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Rejuvenation through high activity? Researchers at Brigham Young University have shown that physically very active people reduce biological aging at the cellular level [1].
Telomeres
Researchers at Brigham sought to find an explanation for the phenomenon that very active people often appear younger than their age would suggest. Part of this can be explained by a healthier-looking body. However, there is also a process at the cellular level that slows aging in very active people. The researchers discovered that people who are always highly active have significantly longer
telomeres than less active people.
For their study, they analyzed data from 5823 adults who participated in the CDC’s
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, one of the few studies where telomere length was determined and the level of activity of the participants was recorded.
A telomere is formed by double-stranded and partly single-stranded DNA, in a coat of protective proteins. Telomere is Greek for ‘end piece’, they are located at the end of a chromosome. Telomeres shorten as they age. The shorter they become, the less capable the cell is of division. Shorter telomere length is therefore associated with aging diseases and specifically with a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases [2].
Telomeres are the protein endcaps of our chromosomes. They’re like our biological clock and they’re extremely correlated with age; each time a cell replicates, we lose a tiny bit of the endcaps. Therefore, the older we get, the shorter our telomeres.
Adults with high levels of activity were found to have telomere lengths that made them 9 years younger at the cellular level than those who were not active at all and 7 years younger than those who were moderately active. ‘High levels of activity’ here means women jogging for 30 minutes a day, five days a week. For men, it’s 40 minutes. The shortest telomeres were found in inactive people, who had 140 base pairs of DNA less at the end of their telomeres than very active people. Interestingly, there was hardly any difference between people who were inactive or had low activity levels.
If you want to see a real difference in slowing your biological aging, it appears that a little exercise won’t cut it. You have to work out regularly at high levels.
All or Nothing?
So the good news is that aging at the cellular level can be slowed down. The bad news is that you need to be quite a fitness freak for this, continuously. You might be discouraged by the fact that moderate activity only yielded a small benefit. And that’s a shame, of course. However, it doesn’t mean that you might as well do nothing if you can’t jog for half an hour five times a week or something similar. It just means that you won’t (completely) reap this benefit of training at the cellular level.
There are still plenty of other benefits of physical activity. It’s no wonder I recently wrote about a study that actually showed that the ‘all or nothing’ mentality often leads to lower activity and more frustration.
Furthermore, there are multiple ways in which a cell can rejuvenate through exercise. We recently wrote about the effects of HIIT at the cellular level.
References
- Larry A. Tucker. Physical activity and telomere length in U.S. men and women: An NHANES investigation. Preventive Medicine, 2017; 100: 145 DOI: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2017.04.027
- (en) Krauss J, Farzaneh-Far R, Puterman E, Na B, Lin J, Epel E, et al. (November 9, 2011). Physical fitness and telomere length in patients with coronary heart disease: findings from the Heart and Soul Study. PLoS ONE. 2011;6(11):e26983.. PLoS ONE 6 (11): e26983.
