Exercise Takes Your Body To The Cleaners

One more thing exercise does: it takes out the trash. Writing in the New York Times’ Well column, Gretchen Reynolds reports on research conducted at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas that suggests that exercise encourages cells in our bodies to clean up the kind of cellular waste and debris whose buildup may contribute to aging. Like much of the research that is reported here, these experiments studied two groups of mice. One group had a cell cleaning system that functioned poorly, and one group had a normal healthy cell cleaning system, the kind that allows our bodies to eliminate waste and useless debris from cells through a process called autophagy. The Texas researchers tricked out the mice so that the membranes involved in autophagy would glow when they were active. When the mice were put on a treadmill for 30 minutes, the cleaning membranes lit up.  Cool, the exercise appeared to turn on the cell cleaning system. The researchers tricked out another set of mice so that the cells involved in autophagy were unable to ramp up activity in response to exercise, as they normally would. Put on treadmills next to normal healthy mice, the autophagy-restricted animals were unable to keep up. Reynolds reports that when the researchers fed the rats a high-fat diet that led to mouse diabetes, the normal mice had the ability to reverse the condition with exercise, but the autophagy-altered mice remained diabetic. What does it mean? The researchers are convinced that good working autophagy, triggered by exercise as it normally is, is necessary for exercise to deliver the health benefits that it was meant to deliver. Read more in the New York Times.