Study urges severely obese to eat more healthily, finding that forgoing a small sandwich is as effective as a one-hour run

Fat woman obese obesity The obesity crisis will not be solved by exercise alone, according to a new study from Aberdeen University. Photograph: Jose Luis Pelaez/Getty Images/Blend Images

The obesity epidemic will not be reversed by urging people to exercise more, because they have too little time to spare, researchers claim.

To make an impact on levels of obesity, severely overweight people would have to exercise for several hours a day, when they could find it easier to lose the weight by eating less, they said. [Read more...]

Seniors can improve muscle strength and bone mineral density, and reduce cognitive decline through exercise.

We all know we’re supposed to exercise, to move our muscles and be strong.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates about three-fourths of older adults are sedentary, despite informative articles insisting activity helps prevent many related ailments, from coronary artery disease to cognitive decline.

Dr. Sheldon Zinberg, founder of the Nifty After Fifty workout centers, insists people are reluctant to put a name to their problem: “We’re talking about sarcopenia, or age-related muscle wasting.” [Read more...]

Ten minutes of brisk exercise triggers metabolic changes that last at least an hour. The unfair news for panting newbies: The more fit you are, the more benefits you just might be getting.

We all know that exercise and a good diet are important for health, protecting against heart disease and diabetes, among other conditions. But what exactly causes the health improvement from working up a sweat or from eating, say, more olive oil than saturated fat? And are some people biologically predisposed to get more benefit than others?

They’re among questions that metabolic profiling, a new field called metabolomics, aims to answer in hopes of one day optimizing those benefits — or finding patterns that may signal risk for disease and new ways to treat it.

”We’re only beginning to catalog the metabolic variability between people,” says Dr. Robert Gerszten of Massachusetts General Hospital, whose team just took a step toward that goal.

The researchers measured biochemical changes in the blood of a variety of people: the healthy middle-aged, some who became short of breath with exertion, and marathon runners.

First, in 70 healthy people put on a treadmill, the team found more than 20 metabolites that change during exercise, naturally produced compounds involved in burning calories and fat and improving blood-sugar control. Some weren’t known until now to be involved with exercise. Some revved up during exercise, like those involved in processing fat. Others involved with cellular stress decreased with exercise.

Those are pretty wonky findings, a first step in a complex field. But they back today’s health advice that even brief bouts of activity are good.

”Ten minutes of exercise has at least an hour of effects on your body,” says Gerszten, who found some of the metabolic changes that began after 10 minutes on the treadmill still were measurable 60 minutes after people cooled down.

Your heart rate rapidly drops back to normal when you quit moving, usually in 10 minutes or so. So finding lingering biochemical changes offers what Gerszten calls ”tantalizing evidence” of how exercise may be building up longer-term benefits.

Back to the blood. Thinner people had greater increases in a metabolite named niacinamide, a nutrient byproduct that’s involved in blood-sugar control, the team from Mass General and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard reported last week in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Checking a metabolite of fat breakdown, the team found people who were more fit — as measured by oxygen intake during exercise — appeared to be burning more fat than the less fit, or than people with shortness of breath, a possible symptom of heart disease.

The extremely fit — 25 Boston Marathon runners — had ten-fold increases in that metabolite after the race. Still other differences in metabolites allowed the researchers to tell which runners had finished in under four hours and which weren’t as speedy.

”We have a chemical snapshot of what the more fit person looks like. Now we have to see if making someone’s metabolism look like that snapshot, whether or not that’s going to improve their performance,” says Gerszten, whose ultimate goal is better cardiac care.

Don’t expect a pill ever to substitute for a workout — the new work shows how complicated the body’s response to exercise is, says metabolomics researcher Dr. Debbie Muoio of Duke University Medical Center.

But scientists are hunting nutritional compounds that might help tweak metabolic processes in specific ways. For example, Muoio discovered the muscles of diabetic animals lack enough of a metabolite named carnitine, and that feeding them more improved their control of blood sugar. Now, Muoio is beginning a pilot study in 25 older adults with pre-diabetes to see if carnitine supplements might work similarly in people who lack enough.

Next up: With University of Vermont researchers, she’s testing how metabolic changes correlate with health measures in a study of people who alternate between a carefully controlled Mediterranean diet and higher-fat diets.

”The longterm hope is you could use this in making our way toward personalized medicine,” Muoio says. The New York Times

Researchers found brief vigorous exercise tends to slow the ageing process, which could help explain why those with healthy lifestyles are likely to live longer.

Just 15 minutes of energetic activity a day can reduce stress and prevent the deterioration of vital cells which lead to us feeling and looking older.

The study shows increasing activity levels not only makes people feel better, it improves the ability of the body’s cells to fight disease and premature ageing.

The effect comes from increasing levels of the enzyme telomerase which plays a critical part in the control of cell ageing.

Psychologist Dr Eli Puterman, who led the US research team at the University of California in San Francisco, said the study built on previous work that showed how changes in DNA in the body resulted in ageing.

He said ‘We have extended those findings to show that, in fact, there are things we can do about it.

‘If we maintain the levels of physical activity recommended by public health bodies we can prevent the unyielding damage that psychological stress may have on our body.’

The researchers studied the effect of exercise on protective strips of DNA called telomeres  – tiny ‘caps’ on the ends of chromosomes which protect against inflammation and other ageing processes.

Telomeres have been called the ‘chromosomal clock’ because they appear to be central to biological ageing.

They shorten over time and after a certain point are no longer able to prevent the DNA falling apart.

Scientists believe this process is at the heart of many age-related diseases, and may even place a final limit on human lifespan.

The latest study found women who did about 15 minutes of exercise a day were able to stop the strips of DNA from shortening.

Dr Elissa Epel, an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, said ‘Telomere length is increasingly considered a biological marker of the accumulated wear and tear of living.

‘Even a moderate amount of vigorous exercise appears to provide a critical amount of protection for the telomeres.’

As little as 42 minutes of vigorous exercise over a three-day period was shown to  protect telomere length.

The researchers recruited 62 post-menopausal women, many of whom were caring for spouses or parents with dementia.

The women reported at the end of each day how many minutes of vigorous activity they had engaged in and how stressed they felt.

Vigorous activity was defined as ‘increased heart rate and/or sweating’, says a report in the Public Library of Science’s online journal.

The women also gave blood samples so the researchers could measure the telomere length of their immune cells.

The results showed psychological stress promoted immune cell ageing through shortening of telomeres.

But even the highly stressed women were able to stop this ageing process if they had exercised. By Jenny Hope, The Daily Mail

Exercise during and after treatment improves quality of life and eases fatigue for patients battling either breast or prostate cancer, a new study finds.

“Using exercise as an approach to cancer care has the potential to benefit patients both physically and psychologically, as well as mitigate treatment side effects,” study lead author Dr. Eleanor M. Walker, division director of breast services in the department of radiation oncology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, said in a statement.

Walker and colleagues created a program called ExCITE that encouraged 30 female breast cancer patients and 20 prostate cancer patients to collaborate on individualized exercise programs. The researchers followed the patients, aged 35 to 80, during their treatment and for a year afterward.

Before patients joined the exercise program, the hospital’s cardiology division evaluated their skeletal muscle strength, endurance and capacity for exercise. Staff also examined patients’ weight, overall health, and type of cancer treatment, as well as doing blood work, bone density screens, metabolic screenings and workups for inflammatory “markers.”

“Exercise is a great alternative to patients combating fatigue and nausea who are considering using supplements which may interfere with medications and chemotherapy they’re taking during cancer treatment,” Walker concluded.

She is slated to present the study June 7 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Yahoo Daily News

What made Larry Brown’s addiction acceptable was that it was, at least on the surface, good for him.

He was in his early 40s and running an impressive 50 miles a week. So what if it consumed him, if he thought about it even when his feet weren’t methodically hitting the pavement or carrying him across a finish line; if he became angry when the weather, or something else he couldn’t control, kept him from his workout?

“My PR (personal record) in a 10K was 33:16,” says Brown, now 63. “I was good enough to where it caught me, and I was blinded by that.”

Even when he developed prostate cancer, and was sitting in his doctor’s office looking at an MRI of a bone tumor in his leg, he was still focused on running.

“That was my first question,” says Brown, a Dallas insurance broker. “Not whether I could still work, or whether I’d be able to walk. It was, ‘Can I keep running?’”

At a time when two-thirds of the U.S. population is overweight, and barely half of us exercise at least three times a week, Brown seems an anomaly. Yet experts say he is far from alone. Look around the gym, or on your favorite trail. Chances are at least several people were there yesterday and — no matter what else is going on in their lives — will be there tomorrow.

Officially, this is known as Overtraining Syndrome. Because of the volume of workouts, it occurs primarily among professional athletes, or those training for a long event such as a marathon or triathlon. Yet most anyone who works out can exercise too much; a workout’s duration and intensity can matter as much as a compunction and compulsion to do it.

Yet there is an irony to this, says Sue Beckham, associate director of education at the Cooper Institute: Instead of leading to faster times and better health, too much exercise can be detrimental.

“Like anything, too much can be bad,” Beckham says. “The way the body works is that we overload it, and by giving it recovery, it adapts. The problem comes when we don’t have balance between overload and recovery.”

OVEREXERCISING SIGNS

Overexercising often leads to such physical signs as loss of appetite, insomnia, fatigue and an inability to maintain what used to be a normal workout. Some people experience depression, mood changes and loss of self-esteem. Those symptoms could be related to exhaustion, or to chemical changes in the body, or by a decline in performance. No one really knows, Beckham says.

Even if someone doesn’t have these signs, overexercising might be taking time from other areas of their lives, such as family. As a former Ironman competitor, Beckham, who has a doctorate in physiology, knows firsthand how exercise can overtake someone’s life.

“When I was training, because of the nature of such a long event, most of the time I was doing two training sessions a day. It creates stress because it encroaches on other things you do. It’s hard to find that balance.”

Brown usually did his training runs while his wife and daughter were sleeping. He assumed that his long miles and time away didn’t affect them.

“Since I was in that kind of shape, I didn’t sense my tiredness,” Brown says. “I didn’t know I wasn’t all that easy to live with. I probably wasn’t covering my bases very well.”

His family didn’t talk to him about easing up, but his friends did.

“I’d say to them, ‘You’re not disciplined,’” says Brown. “I’d rationalize. It was willful blindness. I don’t think at that particular time in my life they could convince me to do otherwise.”

He knows now that his obsession was a matter of control.

“It’s one thing in your life, if you stay relatively uninjured, you can control,” he says. “It was kind of a false sense of control, though, because you were one injury away from not being able to control it.”

Or in his case, prostate cancer and a bone tumor — which was benign, but altered his running regimen. He eventually sought the help of a counselor, which he calls “the best thing I did.”

MAKING EXCUSES

People who overexercise usually know they’re working out too much, says Kirk Burgess, senior physical director at the Town North Family YMCA in Dallas; yet, they justify their actions. He knows because 10 years ago, that’s exactly what he did. He ran the same 7.7-mile course every day without fail and couldn’t seem to stop himself.

“Not only did I feel guilty if I didn’t,” he says, “but I was playing mind games. I thought I was falling behind the norm if I didn’t run, that I wouldn’t be ready for race day, that I felt inferior, that I wasn’t on top of my game.”

Eventually, the bone in his lower left foot “completely broke down.” He had to have a bone graft. For six months, he couldn’t run. Though he’s back to it and is training for his 24th marathon, losing the bone is “what it took,” he says.

“I was just like an alcoholic. It took hitting rock bottom to realize, you might want to slow it down a bit. You only have one body.”

He keeps an eye out for overexercisers, like those who use the cardio and the weight machines every day. Or those who spend hours of each day on one piece of equipment. Though he rarely would tell someone what they probably already know, he might ask about their exercise program, and then talk about balance and about rest.

“The American College of Sports Medicine says rest days are as important as workout days,” Burgess says.

Brown, who had his last cancer treatment 15 years ago, now has a rest day — Monday. He runs about 20 miles a week and takes two spin and two yoga classes a week. It’s still time-consuming, but it just feels different, he says: “I feel like there’s more joy and less intensity.”

Sometimes he worries he’ll revert to his old ways.

“I hope not, but I still wonder,” says Brown, who records every workout in a notebook. “It’s the old controlling nature. Will you revert back to your old self when things get a little stressful in business or in relationships? You wonder if it’s your nature built into it.”

He does have one more goal: To run 50,000 miles by the time he’s 65. As of right now, he still has 1,000 to go — and until Aug. 3, 2011, to accomplish it.

ARE YOU OVERTRAINING?

Sue Beckham of the Cooper Institute offers these signs:

Your heart rate is elevated when you wake up.

You have trouble sleeping.

You notice that in your normal workout, your legs are heavier. You don’t seem to be recovering as well.

Your appetite has decreased.

You’re developing more respiratory infections.

You have nagging injuries that don’t seem to go away.

You experience mood swings.

Your self-esteem plummets.

You’re depressed.

HOW TO EASE UP

Keep a training log. “Almost every time I was sick or injured, I’d go back to my log book and see where I had a big jump in my exercise overload, intensity or volume,” says Beckham, a former triathlete.

Make yourself take a day off. “You won’t see results if you don’t have a rest day,” says Kirk Burgess of the Town North Family YMCA. You don’t have to sit on the couch all day. Play with your kids. Go to an art festival.

Consider hiring a coach. “Someone talking to you about what you’re doing and how you’re feeling is a safety net to step in and tell you it’s too much,” Beckham says.

Be sure you’re sleeping well and eating well. “A lot of times, I see people train really hard but aren’t as serious about nutrition, so end up defeating the purpose of working out,” she says.

If you can’t seem to ease up, seek professional help.  By Leslie Barker Garcia,

Every year, millions of people set health and fitness goals and they tend to be the same, namely, the everlasting search for long lean muscles, less body fat, more energy, flexibility… 2010 is no different and has already ushered in three “new” fitness techniques and products that are hoping to one-up 2009’s international successes with efficiency.

Bellyfit

This is going after the female Zumba crowd. Originating in Canada, Bellyfit classes are women-only and are split into two sections. The first half is a melange of cardio dance including: belly dance, Bollywood, Bhangra, and African dance. The class then focuses on core strengthening and mind-body with various movements from Pilates, yoga and mudra meditation.

Bellyfit is actively training health and fitness professionals in Canada to expand Bellyfit to a gym near you.

Body by Science

This is the ultimate American invention promising complete body fitness in only 12 minutes a week. Doug McGuff, M.D., co-author of Body by Science and emergency room physician, created a research-based program for strength training, bodybuilding and complete fitness. The entire program requires rethinking everything you thought you knew about health, fitness and the science of your body.

Ultimate resistance training, slow movements, heavy weights, push you to your limits for exactly 12 minutes. According to Dr. McDuff, the 12-minute limit is not a marketing ploy, it is all the body can take.

ViPR

The ViPR (Vitality, Performance and Reconditioning) created in England boasts that it is the Swiss Army knife of exercise tools with the ability to integrate into 9,000 different exercises. Many are demonstrated on YouTube and ViPR-fit.com.

Proponents claim it can replace the barbell, dumbbell, Kettlebell, stability ball, medicine ball, balance device and speed ladder.

Some British trainers have said the ViPR offers a whole body workout in the same vein as The Power Plate. The Times of India