If you’re old enough to remember Popeye cartoons on Saturday-morning TV, you may recall how that pipe-smoking sailor became a rippling mass of muscles immediately upon consuming a can of spinach. The transformative vegetable, as I recall, often sailed in a graceful arc from the can — which he simply crushed open with one hand — to his open mouth. I did not at the time consider the amount of grip strength that would require, nor did I wonder how he could do that before eating the superfood.
It also didn’t occur to me then that I never saw Popeye lifting weights or doing pull-ups or even hoisting the anchor on a ship. His biceps seemed only to bulge upon consuming spinach — and generally the uncooked crushed-can variety.
History, of course, is replete with claims of muscle-building foods. Prior to Popeye’s dependence on spinach, Americans were fed promises of transformative musculature by the makers of everything from chocolate and beer to shredded wheat and whiskey. In recent years, the focus has veered toward various nutritional supplements (see creatine, whey protein, casein), including one derived from a particular metabolite that researchers believe may help seniors — even those whose illnesses keep them sedentary — start moving again.
The metabolite in question, L-beta-aminoisobutyric acid (L-BAIBA), is naturally produced by the body during exercise, and one 2025 study found that supplementing the diets of middle-aged lab mice with the compound improved their muscle and bone health. The results came with a caveat, though: It only worked on mice who also exercised regularly during the three-month study period.
Still, the authors, writing in the journal Aging, hailed the results as evidence of a potential pathway to mitigating age-related muscle loss: “The combination of L-BAIBA with exercise may be efficacious for improving anabolic aspects of exercise training and metabolic health in musculoskeletal tissues during aging.”
More recently, Lee Roberts, PhD, a professor of molecular physiology and metabolism at the University of Leeds, set out to discover, with his research team, whether L-BAIBA could trigger muscle-building activity and encourage movement among those for whom a rigorous — or even moderate — workout was beyond their capability. Their findings were published last month in Nature Communications.
The researchers gave a group of mice a daily dose of L-BAIBA over a six-week period and found that the group exercised more rigorously than a control group that did not receive the supplement. Researchers suggest this is due to the ability of L-BAIBA to regulate muscle fatigue resistance through what they describe as “mitochondrial content and intrinsic respiratory capacity.” They also noticed that the L-BAIBA mice had gained muscle mass.
“Our research identifies L-BAIBA as an exercise-induced signal that helps muscles adapt, improve their metabolic capacity and ability to contract, and ultimately enhances physical performance,” Roberts says. “This gives us exciting new insight into how exercise benefits the body and highlights a promising target for future therapies aimed at preserving muscle function in chronic conditions such as diabetes.”
The loss of muscle mass, a condition known as sarcopenia, has been well documented among the elderly, and some research suggests the risk of developing the condition is three times higher for people living with either type of diabetes. Frailty often results, raising the risk of falls and fractures.
Regular exercise can help to manage type 2 diabetes and fend off age-related sarcopenia, notes Anna Morris, assistant director of research strategy and partnership at Diabetes UK, and Roberts’s study may offer some hope to those who find it difficult to move. “[F]or many people muscle weakness and fatigue can make staying active a real challenge,” she says. “This research helps us better understand how muscles adapt to exercise and identifies a potential new target for improving muscle health.”
When Newsweek’s Daniella Gray asked Roberts whether we might regard this as a first step toward an “exercise pill,” the researcher demurred. “We can’t say for certain, but this is a possibility,” he replied. “We know BAIBA can improve muscle function in experimental models of diabetes. In the next few years we hope to understand whether it might be beneficial more broadly to other conditions that can impact the capacity of people to exercise.”
I bet Popeye would approve.
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