Muscle Aging Can Be Reversed By Apples And Green Tomatoes

Do you want to reverse aging in muscles? Then eat apples and green tomatoes. They contain a compound that will fight it.

"Many of us know from our own experiences that muscle weakness and atrophy are big problems as we become older," said Christopher Adams, UI professor of internal medicine and senior study author. "These problems have a major impact on our quality of life and health."

It has been identified that ursolic acid in apples, and tomatidine from green tomatoes can help to prevent acute muscle wasting in humans. Now the experiments suggest that they can also reduce "age-related muscle weakness and atrophy" in mice.

While the protein ATF4 is a transcription factor that can help to change gene expression and lead to reduction in muscle protein "synthesis and strength", there are two natural compounds that would reduce this muscle-wasting protein's activity, the University of Iowa  reported.

In an experiment, scientists located mice suffering from age-related muscle weakness and atrophy, giving them 0.27 percent ursolic acid, or 0.05 percent tomatidine for two months. They helped to increase muscle mass by 10 percent and muscle quality by a high 30 percent.

"Based on these results, ursolic acid and tomatidine appear to have a lot of potential as tools for dealing with muscle weakness and atrophy during aging," Adams says. "We also thought we might be able to use ursolic acid and tomatidine as tools to find a root cause of muscle weakness and atrophy during aging."

Both the natural compounds turned off a group of genes that were turned on by the transcription factor ATF4.

"By reducing ATF4 activity, ursolic acid and tomatidine allow skeletal muscle to recover from effects of aging," Adams concluded, according to hngn.

The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.