.6 more pounds of lean tissue mass than those with
only half the potassium intake. That muscle mass, the letter reports,
almost offsets the 4.4 pounds of lean
tissue typically lost in a decade in
healthy men and women age 65 and
above. What food are high in potassium? Bananas, avocados, cantaloupes, milk, and many more found here.