Working out and want to build stronger muscles without dangerous steroids? Getting older and worried you are losing muscle strength? New research just published in the January edition of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, concludes there could well be an all-natural answer. An association between vitamin D and significantly stronger muscles was found that could not be explained away by other factors.

"The results of this study indicate that vitamin D may be a viable treatment for muscle strength loss in adults. This is a key area of aging research since people lose strength as they age, but maintaining muscle strength helps prevent falls and fractures, and preserves the ability to live independently," primary investigator, Paul D. Thompson, M.D., chief of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, said in a media statement.

The researchers started out testing arm and leg strength in adults participating in a study of how the statin cholesterol drugs impact exercise performance. (Big Pharma's highly touted statin drugs are known to impact muscles and can cause muscle pain, weakness and even myositis, inflammation of the muscles.) As the research team looked at multiple factors in their research subjects -- including age, gender, resting heart rate, systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), body mass index (BMI), maximal oxygen uptake, physical activity and vitamin D status, something stood out. Higher vitamin D levels were clearly linked to both arm and leg muscle strength.

Their conclusions, the scientists report in the journal article, indicate that vitamin D may be an effective treatment to preserve muscle strength in older adults. They are calling for additional research in order to further study the relationship between vitamin D and the ability to maintain and perhaps even increase muscle strength with aging. A previous study in the same journal found that vitamin D improves performance in athletes when low levels of the vitamin are corrected and suggested that the vitamin could help spur peak athletic performance.

As Natural News has reported extensively, over the past decade, scientists have documented vitamin D's crucial role in health -- from helping prevent cancer to reducing cavities in children's teeth by 50 percent. The vitamin's link to muscle strength in adolescent girls was also revealed in research published in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. In addition, another earlier study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found low vitamin D levels could be a direct factor in cardiovascular events, including stroke and congestive heart failure.

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