One For The Ages

It's never too late to reap the benefits of weight training, identical twins prove a vegan diet boosts health, and your weekly recommendations.

The Rundown

One For The Ages. According to a new study on resistance training and the elderly, age is indeed just a number when it comes to building muscle mass, strength and mobility. The research found that even participants in their 80s and 90s, who had never weight trained, had significant gains after starting a supervised lifting program three times a week.

The study recruited 29 healthy, older women and men who were put into two groups. People between the ages of 65 and 75 were the “younger old” group while those in the “older old” group were at least 85. No one had weight trained before and everyone lived independently.

After measuring the participants’ current strength and muscle mass, the researchers introduced them to a basic full-body resistance routine using machines at the gym. The volunteers lifted three times a week for 12 weeks with weights that were as much as 80 percent of their full strength. Attendance was reportedly high and injuries were rare.

The 85+ group added an average of 11 percent to their muscle mass and 46 percent to their strength while the 65-75 year-old group put on ten percent more muscle and 38 percent more strength. The researchers believe that the gains the older group made were partly due to that group’s lower baseline, having had an extra decade of declining muscle size and strength.

So does this mean you can skip weight training now and wait until retirement to start? Lead study author Gabriel Masri Marzuca-Nassr says probably not, “It’s better to start at an earlier age and continue through life.”

The key takeaway: There doesn’t seem to be an age limit on the body’s ability to adapt and improve, which is another way of saying you’re never too old to start exercising!

*If you’re over age 60 and interested in starting a new weight training program, you should probably first check with your doctor and then look for training programs at a gym or community center that are specifically designed for older people.

Vegan Boost. I don’t typically highlight nutritional research in this newsletter, preferring instead to mainly focus on movement studies. However, a recent identical twin study out of Stanford that tests a healthy omnivore diet against a healthy vegan one is worth noting.

The idea that eating less meat improves cardiovascular health is nothing new but what previous studies couldn’t control—genetics, background and lifestyle—this one did, by using twins to remove many of those variables. The results confirm that a vegan diet offers a broad health boost.

For the study, Stanford recruited 22 sets of identical twins who had grown up together and who had reported similar present-day lifestyles. The mean age was 39.6 years and 69% of the participants said they were very similar to their twin.

Over eight weeks, the twins were randomly assigned a healthy plant-based diet or a healthy omnivorous diet. Both diet plans heavily featured vegetables, legumes and whole grains and omitted refined sugars and starches. The plant-based diet omitted all animal products, including eggs and milk. The omnivorous plan included fish, chicken, eggs, cheese and dairy.

A delivery service provided nutritionist designed meals for the first month and the recruits prepared their own meals in line with their eating directives for the second month.

Before, during and after the trial, the twins were assessed with bloodwork, weigh-ins, feces testing and more. While everyone in the study already had reasonably healthy low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels (LDL), those on the vegan diet had the most significant change, dropping from 110.7mg/dL to 95.5 mg/dL. (The optimal range is below 100 mg/dL).

The vegans also had around a 20% drop in fasting insulin and lost an average of 4.2 pounds more than their meat-eating counterparts.

The Stanford team recognizes that the study is not likely to make anyone adopt a full-time plant-based diet (in fact, one vegan twin said she ate less because she didn’t want more whole grains or vegetables). But including more plant-based foods into your diet is a good idea, as the study demonstrates just how effective reducing saturated fats, increasing dietary fiber and losing weight is to improving cardiovascular health.

Extra Point

Watch

It Ain’t Over. Baseball great, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, amassed ten World Series rings, three MVP awards and 18 All-Star Game appearances. He also caught the only perfect game in World Series history but his accomplishments were often overshadowed by his off-the-field persona. This documentary goes beyond the personality and “Yogisms” to explore the career of a sport’s legend. It Ain’t Over is streaming on Prime Video.

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Nothing Much Happens. In this podcast, yoga and meditation teacher Kathryn Nicolai tells bedtime stories where nothing much happens to help you relax and sleep peacefully. The stories are described as a “soft landing spot for your mind.”

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Sore After Working Out? Here’s How to Manage. Amanda Loudin takes a look at the research and offers helpful tips on managing post-workout aches and pains in this piece for the New York Times.