Once a week, I dump a large plastic bin full of paper, cardboard, bottles, and plastic into an even larger trash container and shuttle it out to the street. The City of Austin provides a great recycling service and picks all this stuff up and hauls it off to be sorted and then turned into stuff we can use again.
There’s something similar going on in your body.
But you need the right kind of stimulus to make it happen.
Exercise.
You’ve probably heard that exercise is good for you, right?
Builds strong bones, powerful muscles, efficient heart and lungs, and helps you feel more energetic. Coupled with the right kind of eating plan, it can also help you maintain ideal body fat levels.
But did you know that exercise also turns on a special kind of recycling process in your cells?
So I won’t dive too deep on cellular physiology lest you find your head snapping back as your eyelids flop shut, but you need to know just a couple of basic things.
Over time, our cells are damaged, sometimes from things we just can’t do much about like environment pollutants or too much sunlight and sometimes from things we eat, cigarette smoke or even a lack of activity. It’s this cellular damage that turns into what we call “aging”.
Well, according to Congcong He, PhD, a research fellow in the department of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, there’s some good news. There’s a mechanism that turns on and off that actually recycles the damaged cells and removes the “waste” from our bodies ((He, C., M. C. Bassik, et al. (2012). “Exercise-induced BCL2-regulated autophagy is required for muscle glucose homeostasis.” Nature 481(7382): 511-515.))
The process is referred to as autophagy”. Dr. He was curious if exercise would turn on this cellular mechanism.
I’ll spare you all the science but in a nutshell, at about thirty minutes of moderately intense exercise, the cellular recycling started. While his study subjects were mice, Dr. He believes that the same process happens in humans since, oddly enough, mice and humans have a lot of similarity in how the body works.
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So, in addition to helping regulate insulin, stave off diabetes, control blood pressure, boost your libido (via hormonal changes), it also looks like exercise helps renew your cells keeping you as youthful as possible as you move through life.
Of course, it would be great if it was as easy to recycle your cells as it is for me to recycle my trash but until the day comes when a pill (or maybe an app) does such a thing, if you want to get the most out of life, get moving.
Often.
