Exercise + Restricted Calorie Intake = Forever Young

I bet you have already heard this a million times: exercising is good for you! Am I right?
I also bet that you’ve been told why is good for you...because it improves your mood, combats chronic diseases, helps controlling your weight, boosts your energy levels, promotes better sleep, can put the spark back into your sex life and because it’s fun.
Recently, new studies have brought up something new and exciting: there is more evidence that exercising can effectively contribute to delay and maybe even reverse aging. Yes, that is correct! Being physically active can help you turn the clock back time. This happens especially if you pair exercise with a healthy food regimen.

Studies conducted all over the world have established that exercise plus restricting calorie intake helps delay the mental and physical deterioration caused by aging.
More recently two Harvard researchers claimed that they might have discovered how this happens.
They have uncovered a mechanism through which caloric restriction and exercise delay aging by rejuvenating connections between nerves and the muscles that they control.
The research described in the August 2010 issue of the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, begins to explain how exercise and restricted-calorie diets help to stave off the mental and physical degeneration of aging.
"Caloric restriction and exercise have numerous, dramatic effects on our mental acuity and motor ability" says Joshua Sanes, a professor of molecular and cellular biology and director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University.
"This research gives us a hint that the way these extremely powerful lifestyle factors act is by attenuating or reversing the decline in our synapses."
Sanes says their research, conducted with mice genetically engineered so their nerve cells glow in fluorescent colors, shows some of the debilitation of aging is caused by deterioration of connections that nerves make with the muscles they control, structures called neuromuscular junctions.

These microscopic links are remarkably similar to the synapses (junction between nerve cells, where the club-shaped tip of a nerve fiber almost touches another cell in order to transmit signals) that connect neurons to form information-processing circuits in the brain.
In a healthy neuromuscular synapse, nerve endings and their receptors on muscle fibers are almost a perfect match, like two hands of a prayer placed together, finger to finger, palm to palm.
This perfect lineup ensures maximum efficiency in transmitting the nerve's signal from the brain to the muscle, which is what makes it contract during movement.
As people age, however, the neuromuscular synapses can deteriorate in several ways.
Nerves can shrink, failing to cover the muscle's receptors completely. The resulting interference with transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles can result in wasting and eventually even death of muscle fibers. This muscle wasting is a common and significant clinical problem in the elderly.

The new work shows that mice on a restricted-calorie diet largely avoid that age-related deterioration of their neuromuscular junctions (synapses), while those on a one-month exercise regimen when already elderly partially reverse the damage.
"With calorie restriction, we saw reversal of all aspects of the synapse disassembly. With exercise, we saw a reversal of most, but not all” Sanes says.
Because of the study's structure - mice were on calorie-restricted diets for their whole lives, while those that exercised did so for just a month late in life - Sanes cautions against drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of exercise versus calorie restriction.
He notes that longer periods of exercise might have more profound effects, a possibility he and Lichtman are now testing.
Though much of Sanes and Lichtman's work focuses on brain synapses, both have investigated neuromuscular synapses for many years. Neuromuscular junctions are large enough to be viewed by light microscopy, and can be a jumping-off point for brain study, highlighting areas of inquiry and potential techniques.
"These findings in neuromuscular synapses make us curious to know whether similar effects might occur in brain synapses" Sanes says.
While the changes to the synapses through caloric restriction and exercise were clear in the images the researchers obtained, Sanes cautioned that their work was structural, not functional, and they have not yet tested how well the synapses worked.

In a different research conducted at South Western Medical School in Dallas, TX in 1966, five healthy twenty-year old males spent three weeks of their summer break resting in bed.
For these dudes this must have seemed like a dream come true. But unfortunately at the end of the three weeks, the dream had turned into a nightmare. They had:
- Faster resting heart rates
- Higher systolic blood pressure
- A drop in the heart’s maximum pumping capacity
- Fall in muscle strength.
Each of these problems can also be associated with premature aging and the natural aging process of the body. Thus proving the link between a lack of exercise and activity and the aging aspect many are trying to avoid. As the study moved further, the effects of the addition of exercise to an otherwise sedentary lifestyle were phenomenal.
The young men then began an eight-week exercise program. This plan more than reversed the adverse effects of being sedentary. Some of the measurements were better than at the beginning of the experiment.
A study of this magnitude shows that even the most aged persons can reverse some of the effects of aging by simply making a few changes in their everyday lifestyles. These changes do not come from a bottle or a syringe, they come from moving your body more tomorrow than you did today!

Finally, in the January 28, 2008 issue of “Archives of Internal Medicine”, doctors in London (UK) found that the cells of those who enjoyed leisure time exercise showed slower cell changes related to aging. Their cells appeared the same size as sedentary people ten years younger.
The best advice comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: taking the time to care for your body through a regular exercise schedule will prevent the effects of aging from a cellular level and the benefits of exercise have been shown in study after study.

Exercise more + be more cautious of what you eat = age less!
The secret to anti aging is just that simple and just that easy to accomplish.

TheIronYou