Exercise Found to Be Equal to Drugs For Heart Disease &Diabetes

By Dr. Mercola

One of the key health benefits of exercise is that it helps normalize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels by optimizing insulin and leptin receptor sensitivity. This is perhaps the most important factor for optimizing your overall health and preventing chronic disease, and may explain why exercise is such a potent preventive medicine.

In fact, researchers recently suggested that exercise is "the best preventive drug" for many common ailments, from psychiatric disorders to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. According to Jordan Metzl, a sports-medicine physician at New York City's Hospital for Special Surgery and author of The Exercise Cure:

"Exercise is the best preventive drug we have, and everybody needs to take that medicine."

And, as stated by Dr. Timothy Church, director of preventive medicine research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge:

"Exercise strengthens the entire human machine — the heart, the brain, the blood vessels, the bones, the muscles. The most important thing you can do for your long-term health is lead an active life."

Get Up And Move - Your Health Depends On It

Unfortunately, many fail to get sufficient amounts of exercise. Worse yet, a majority of people may still endanger their health simply by sitting too much. Compelling evidence actually suggests that even if you exercise regularly, prolonged sitting is itself a risk factor for chronic disease and reduced lifespan...

Overall, federal data suggests only 21 percent of American adults meet the government recommendation to engage in two and half hours' worth of aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise each week, so there's clearly a lot of room for improvement.  Ideally though, you'll want to exercise regularly AND frequently interrupt your sitting in order to optimize your health and longevity. I'll review the reasons for this below.

Forget The Drugs - Exercise Can Equally Help Prevent Diabetes And Heart Disease
A recent meta-review conducted by researchers at Harvard and Stanford compared the effectiveness of exercise versus drug interventions on mortality outcomes for diabetes, coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.

After reviewing 305 randomized controlled trials, which included nearly 339,300 people, they found "no statistically detectable differences" between physical activity and medications for prediabetes and heart disease.

This is a potent reminder of the power of simple lifestyle changes, as well as the shortcomings of the drug paradigm! 

Besides optimizing insulin/leptin receptor sensitivity, other beneficial biochemical changes also occur during exercise, including alterations in more than 20 different metabolites involved in fat burning and metabolism, among other things. As stated by Dr. Church, exercise indeed affects your entire body—from head to toe—in beneficial ways. This includes changes in your: 

Muscles
Muscles use glucose and ATP for contraction and movement. Tiny tears in your muscles make them grow bigger and stronger as they heal. Gaining more muscle through resistance exercises has many benefits, from losing excess fat to maintaining healthy bone mass and preventing age-related muscle loss as you age. The intensity of your resistance training can achieve a number of beneficial changes on the molecular, enzymatic, hormonal, and chemical level in your body. 

Lungs
As your muscles call for more oxygen, your breathing rate increases. The higher your VO2 max—your maximum capacity of oxygen use—the fitter you are.

Heart
Your heart rate increases with physical activity to supply more oxygenated blood to your muscles. The fitter you are, the more efficiently your heart can do this, allowing you to work out longer and harder. Your blood pressure will also decrease as a result of new blood vessels forming.

Brain
The increased blood flow also benefits your brain, allowing it to almost immediately function better. Exercising regularly also promotes the growth of new brain cells, boosting your capacity for memory and learning. A number of neurotransmitters are also triggered, such as endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and GABA. Some of these are well-known for their role in mood control. Exercise, in fact, is one of the most effective prevention and treatment strategies for depression.

Joints and Bones
Exercise can place as much as five or six times more than your body weight on them. Weight-bearing exercise is one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis, as your bones are very porous and soft, and as you get older, your bones can easily become less dense and hence, more brittle -- especially if you are inactive. 

For Optimal Benefits, Make Sure You're Exercising Correctly

I've often equated exercise to a drug from the perspective that they both need to be wisely prescribed in order to optimize your health. Simply doing random exercises for the sake of "exercising" will not achieve the benefits you seek. In fact it could cause serious injury, especially if you engage in strength training with poor form and no coaching. In terms of "dosage," it's important to note the changes in recommendations that have taken place over the past few years. While conventional aerobic exercise was long considered the "gold standard" of a good workout, research has refuted such notions.

Instead, high-intensity interval training (which requires but a fraction of the time compared to conventional cardio) has been shown to be FAR more efficient and effective, compared to longer, slower cardio workouts. In fact, exercises such as long distance running have been shown to be among the worst forms of exercise, in terms of health benefits.

The reason for this is quite simple. High intensity interval training (HIIT) mimics the movements of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which included short bursts of high-intensity activities, but not long-distance running. This, researchers say, is what your body is hard-wired for. Basically, by exercising in short bursts, followed by periods of recovery, you recreate exactly what your body needs for optimum health. Twice-weekly sessions, which require no more than 20 minutes from start to finish, can help you:

• Lower your body fat
• Improve your muscle tone
• Boost your energy and libido
• Improve athletic speed and performance

Naturally increase your body's production of human growth hormone (HGH)—a synergistic, foundational biochemical underpinning that promotes health and longevity. Conventional cardio will NOT boost your HGH level

The Importance of Non-Exercise Movement

Next, let's address the issue of non-exercise movement. I also like to call this intermittent movement. This is the latest area of physical activity that's gaining a lot of attention, and for good reason. Studies have repeatedly found strong correlations between prolonged sitting or inactivity and reduced life expectancy—even if you exercise regularly!

It appears that temporary vigorous exercise simply cannot compensate for the damage incurred by prolonged daily sitting. For example, a recent analysis of 18 studies, found that those who sat for the longest periods of time were twice as likely to have diabetes or heart disease, compared to those who sat the least. An earlier study that highlighted much of the recent evidence linking sitting with biomarkers of poor metabolic health, also found that total sitting time correlates with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other prevalent chronic health problems—even if you exercise regularly.

The answer, fortunately, is quite simple. You just need to make sure you move your body more often. Simply standing up from a seated position has been found particularly effective at counteracting the ill effects of sitting. This is something I seek to do every 15 minutes while I am sitting. I set a timer to remind me. When the timer rings I get up and do some simple hamstring or chest stretches for a minute or two. I am testing a variety of different ones and hope to report on them later this year.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Dr. Joan Vernikos, former director of NASA's Life Sciences Division and author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals, on this topic. Her groundbreaking research reveals why standing up is such an effective remedy—it's because when you stand up, your body acts against gravity. Sitting actually simulates a low-gravity type environment for your body, and your body deteriorates at a far more rapid pace in anti-gravity situations... Hence, the remedy is to continuously engage in physical movements, as this increases the forces of gravity on your body.

Simple everyday activities such as housecleaning, cooking, gardening, hanging clothes to dry, bending over to pick up a stray sock, reaching for an item on a high shelf, all fall within the spectrum of movements you would ideally engage in—more or less continuously—from morning until night. To learn more about this important aspect of health, please see this previous article.


*Find the full article here: http://foodmatters.tv/articles-1/exercise-found-to-be-equal-to-drugs-for-heart-disease-diabetes

This Is What Happens to Your Body When You Exercise

Have you been wondering what are the exact processes that happen in your body when you exercise ? Did you have an idea that your exercise is directly connected to increased brain functioning? Read this article to read about the positive benefits from exercising on your body and beyond... 

By Dr. Mercola

One of the key health benefits of exercise is that it helps normalize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels by optimizing insulin/leptin receptor sensitivity. This is perhaps the most important factor for optimizing your overall health and preventing chronic disease.

But exercise affects your body in countless other ways as well—both directly and indirectly. Here, however, even the most unexpected side effects are almost universally beneficial. For example, side effects of exercise include but are not limited to:

• Improved sexual function
• Changes in gene expression
• Clearer skin
• Improved mood
• Improved sleep

What Happens in Your Body When You Exercise?

 A number of biological effects occur, from head to toe, when you exercise. This includes changes in your:

• Muscles, which use glucose and ATP for contraction and movement. To create more ATP, your body needs extra oxygen, so breathing increases and your heart starts pumping more blood to your muscles.
Without sufficient oxygen, lactic acid will form instead. Tiny tears in your muscles make them grow bigger and stronger as they heal.
• Lungs. As your muscles call for more oxygen (as much as 15 times more oxygen than when you’re at rest), your breathing rate increases. Once the muscles surrounding your lungs cannot move any faster, you’ve reached what’s called your VO2 max—your maximum capacity of oxygen use. The higher your VO2 max, the fitter you are.
• Heart. As mentioned, your heart rate increases with physical activity to supply more oxygenated blood to your muscles. The fitter you are, the more efficiently your heart can do this, allowing you to work out longer and harder. As a side effect, this increased efficiency will also reduce your resting heart rate. Your blood pressure will also decrease as a result of new blood vessels forming.
• Brain. The increased blood flow also benefits your brain, allowing it to almost immediately function better. As a result, you tend to feel more focused after a workout. Furthermore, exercising regularly will promote the growth of new brain cells. In your hippocampus, these new brain cells help boost memory and learning. As stated in the featured article: 

“When you work out regularly, your brain gets used to this frequent surge of blood and adapts by turning certain genes on or off. Many of these changes boost brain cell function and protect from diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or even stroke, and ward off age-related decline.” 

A number of neurotransmitters are also triggered, such as endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and GABA. Some of these are well-known for their role in mood control. Exercise, in fact, is one of the most effective prevention and treatment strategies for depression.
• Joints and bones, as exercise can place as much as five or six times more than your body weight on them. Peak bone mass is achieved in adulthood and then begins a slow decline, but exercise can help you to maintain healthy bone mass as you get older.
Weight-bearing exercise is actually one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis, as your bones are very porous and soft, and as you get older your bones can easily become less dense and hence, more brittle -- especially if you are inactive.

Your Brain Health Is Directly Related to Exercise

A related article published by Lifehacker.com focuses exclusively on brain-related changes that occur when you exercise. While I just mentioned that neurotransmitters, chemical messengers in your brain, such as mood-boosting serotonin, are released during a bout of exercise, that doesn’t account for all the benefits your brain reaps.

“If you start exercising, your brain recognizes this as a moment of stress. As your heart pressure increases, the brain thinks you are either fighting the enemy or fleeing from it. To protect yourself and your brain from stress, you release a protein called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor). This BDNF has a protective and also reparative element to your memory neurons and acts as a reset switch. That's why we often feel so at ease and like things are clear after exercising,” Leo Widrich writes.

Simultaneously, your brain releases endorphins, another stress-related chemical. According to researcher MK McGovern, the endorphins minimize the physical pain and discomfort associated with exercise. They’re also responsible for the feeling of euphoria that many people report when exercising regularly.

Scientists have been linking the benefits of physical exercise to brain health for many years, but recent research has made it clear that the two aren't just simply related; rather, it is THE relationship. The evidence shows that physical exercise helps you build a brain that not only resists shrinkage, but increases cognitive abilities. Exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by causing your nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections, and protecting them from damage. There are multiple mechanisms at play here, but some are becoming more well-understood than others.

The rejuvenating role of BDNF is one of them. BDNF activates brain stem cells to convert into new neurons. It also triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health. Further, exercise provides protective effects to your brain through:

• The production of nerve-protecting compounds
• Improved development and survival of neurons
• Decreased risk of heart and blood vessel diseases
• Altering the way damaging proteins reside inside your brain, which appears to slow the development of Alzheimer's disease 

Both Fasting ans Exercise Trigger Brain Rejuvenation 

Growing evidence indicates that both fasting and exercise trigger genes and growth factors that recycle and rejuvenate your brain and muscle tissues. These growth factors include BDNF, as just mentioned, and muscle regulatory factors, or MRFs.

These growth factors signal brain stem cells and muscle satellite cells to convert into new neurons and new muscle cells respectively. Interestingly enough, BDNF also expresses itself in the neuro-muscular system where it protects neuro-motors from degradation. (The neuromotor is the most critical element in your muscle. Without the neuromotor, your muscle is like an engine without ignition. Neuro-motor degradation is part of the process that explains age-related muscle atrophy.)

So BDNF is actively involved in both your muscles and your brain, and this cross-connection, if you will, appears to be a major part of the explanation for why a physical workout can have such a beneficial impact on your brain tissue. It, quite literally, helps prevent, and even reverse, brain decay as much as it prevents and reverses age-related muscle decay.

This also helps explain why exercise while fasting can help keep your brain, neuro-motors, and muscle fibers biologically young. Sugar suppresses BDNF, which also helps explain why a low-sugar diet in combination with regular exercise is so effective for protecting memory and staving off depression.

This Is Your Brain When You Exercise

BDNF and endorphins are two of the factors triggered by exercise that help boost your mood, make you feel good, and sharpen your cognition. As mentioned by Lifehacker, they’re similar to morphine and heroin in their action and addictiveness—but without any of the harmful side effects. Quite the contrary! So, how much do you have to exercise in order to maintain a sunnier disposition and better memory long-term?

According to a 2012 study published in the journal Neuroscience, the “secret” to increased productivity and happiness on any given day is a long-term investment in regular exercise. And a little each day appears to go further than a lot once or twice a week.

"Those who had exercised during the preceding month but not on the day of testing generally did better on the memory test than those who had been sedentary, but did not perform nearly as well as those who had worked out that morning,”the authors note.

The reasons for this can perhaps be best perceived visually. Take a look at these images, showing the dramatic increase in brain activity after a 20 minute walk, compared to sitting quietly for the same amount of time.

There is a minor caveat, however. The researchers also discovered that exercise does not affect the brains of all people in exactly the same way. Some people, about 30 percent of people of European Caucasian descent, have a BDNF gene variant that hinders post-exercise BDNF production. The people with this BDNF variant did not improve their memory scores, even when exercising regularly, as significantly as those without this variant. Still, the research clearly suggests that—with individual variations as to the degree—regular exercise will cumulatively enhance your memory and other brain functions.

You Don’t Need to Train Like an Athlete to Reap the Benefits of Exercise

If you are sedentary there is hope for you. In her book, The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer, New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Reynolds addresses the issue of exercise as a way to improve longevity and happiness as well.

"The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health benefits. You get prolonged life, reduced disease risk - all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active,” she said in a 2012 interview.

Similarly, research published in 2008 found that those who exercised on work days experienced significantly improved mood on days that they exercised. Interestingly, while their mood remained fairly constant even on non-exercise work days, their sense of inner calm deteriorated on those days. According to the authors:

“Critically, workers performed significantly better on exercise days and across all three areas we measured, known as mental-interpersonal, output and time demands.”

Key findings included:

• 72 percent had improved time management on exercise days compared to non-exercise days
• 79 percent reported improved mental and interpersonal performance in exercise days
• 74 percent said they managed their workload better
• Those who exercised regularly also reported feeling more than 40 percent more “motivated to work” and scored more than 20 percent higher for concentration and finishing work on time

But remember, it is FAR better to exercise regularly. I believe it is also vital to engage in regular movement if you have a sitting job like most of us do, including me. I typically sit in front of a computer for more than 12 hours a day. What I have recently appreciated is that standing up every 10 minutes (with the help of a timer) and engaging in some type of brief exercise, is an enormously powerful habit to minimize the damage of long term sitting.

Aim for a Well-Rounded Fitness Program

Ideally, to truly optimize your health, you’ll want to strive for a varied and well-rounded fitness program that incorporates a wide variety of exercises. As a general rule, as soon as an exercise becomes easy to complete, you need to increase the intensity and/or try another exercise to keep challenging your body.

Additionally, more recent research has really opened my eyes to the importance of non-exercise movement. Truly, the key to health is to remain as active as you can, all day long, but that doesn’t mean you train like an athlete for hours a day. It simply means, whenever you have a chance to move and stretch your body in the course of going about your day—do it!

And the more frequently, the better. Everything from standing up, to reaching for an item on a tall shelf, to weeding in your garden and walking from one room to another, and even doing dishes count. In short, it’s physical movement, period, that promotes health benefits by the interaction your body gets with gravity. That said, I recommend incorporating the following types of exercise into your program:

• Interval (Anaerobic) Training: This is when you alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with gentle recovery periods.
• Strength Training: Rounding out your exercise program with a 1-set strength training routine will ensure that you're really optimizing the possible health benefits of a regular exercise program. You can also "up" the intensity by slowing it down.
• Stand Up Every 10 Minutes. This is not intuitively obvious, but emerging evidence clearly shows that even highly fit people who exceed the expert exercise recommendations are headed for premature death if they sit for long periods of time. Personally, I usually set my timer for 10 minutes while sitting, and then stand up and do one legged squats, jump squats or lunges when the timer goes off. The key is that you need to be moving all day long, even in non-exercise activities.
• Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability.
Exercise programs like Pilates and yoga are also great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer.
• Stretching: My favorite type of stretching is active isolated stretches developed by Aaron Mattes. With Active Isolated Stretching, you hold each stretch for only two seconds, which works with your body's natural physiological makeup to improve circulation and increase the elasticity of muscle joints. This technique also allows your body to repair itself and prepare for daily activity. 

Sources & References:

• http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2013/09/20/exercise-health-benefits.aspx
• http://lifehacker.com/5938216/what-happens-to-our-brains-during-exercise-and-why-it-makes-us-happier 
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22554780