Exercise does a lot for the body. It can help your digestion, reduce the risk of serious conditions like stroke, type2 diabetes, high blood pressure, some types of cancer and metabolic disease. Exercise can help you live longer in other ways, too. For instance, if you’re obese, which is today’s leading killer of preventable deaths, it can help you lose weight. What happens to the body when you exercise also improves your health and boosts longevity.
Healthy eating and regular exercise impact several systems in your body in a positive manner.
While a healthy lifestyle always starts with a healthy diet, exercise is a close second. It’s known for slowing aging and reducing aches and pains that occur as people age. One way it does it is by lengthening telomeres. Telomeres protect the DNA and act like aglets, those plastic tips on shoelaces. They prevent gene damage and cell death. The longer the telomeres, the longer they replicate and the longer the cells live. That’s because the telomeres shorten in replication, keeping chromosomes intact.
Exercise also helps boost the body’s stem cells.
No matter how old you are, you still have some stem cells. Studies show that the more active you are, the more stem cells you create. In fact, stem cell therapy is often used to repair joints and doctors recommend increasing activity to boost the body’s stem cell production. As you increase activity, your body recognizes the need to increase stem cells to replace older cells lost in exercise. It’s one of the reasons arthritis pain can be relieved with exercise.
Increasing your exercise doesn’t have to be difficult.
Just increasing the amount of steps you take each day can help you boost your fitness level. One study from Australia found that people who went from no exercise to an active 10,000 steps a day reduced their mortality risk by as much as 40%. Another study showed that just increasing your steps by an additional 3,000 steps a day reduces the risk of dying by 12%.
- While studies show that getting more exercise, including boosting how much you walk, can improve your overall health and lifespan, a healthy diet is just as important. You can’t out-exercise a bad diet.
- Exercise can reduce your cholesterol levels. It also can help lower blood pressure. When you workout, you boost nitric oxide, which causes blood vessels to expand, making blood flow easier and blood pressure lower.
- Exercise is a great stress buster. Stress does not cause changes in your body that detrimentally affect health, it shortens telomeres. Exercise not only lengthens telomeres to prevent early cell death, it burns off the hormones of stress to prevent premature shortening.
- A combination of a healthy diet and regular exercise helps reduce the potential for serious illness and premature aging. Food provides the building blocks and exercise keeps the body going. Just walking faster can increase your lifespan substantially.
For more information, contact us today at Targeted Nutrition Technologies
