You know how I feel about sugar when it comes to optimal health and fitness. The more you use the former, the harder it is to achieve the latter.

When it comes to writing, I feel the same about sugarcoating.

So I won’t pull a Mary Poppins when I administer your health and fitness medicine. From what I can gather, Dr. Gabe Mirkin won’t either.

He’ll tell you, for instance, that there’s really nothing natural about dying of natural causes. “It usually means that [you] died of heart failure ... When you become inactive, you lose your skeletal muscles at an alarming rate, and losing skeletal muscle causes loss of heart muscle until your heart ... become[s] too weak to pump blood to your brain and you die.”

As much as I admire Mirkin’s cold hard dose of use-it-or-lose-it reality in “Your Muscles Make Your Heart Stronger” at RoadBikeRider.com, there’s something I like about his article even more. It schooled me on Dr. Ernest Starling and what’s known as Starling’s Law.

Created more than 100 years ago, Starling’s Law suggests that our present notion of nurturing heart health through aerobic exercise and augmenting it with anaerobic exercise like weightlifting is a bit backwards. Or as Mirkin says (in a most delightful way): “strengthening skeletal muscles strengthens heart muscle and not the other way around.”

Give it some thought and Starling’s Law makes sense.

If you curl a barbell to work your biceps, for example, the biceps muscles along with a few others contract. These contractions “squeeze the veins” and send blood back to the heart, which in a sense creates a second workout.

One for your heart.

The returning blood makes the heart muscle contract in a manner similar to the muscles activated to perform a barbell curl. And just like any other muscle, Mirkin reminds us, “the harder your heart muscle has to contract regularly in an exercise program, the greater the gain in heart muscle strength.”

In short, adding muscle mass helps your health by strengthening your heart. Losing muscle mass does the opposite.

And it’s not just Starling, Mirkin, and yours truly who believe this is to be true.

Seven Greek, Spanish, and Australian researchers who crunched data accrued over 10 years on more than 1,000 Greeks 45 years of age or older with no previous history of heart disease reached the same conclusion. Their work, published in the November 2019 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, linked the rate of fatal and non-heart heart attacks as well as the incidence of strokes to the degree of muscle mass in the subjects.

After the degree of muscle mass was determined in each subject, three groups were created based on that rate. During the next 10 years, those in the top-third were found to have an 81 percent lower risk of developing the aforementioned diseases when compared to those subjects in the bottom third.

Since prior studies found the link between muscle mass and a reduced rate of heart disease to be true for males but not females, these researchers also performed a separate analysis and found the same. Yet this finding should in no way discourage middle-aged females from doing all they can to maintain or even add muscle since so much other good results from muscle.

Consider, for instance, the different caloric demands of fat and muscle.

If you add 10 pounds of body fat as a result of poor eating and insufficient exercise, your body only requires 20 extra calories per day to maintain the new fat. If you add 10 extra pounds of muscle amass through proper eating and progressive resistance workouts like weightlifting, however, you now need to eat 375 more calories a day to maintain the new muscle.

Moreover, the process of adding muscle through progressive resistance causes the body to create new bone cells, the creation of which is key in avoiding osteoporosis as you age.

But the benefits of muscle mass don’t end there.

In an article about weightlifting for Global News, Dr. Stuart Phillips, a McMaster University professor in kinesiology and Canada Research Chair in skeletal muscle health, tells Carmen Chai quite simply, “The stronger you are, the more resilient you are against disease and overall risk for mortality.”

For support, Phillips could cite a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Cardiology that found even those who previously had heart disease benefited from being muscular. If the extra muscle was combined with a low body fat percentage, that was even better.

Those who placed in the top 25 percent based on muscle mass and the bottom 25 percent based on body fat clearly had the lowest mortality risk of any other group.

And like all exercise, the type you do to add or maintain muscle regulates insulin secretion, improves your mood, and energizes your day.