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Science

Exercise May Be the 'Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known' (pbs.org) 74

Exercise is the most potent medical intervention known, according to Stanford University researchers who mapped its molecular effects across body tissues. In a study examining sedentary and exercising rats over eight weeks, scientists found comprehensive changes in every tissue examined, from fat cells to mitochondria, with exercise often reversing disease-related molecular changes. The findings explain how exercise reduces heart disease and cancer risks by 50%.

Exercise May Be the 'Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known'

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Exercise and eat a healthy diet.
    • Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @02:08AM (#65056411)

      Exercise and eat a healthy diet.

      Yup. That's how the President-elect does it, and he's 78. :-)

      • Exercise and eat a healthy diet.

        Yup. That's how the President-elect does it, and he's 78. :-)

        The human body has a propensity for absoribing large amounts of abuse before giving up.

        • Bitterness and spite are amazing preservatives.

        • The human body has a propensity for absorbing large amounts of abuse before giving up.

          Hopefully that's also true for our political and societal systems as well ...

      • Modern pharmaceuticals are great for those with poor eating and exercising habits.

      • Diet cokes and Big Macs. Probably with jumbo orders of fries and lots of ketchup.

        But why'd you propagate the vacuous Subject?

        (I'm just wondering what it will take before the fools admit they screwed up. There's no room in the clown car for any of the real fools, so they're just going to get dragged behind along with the rest of us... They think they wanted revolutionary change? I think they are deluded because they've had easy lives where most of the changes were for the better. In an actual revolution, all

    • Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dbialac ( 320955 ) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @09:09AM (#65056809)
      Who'd a thunk!?! I dropped over 100lbs through exercise and calorie control and not drinking soda, including diet soda. After getting below 250, I started running and my metabolism increasing fast. I found myself not craving the fatty foods I used to eat and, surprisingly, I actually increased calorie intake, but from healthy foods, because I needed those calories to burn all of the energy my body required.
      • Who'd a thunk!?! I dropped over 100lbs through exercise and calorie control and not drinking soda, including diet soda.

        I dropped 47.5 lbs last year and early this year thru diet, exercise, and drinking almost exclusively diet soda. Bought a club-level Life Fitness elliptical crosstrainer. Having it in the home is the bomb - do 200 calories here, 400 there, etc. 600 calories of exercise a day usually, with Nutrisystem food mostly. But It's the diet and exercise that does it, as in dietING, eating substantially less, so's the calories eaten minus calories burned was between 500 and 1000 a day. Works great, feel like a

    • Is this the "get back into a workout routine" that we all needes for the New Year? :-)

    • I was diagnosed with Parkinson's about five years ago.

      I asked my doctor what I could do to help myself and questioned whether exercise would be of any benefit (use it or lose it).

      He told me "no, just take these (carvadopa/levadopa) pills".

      Having a background in engineering and science... I did my *own* research.

      I discovered that endorphins promoted the release of dopamine. The slow death of the brain-cells that produce most of your dopamine is the root cause of Parkinson's so I figured that perhaps if I e

      • by kackle ( 910159 )
        That's great to hear. Add to your research "leaky gut" and "leaky brain", and the microbiomes of each. I can't say I have any solid information that I've found yet, but that's what I would pursue.
      • Except, one of the relative I had who died of parkinson's was very active, even in old age, and the onsets came fast. My grandfather on the other hand was very active, until he had an aneurism surgery so he became relatively less active, though still walking through the ranch, and he had Parkinson's for a few decades that never got too bad.

  • msmash rings in the New Year with health non-advice. That's news for nerds, folks! That's what matters.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      "Ancient texts unlocked by AI tell us that Exercise May Be the Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known" should have been the correct summary title IMHO.

  • It's no joke. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vegan Cyclist ( 1650427 ) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @12:46AM (#65056375) Homepage

    Our bodies have evolved to move quite a lot.

    Should be a 'no shit' moment, but anyone who's trained fairly seriously at an athletic activity knows just how different you feel being fit and unfit.

    If you haven't - give it a go. Do something that gets your heart rate up regularly. You won't regret it.

    • At one point, we were evolved enough to hunt gazelles with spears, and very successfully. Very few humans have maintained this level of evolution.
    • Does jerking off count?
      • by dargaud ( 518470 )
        A little bit, but the best sports are those where everything in the body moves. So try sex (with an athletic partner) instead.
        • [quote]A little bit, but the best sports are those where everything in the body moves. So try sex (with an athletic partner) instead.[/quote] It ought to be with someone very unathletic so that you'd have to do all the work though.
          • so, vigorous sex with my sex robot counts?
            • Yes for physical health absolutely but crying yourself to sleep afterwards may leave you emotionally scared.

              • actually my sex robot soothes me when it detects me crying, ya gotta buy the top model sex robot, otherwise you may be crying because it's tensile strength sensors were a bit too vigorous.
      • I would say, yes if you do so very vigorously and for a long period of time. if you're done in 3 minutes and only one arm gets a workout, well, not so much, but hey, what do I know?
    • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      Should be a 'no shit' moment, but anyone who's trained fairly seriously at an athletic activity knows just how different you feel being fit and unfit.

      Everything feels better, except when you're injured and you can't work out and then it feels weird, like you missed a shower. Then again, it's probably me that's weird because I've really like working out since I was a teen.

      I love field sports like hockey, footy and soccer but I'm too old now to risk the ballistic contact and stick to martial arts and weights. There is also the social aspect which a doctor tells me is good for the brain and preventing dementia. Also after lots of sports a good physio (

    • I try to, but my wife is never in the mood
    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      The part most people get wrong is just how little physical activity is required to get almost all of the health benefits. 150 minutes of light jogging per week (30 minutes x 5 days per week) is all it takes to increase your life expectancy by 7 years. You get very negligible additional benefit by doing any more physical activity than that.

      Put another way, every minute of moderate physical activity, up to 150 minutes per week, will add five minutes to your lifespan. This doesn't even include overall improved

    • Absolutely. In 2020, I started riding a bike daily, about 6 miles, just around nearby neighborhoods. I never stopped. Now, I hate missing even a day. It gets me outside, it gets me exercise, helps me sleep better, helps me work better.

  • I'm not disputing their findings, but is there an actual research paper or something we can read? What "molecular effects" did the group study? What was the magnitude of these effects? Which molecular markers did they study that *didn't* show an effect?

  • You know, this connection was already well known in the 80s! That's why I always used to watch that nice Jane Fonda on TV doing them air-obics!
    • We have known this for quite some time. That's how Jack LaLanne was able to perform ridiculous feats of strength and endurance well into his 70s. He even claimed that he and his wife maintained an active sex life into his 90s.

      Joe Weider lived into his 90s as well with comparatively good health compared to his contemporaries who didn't exercise like he did.

      We have had this knowledge for decades but the counter-argument could be that correlation isn't causation. This kind of research is needed to prove that i

      • by Anonymous Coward
        The sports forum I read frequently people are reguarly overtraining. We're constantly telling them to rest (mostly young males) as they develop injuries and continue to push through because they enjoy the sport so much. Often they participate multiple times a week and train nearly every day for it. Not every group is inherently sedentary.
  • link to research (Score:5, Informative)

    by SlashTex ( 10502574 ) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @03:08AM (#65056469)
    the paper https://journals.physiology.or... [physiology.org]

    Charting the Molecular Terrain of Exercise: The Power of Multi-Omic Mapping
    Physical activity plays a fundamental role in human health and disease. Exercise has been shown to improve a wide variety of disease states, and the scientific community is committed to understanding the precise molecular mechanisms that underlie the exquisite benefits. This review provides an overview of molecular responses to acute exercise and chronic training, particularly energy mobilization and generation, structural adaptation, inflammation, and immune regulation. Further it offers a detailed discussion on known molecular signals and systemic regulators activated during various forms of exercise and their role in orchestrating health benefits. Critically, the increasing use of multi-omic technologies is explored with an emphasis on how multi-omic and multi-tissue studies contribute to a more profound understanding of exercise biology. These data inform anticipated future advancement in the field and highlight the prospect of integrating exercise with pharmacology for personalized disease prevention and treatment.
    • I don't think that's the paper, that's a review - I think the paper with the rat studies mentioned is
      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]

      • Doh, right you are, good catch. I had both pulled up, then took the wrong one. :-(

        Although, he said to mitigate the damage, the review addresses much of the research and cites the paper -- which is how I found the paper.

        I need to stop contributing at 0 dark 30 in the morning.
  • Well, duh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @05:21AM (#65056571) Homepage
    Sure, it's nice to investigate the metabolic effects of exercise. However, the headline is stupidly obvious. This has been common knowledge for literally thousands of years. Hippocrates in Ancient Greece wrote "Eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health."
    • While what you say is generally correct your example is obtuse for a multitude of reasons.

      Firstly: There's a difference between something being known and something being proven. There's a difference between the generalities of something and understanding the mechanisms by which it comes to be. Hippocrates knew nothing about medicine, it was a general observation on health of people. Much like Hippocrates knew the sky was blue and could tell people the sky was blue, it wasn't until the late 1870s that Raylei

  • You have no idea. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday January 02, 2025 @06:14AM (#65056609)

    Albeit that I'm your Type A 80ies computer kid and earn my living as a seasoned professional webdev I spent my twens getting a diploma in preforming arts. Added fitness included. As a teen, if I wasn't sitting in front of my buddies C64, playing Dark Eye or programming character generators on my Sharp pocket computer I was out climbing. In my late 30ies I bumped into social dancing (Argentine Tango), got hooked and did that very intensly for more than a decade. In recent years I've picked up Yoga and Calisthenics and plan to ramp that up to 3x - 5x per week.

    The difference is palpable. My fat buddies look and move as if they were decades older. The last 12 months I slacked off due to a severe leg injury with 6 operations and 6 months of being pinned to the bed and sofa. I feel like a sloth in slomo and can't wait to get back to moving and dancing daily. I'm closing in on 55 and pushing up against the bioclock is becoming a cold hard necessity. And I wouldn't want to have it any other way.

    A core advice would be consistency and general lifestyle. Don't expect results from once a week. 3x right up to 5x or daily is where the magic is. And that of course entails building a lifestyle that is active by default. And such is waaaaay more important than big cars and excess material abundance.

    • People ask me: how long does it take to get a black belt "insert your martial art"
      The answer is: depends on how many hours you train.
      One time a week gets you no where.
      Two times barely make you keep your level.
      Three times barely make you make progress!
      Four times a week is the minimum you need to really get forward ... does not really matter what you are doing/practicing.

  • is trying to make you feel bad or sell you something. Note that if your own doctor tells you to exercise, you have implicitly solicited his opinion by paying him.

    • Note that I'm not saying the advice is wrong, just that anyone offering it unsolicited has motives in mind other than helping you.

  • How do we get this in a pill?
  • Don't make me decide!

  • Vaccines are an intervention.

    Exercise is something we humans used to do out of necessity and then stopped doing. It isn't an 'intervention'.

    • Vaccines are an intervention.

      Exercise is something we humans used to do out of necessity and then stopped doing. It isn't an 'intervention'.

      Well, no, that is exactly what it is if someone isn't exercising and they are convinced to start doing so. I think what you mean to say is that it shouldn't need to be an intervention, it should just be part of life. But it just isn't for most of us.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I suffer from a rare endocrine condition with some metabolic side effects (like pre-diabetes), diagnosed in my late 30s. While not exactly obese, as an IT desk jokey I did (and do) sit a lot. My treating endocrinologist always encouraged me to exercise more. I started off with the walk around the block, and the occasional manual labor in the garden - not enough. At a stage my work (from home) schedule was quite flexible and I would take a daily bike trip of maybe 10 to 20 kms, combining it with grocery shop

  • The answer to the title's assertion is actually SOAP.

    But why let facts stand in the way of click-bait?

  • I'd do just ANYTHING to lose weight -- except diet or exercise.

At these prices, I lose money -- but I make it up in volume. -- Peter G. Alaquon

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