14 Feb New evidence shows that exercise can ‘clean up’ your body

People have long suspected that exercise helped clean the body’s toxins out, but now there’s actual proof that this takes place.
A recent study actually proves that intracellular housecleaning takes place during exercise in mice.
Scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas studied two groups of mice. One group of mice was healthy, while the other had been bred to have a blunted cleaning system.
Dr. Beth Levine, a medical investigator, and her colleagues had lab mice run to see the effects exercise would have on their cells.
The animals had been medically treated so that the membranes that engulf debris inside their cells would glow, allowing researchers to track the progress.
Following just 30 minutes of running, the mice had noticeably more membranes in cells throughout their bodies. Researchers concluded they were undergoing accelerated autophagy — a natural trash burning system. Essentially, “self-eating” cells create specialized membranes that engulf junk (misshapen, broken down cells, etc.) in the cell’s cytoplasm and carry it to a part of the cell known as the lysosome, where the trash is broken apart and then burned by the cell for energy.
The researchers then wanted to explain what the increased cellular cleaning meant for the well-being of the mice.
A new strain of mice was developed that showed normal autophagy levels in most instances, but could not increase its cellular self-eating in response to stress.
Those mice were made to run alongside a control group of normal mice. The autophagy-resistant mice quickly grew fatigued and their muscles seemed incapable of drawing sugar from the blood as the muscles of the normal mice did.
When both groups of mice were then given a high-fat diet until they developed a rodent version of diabetes. The normal mice were able to reverse the condition by running – despite staying on the fatty diet – but the autophagy-resistant animals did not.
Following several more weeks of running, they remained diabetic and their cells weren’t absorbing blood sugar normally. They also had higher levels of cholesterol.
The exercise had not made them healthier.
Basically, Dr. Levine and her colleagues showed that autophagy may be augmented through exercise and could also help some people achieve better health.
However, even with exercise some others might not respond as well.
Zhen Yan, the director of the Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at the University of Virginia, also studies autophagy and exercise.
“(Levine’s study) improves our understanding of how exercise has salutary impacts on health,” Yan said. “It’s very difficult to study autophagy in humans.”
However, Yan and Levine feel that perhaps at some point autophagy-prompting drugs or specialized exercise programs could enable everyone to fully benefit from exercise.
Regardless, the study is another reminder of the importance of staying active.
People wouldn’t let trash sit around their house.
So why would anyone let garbage collect in their own cells?
By exercising, it appears now more than ever that we can clean up our own “inner house” that is our cells.

At Home Fitness consultant Aaron Dorksen’s blog deals with a variety of fitness topics, ranging from workout tips, motivational ideas and feature stories on how exercise impacts people’s lives. E-mail him with comments, questions or ideas for future blogs at aaron@athomefitness.com