The boundary between sports nutrition and healthy aging is narrower than most people assume. Dietary strategies developed to accelerate athlete recovery and preserve muscle mass increasingly appear relevant to the broader challenge of maintaining skeletal muscle function across the lifespan — a finding with real implications for anyone trying to slow age-related muscle loss.
This review, published in Current Drug Research Reviews, examines a cluster of nutritional compounds — omega-3 fatty acids, gelatin/collagen, probiotics, curcumin, and tart cherry juice — through the dual lens of athletic performance and musculoskeletal resilience. Omega-3 fatty acids are highlighted for their role in modulating inflammatory signaling pathways relevant to muscle repair. Collagen and gelatin supplements, noted for their favorable amino acid profiles and low adverse-effect burden, are positioned as accessible, cost-effective tools for supporting connective tissue integrity. Curcumin and tart cherry juice emerge as functionally distinct anti-inflammatory agents capable of attenuating exercise-induced muscle damage markers, though their downstream effects on performance timelines remain contested in the literature.
The review's most analytically interesting contribution is its explicit bridging of sports physiology and geroscience. The mechanisms underpinning muscle hypertrophy and remodeling in competitive athletes — particularly around satellite cell activation, protein synthesis signaling via mTORC1, and inflammation resolution — are the same pathways implicated in sarcopenia prevention. This parallel is not new, but its systematic articulation in a nutritional context adds practical texture. The key limitation here is substantial: as a narrative review rather than a meta-analysis, it cannot quantify effect sizes, resolve conflicting trial outcomes, or establish dosing thresholds. Most supporting evidence originates from small, short-duration trials in trained populations, limiting generalizability to sedentary or elderly adults. This is best characterized as a consolidating, hypothesis-organizing review rather than a paradigm-shifting one — useful for framing future trials, but not yet sufficient to anchor clinical recommendations.
