Exercise Is Doing More Than Building Muscle: It May Also Be Rewiring Your DNA
We’ve been saying exercise is good for your immune system for so long that the sentence barely means anything anymore. It’s right up there with vegetables are good for you and smoking is bad. Okay. Thanks. Anything else? Then somebody finally starts looking under the hood. A study published September 18 in Science Advances used some fairly sophisticated molecular tools to compare regular exercisers with sedentary people and found differences not merely in cholesterol, blood sugar or some other number your doctor circles in red. The differences went all the way down into metabolism, immune-cell gene activity and the accessibility of the genetic machinery those cells use to do their jobs. That’s considerably more interesting than telling us people who exercise tend to be healthier. The researchers pulled data from the Chinese Immune Multi-omics Atlas , an enormous project that has profiled more than 10 million circulating immune cells from 428 adults. For this particular exercise ana...