[Science Solitaire] The right to exercise

Practically everyone is convinced that exercise is good for us without having to read scientific journals. So what is new?

Now, scientific studies have revealed what goes on inside our bodies at the molecular level when we regularly exercise, and which explain why exercise—together with good eating habits—could make us trump some of the “bad” genes we inherited and even make us “smarter.” 

New studies have revealed that exercise is “life-giving” in so many ways that I think we should now consider exercise as a right.

The August 2013 issue of the Scientific American carried an article called “Why Exercise Works Wonders.” By “exercise,” it means “regular exercise” which is about 140 minutes per week total of both aerobic and resistance exercise.   

The studies they cited in addition to other related studies that I have come across gave a very convincing picture of why regular exercise is a necessary part of our lives if we value the quality of our lives and want to live for as long as we could.

Good for our brains

Experiments on rats have shown that exercise enables the growth of new neurons in one of the brain parts mainly responsible for storing and organizing memory—the hippocampus. Even if the study was not done on humans, there is good reason to believe that a similar thing may be happening to us too since the hippocampus is a brain part we share with rats.

Studies have found that exercise improves our attention, planning, and organization of information. Also, studies on Alzheimer’s patients show that exercise has delayed the onset of the disease in a significant number of those Alzheimer’s patients.

In terms of anxiety, scientists have probed what happens in the neurons of mice who exercised regularly (“gym mice”) versus those who did not. In effect, when the “gym mice” were stressed in the form of a splash of cold water, their neurons acted to inhibit the excitement in the hippocampus. 

This means that the mice’s anxiety was regulated in contrast to the mice that did not, well, go to the gym. A good friend of mine who is bipolar treats exercise as like a happy hormone bar where she can get a dose of endorphins—the hormones released when working out—known to act as “pain suppressors” and gives an overall good feeling. While it cannot take the place of medication, exercise has been found to help in regulating moods.

Fat and sugar chasers

Aside from the obvious fact that exercise burns calories from carbohydrates and fats, the Scientific American article cited studies that have discovered how exercise deals with LDL – usually called “bad cholesterol.”

LDL is not really the cholesterol itself but its vessel. As it turns out, if the vessels are small, they behave like typical jeepney drivers that could go careening all over the highways of your veins and arteries, causing damage. Thus, you would prefer that they are big, making them more stable. Big is good when it comes to LDL. And when you exercise regularly, you have more big LDLs than small ones.  

Exercise also changes the way your body stores fat. Scientists have discovered that the genes that are known to be active in storing fat are less active in doing so in people who exercised for 6 months.

This effect touches on the “epigenetics” or the things that happen to genes that turn them on and off. This is very important as we all know we cannot change our genes since those have been pretty much set when we were conceived.

But the way they would express themselves may still be a good stage for change. So you may have diabetic genes but perhaps there is still a good chance you can foil them, or at the very least, delay diabetes, if you exercise regularly.

Insulin, the hormone that can process the sugar we take in, is also affected by regular exercise as studies have shown that you become more sensitive to insulin and thus would need less of it to do the job required. 

Other studies have shown that exercise gets rid of “clunky” mitochondria and even enables the production of more mitochondria in your cells which are the efficient burners of all the food you take in. New mitochondria means less of the damaging by-products of “calorie-burning” inside cells.

These findings lay out that indeed, exercise clearly works wonders that, I think, it should be decreed as part of our rights as workers—especially those types of job where “sitting” is a major activity (sitting for more than 6 hours has been found to cancel out the benefits of exercise.) 

We have long gone past asking if regular exercise was good for us. It is. The question now is, what we are going to change in our personal routines, work and school machineries to embed our right to exercise? – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.

Dumb bells image from Shutterstock