EXERCISE for health, longevity and your mind!!

EXERCISE !!

Exercise!

Exercise!

Extension of Life might just be in your muscles! Quality of life might just be in your brain!

The New Dawn of media hype, blogs, tweets and Facebook links that tout sculpting your body has arrived with bushels of resolutions, top amongst them is “I will exercise! to show-off in the speedo? "--- Don't Please! I mean do exercise but that speedo part keep it in front of a mirror if you must.

Okay maybe here might be some incentives for you.

1. Exercise overall tones your body, sculpts your muscles and lubricates your joints and prevents the bone softening that come with age.

1. The facts are simple. Use them or lose them. Muscles like the brain need to be fed with some repetitive resistance to develop memory. Just like the brain when it is fed with knowledge it grows in intelligence and wherewithal.
2. Exercising the muscle leads to increasing the IGF-1Receptors that help store the glycogen within the muscle cells for use as energy. The higher the IGF-1R expressed by the muscle the less the Insulin floating around. Thus exercise leads to utilization of the consumed foods converted into sugars to be stored for use by the muscles. This leads to less sugar in the blood for insulin spikes.
3. Excess sugar floating in the blood stream is converted into fat and stored in the adipose tissue. So the larger the storage the fatter the person. This ultimately leads to resistance to insulin and Voila Type II Diabetes mellitus happens. There is a feed-forward-loop mechanism where accumulation of fat leads to more lipogenesis (fat production). It is like liking chocolate and then becoming a chocoholic. The initial desire if not curbed will lead to a perpetual desire. 
4. Of course the more unconverted sugars in the blood stream, the more filtration by the kidney and more sugar spills in the urine to the point that kidney damage results, ultimately leading to dialysis.
5. And if that was not enough more sugars in the blood stream floating through the eyes leads to impairment of vision.
6. And last but not least (since this is a simple primer) Excess sugars convert to triglycerides and those fatty molecules lining the arteries leads them to become rigid which leads to high blood pressure leading ultimately to strokes, heart attacks and other maladies that are not fitting for any bloggersdom.
7. About the brain. Well there are ample studies that have replicated the fact that exercise increases blood-flow to the brain. You know heart pumps faster thus increasing the blood-flow-rate and the result is more nourishment to the brain. Remember the brain resides atop the body in most people whose hormones are not in play (a little joke). Anyway the more nourishment the better the cells live and thrive. It definitely beats the alternative doesn't it: To be sitting in a lounge chair trying to remember your own name! Data show that exercise reduces dementia! Oh yes it does! Believe me and if you don't heed to this piece of information then well, at age 80 or sooner you won't need to worry about it at all.
8. Excess fructose/corn syrup that food industry desires to add to most foods and drinks cause an excess fat deposition in the liver which I am positive the liver does not like. You can experiment at your own peril. My suggestion look at the food label and then decide to ingest - simple.

Exercise and the Heart: Speaking about the heart, and there is a lot to be said about "heart." Suffice it is to say, exercise of those gloppy-gooey icky things that can stick to the inside of the arteries will stick and sometime in the future when the need is great and the blood supply constricted from reaching its source or a sudden collective rupture of the endothelium (inner artery lining) causing a cascade of platelet clumping will cause a lot of pain. A few pictures will roil your mind, cause chaos in your brain and hopefully get you off the couch.

Atherosclerotic Artery Section

Calcified Coronary Artery

XRay view of calcified arteries

Mayo Representation of atherosclerosis

2. Moderate Exercise and Endurance: Results in a IGF-1R expression in the heart muscle too which leads to allowance for cardiac myocyte (heart cell) hypertrophy (Or physical exercise leads to a tougher heart) So in a sedentary individual there is limited if any IGF-1R protein presence and faced with “fight-or-flight” scenario such as a muscle-bound coming at you with a sledge hammer, the heart would not be able to expand to function at peak capacity for the potential induced stress and thus might outrace itself into an arrythmia (irregular heart-beat which can cause sudden-death). That is why athletes have a resting heart rate much lower than non-athletes. On the other hand a compromise is needed. One cannot overdo exercise either. Too little and a bad diet and too much exercise can induce some coronary damage via "dystrophic calcification." (Calcification through damage;  calcium deposit in the heart (coronary) arteries leads to them being rigid and ultimately narrowed enough to limit blood supply for the induced physical stress.)
3. Exercise and Cancer:
1. If a sculpted “cool” body does not grab your attention let me try another approach that I know will get the point across:               Cancer Cell

1. Exercise leads to a lower death rate from Colon cancer. 
2. Exercise induces IGF-1R expression in patients with a specific type of Triple Negative Breast Cancer where those patient who had a higher expression of IGF-1R in their cells had a higher survival rate then those without. So exercise did make a difference in their survival and well-being.
3. Women who exercised regularly had lowered risk of developing breast cancer. Exercise was preventative!
4. Women who had breast cancer had a higher chance of increasing their overall survival and potential cure.
5. Exercise is also implicated in reducing the risk of lung cancer in current or former women smokers.
6. Exercise with diet rich in vegetables, fruits are also implicated in reducing the risk of Prostate Cancer in Men

4. Exercise and Brain Function: This will not come as any surprise to anyone, but exercise induces the flow of neuro-chemicals in the brain, which lead to a feeling of well-being. These chemicals are called “Endorphins.” The feeling of well-being leads to a positive outlook on life and changes the approach to life.
1. Decision Making is on a moment-to-moment basis. We make decision at every level, at every turn of the screw and at every fork in the road. We survive through life living with the results of those decisions. Might it not be a good reason to make all decisions when we have a full score of endorphins circulating in our brains? Remember Charles Dickens, he would walk the streets of London and those walks gave him the ideation of the Classics and the temper to toil writing such works as "Oliver Twist" and "A Christmas Carol."

MRI of the Brain 

Was there something you were waiting for that I forgot to mention? Oh yes: "Just Do It."

Okay, so get off the couch, turn the TV off, put away the 3D glasses, put your sweats on and roll with the endorphins.

Wish you all a happy healthy and endorphin-rich-proper-decision-making-rest of  2011!

References:

1. 1. Insulin-Like Growth Factor I Receptor Signalin is required for exercise induced Cardiac Hypertrophy, Jaetaek Kim et.al; Molecular Endocrinology 22 (11):2532-2543.
2. 2. Enhanced muscle insulin receptor autophosphorylation with short-term aerobic exercise training, J.F. Youngren et. al: Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab (2001) 280: E528-33.
3. 3. Impact of physical activity on cancer recurrence and survival in patients with stage III colon cancer: findings from CALGB 89803, Meyerhardt JA et al. J Clin Oncol 2006 Aug1; 24(22): 3535-41 (Dana Farber Institute, Boston, MA)
4. 4. Tao MH, Shu XO, Ruan ZX, et al: Association of overweight with breast cancer survival. Am J Epidemiol 163:101-107, 2006.
5.  5. Bianchini F, Kaaks R, Vainio H: Weight control and physical activity in cancer prevention. Obes Rev 3:5-8, 2002
6. 6. Del Giudice ME, Fantus IG, Ezzat S, et al: Insulin and related factors in premenopausal breast cancer risk. Breast Cancer Res Treat 47:111-120, 1998
7. 7. Holmes MD, Chen WY, Feskanich D, et al: Physical activity and survival after breast cancer diagnosis. JAMA 293:2479-2486, 2005.
8. 8. The Association of Physical Activity with Lung Cancer Incidence in a cohort of Older Women: The Iowa Women’s Health Study. Sinner,P et. al. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2006;15(12):2359–64.
9. 9. Evidence of Inhibitory effect of Diet and Exercise on Prostate Cancer Cell Growth. Tymchuck, CN et.al. Journal of Urology Vol 166 (3): Pages 1185-1189, September 2001