Among various healthy food items, spinach is one leafy vegetable that helps you strengthen your muscles and makes you stronger.

In present scenario, almost every man wants to bulge over his biceps and for this he keeps on searching for foods that are high in proteins and other essential nutrients for muscle building. Cartoon character Popeye is one of them but then he makes sure that a can of spinach in included in his daily diet.

This fact has been supported by the researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm also. After conducting a study on mice, they revealed that nitrate, which is found in spinach and several other vegetable is an excellent ingredient for toning up your muscles. They fed a group of mice with nitrate mixed water for one week. Then dissected them and compared the functioning of their muscles with other group of mice. As a result they found that all of them on a consistent nitrate diet had much stronger muscles.

As told by a researcher at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Andres Hernandez "The nitrate used was equivalent to a human's consumption of about 200 to 250 grams of spinach a day, so it's a very easily obtained amount".