Muscle Growth And Enriched Foods

Your efforts to build muscle are important, and you should ensure that your diet supports those efforts as well. It can be tempting to seek out specially designed, enriched foods that are touted to boost your muscle growth. Rather than being fooled, focus on eating a well-balanced diet that will provide your body the nutrients it needs to build muscles. Focus your exercise on challenging your muscles, as exercise is what spurs muscle growth.

Muscle Growth and Diet

The American Dietetic Association explains that muscles are developed through exercise and adequate nutrition. Daily, you need 1.4 to 1.8 g protein per kilogram of body weight, and that is about 20 percent of your total caloric intake. You can get protein from a variety of foods, including lean meat, low-fat dairy foods, vegetables, whole and unrefined grains, and legumes. In addition to eating a balanced diet, you should also regularly exercise at least twice per week in order to challenge your muscles and build strength, according to the American Dietetic Association.

Misconceptions about Muscle Growth

According to the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, there are multiple ergogenic aids designed to help athletes build muscle or perform better, but these aids may harm the taker or they may result in an unfair physical advantage for competitive athletes. In addition, many ergogenic products are researched and marketed for their roles in boosting muscle growth, but products sold may include several various products that may or may not actually have benefits or be safe for consumption. For this reason, the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports recommends using dietary supplements to contribute to a healthy diet but not to substitute for one.

Enrichment of Foods

The American Dietetic Association defines enriched foods as those foods whose vitamins and minerals lost during refining are added back during a later step in production. Enriched foods do not necessarily have higher nutrient content than unrefined, unenriched foods. They do offer more nutritional value than the unenriched, refined forms and should be chosen instead of those. It would be best to choose the unrefined, unadulterated form of any food, as it has more nutritional value than after it has been processed. Since enriched foods do not have more vitamins or minerals, they will not contribute to added muscle growth only by eating them.

Misconceptions about Food Supplements and Muscle Strength

Researchers have found that food supplements and ergogenic aids help to boost athletes' immune systems and overall body composition, but only resistance training programs resulted in muscle growth. The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition showed that study participants who were taking the supplements did not have any marked strength increase over participants who simply exercised. This study suggests that seeking out nutrition enriched foods will not assist in added muscle growth.

Muscle Growth for Older Athletes

A study conducted at the University of Oklahoma referenced the potential of the ergogenic benefit of creatine or increased protein intake in muscle growth for older adults. However, when they researched the effects of creatine and higher protein intake on older adult men, they found that exercise itself, and not creatine or higher protein, resulted in increased muscle growth. Protein or creatine-enriched foods did not help the men increase muscle.