Recover faster from your workout with vitamin E
Long established as a powerful antioxidant, vitamin E is important for the membrane that envelops your muscle cells, promoting proper healing from the natural tears that take place when you exercise, according to a new study.
“Every cell in your body has a plasma membrane, and every membrane can be torn,” says corresponding author Dr Paul L. McNeil, cell biologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University in the US.
The study, which was published in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine, has implications for muscular dystrophy, traumatic brain injury, common diabetes-related muscle weakness and – of course – body builders.
“Part of how we build muscle is a more natural tearing and repair process – that is the no pain, no gain portion – but if that repair doesn’t occur, what you get is muscle cell death,” says McNeil. “If that occurs over a long period of time, what you get is muscle-wasting disease.”
Working with rats, McNeil and his team established their natural ability to run downhill on a treadmill, a challenging exercise called eccentric contraction and it helps lengthen muscles, according to the study.
Next, they fed them either normal rodent chow, chow in which the naturally occurring vitamin E had been filtered out, or a diet lacking in vitamin E save for a synthetic supplement.
Vitamin E deficient rats had trouble running compared to their healthy counterparts and were more likely to visit a rest area despite receiving a mild electric shock upon doing so.
Dry roasted sunflower seeds, cooked spinach and safflower oil are all examples of foods rich in vitamin E.
What’s more, overdoing vitamin E is not the same health concern that excess of other vitamins can be, according to a 2013 study. – AFP Relaxnews
Category: Features, Wellness and Complementary Therapies
