Sleep well, eat healthy and exercise daily is now well accepted as a simple model for a healthy life. But just how useful is exercise hadn’t been fully understood until this recent study. Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University calls exercise the single most potent medical intervention ever known. Ashley’s research showed that exercise has the exact opposite effect on our bodies that a disease might have.
“So the first study we released was rats that were sedentary, and then they were trained over the course of eight weeks aerobic training on — literally on a treadmill. And then at the end of the period of time and at the end of several time points along that eight-week time period, we looked at the tissues from the rats.
And the thing that we were really surprised to find was that really they turned into almost different beings. I mean, exercise was that potent. Every single tissue we looked at showed something completely different from before. It really changed the entire molecular makeup of the individual organs of the rats in a very positive direction.
One example might be that multiple tissues, for example, fat tissue. Another example would be the mitochondria, the little battery-like organelles inside each cells. When we looked at the changes with exercise, we often saw mirror image changes to the ones we see with disease.
So, exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases.”
How does this actually happen?
“One of the biggest signatures we saw was in a system that basically tends to the proteins in our cells. So it helps them come together in the right format in three dimensions. It stops them sticking together and aggregating.
And when it’s time for those proteins to be renewed, it helps. It’s called the heat shock response. And this was something that we saw changed across multiple tissues, across all the tissues, as you mentioned, lungs, skeletal muscle, not just the ones that you might expect. We would expect perhaps skeletal muscle and heart, for sure.
But we were seeing changes in the kidney, in the adrenal gland, in the intestine, in the brain. And I think that begins to get at how exercise is just such a remarkable intervention, essentially helping with, for example, reducing the risk of heart disease by 50 percent, reducing the list of many cancers by 50 percent and more, reducing the risk of back pain.
People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways.”
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