EXERCISE slows aging....

Today's post: Thursday, 3-27-2008

We’ve already done posts on how exercise has been found to trigger the growth of new brain cells & how it protects you from things like heart disease than can slash your energy level or even kill you.

We even have posted that exercise probably helps keep your body well repaired which would tend to slow aging or its effects -- because when you exercise, particularly in & after strength training, your body releases testosterone & growth hormone. (And, yes studies DO show regular exercise improve the sex lives of both men & women.)

We’ve even posted that it was recently found that exercise helps lower your homocysteine levels & that keeping your homocysteine low enough to be in the desirable range slows aging.

But, as powerful as all those effects are, the information I got recently is astounding.

A new study has found that exercise directly slows aging at the cellular level -- which likely means in every part of your body.

Last Sunday, 3-23-2008, the San Francisco Chronicle in its STYLE section had an article with the title: “Exercise as a Fountain of Youth.”

The main cause of aging seems to be that the telomeres at the ends of each strand of your DNA gradually get shorter which gradually results in less accurate copies as your body replaces each cell.

So, if you can reduce or prevent this, you also tend to slow or reverse aging.

It’s already known that excessive stress tends to shorten telomeres and that taking 1,000 mg a day or more of vitamin C tends to prevent your telomeres from shortening.

This recent article reports research that regular exercise tends to prevent your telomeres from shortening & that you can slow aging by up to 9 years or more by exercising.

Here is a brief quote.: “A recent study down in Britain followed sets of twins and looked at their activity level. Their findings confirmed that the twin who exercised more had longer telomeres than the one who didn’t – and was as much as nine years “younger.” ….”

Apparently the average person of a given age has certain telomere lengths & by that measure the twins who exercised more had longer telomeres & were therefore less aged.

Or in even plainer language the twins who exercised least or not at all aged faster.

I’ve said for some time that if people really knew what good things regular exercise did FOR them & what bad things not exercising did TO them, very few people would get no exercise -- & almost everyone would exercise.

Now you can add how fast you age to the list of effects of how much or how little you exercise has on you.