By Julie E 
Photo Credit (Pixabay)
The question of whether we can prolong our lives and slow down the aging process is one that civilizations have had since the beginning of time.
Researchers at Brigham Young University have now discovered that a particular kind of exercise can slow down the aging process in our cells. In the end, that translates into improved health and physical fitness that corresponds with a much younger person’s natural age progression—by as much as nine years.
It’s an interesting move in the direction of youth, even if it’s not quite it. I’m also the first to acknowledge that a claim this significant merits skepticism. Let’s get straight to the study and look at what the researchers say, as well as how much exercise is necessary to get the desired effects.
The information and the study
Under the direction of Larry Tucker, an exercise science professor at BYU, researchers examined 5,823 adults who had taken part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This study monitored the participants’ daily physical activity, among other factors. In particular, it monitored the extent to which these individuals performed 62 different forms of exercise across a 30-day span.
Additionally, the CDC study examined “telomere length values.” According to a BYU press release, telomeres are “the nucleotide endcaps of our chromosomes,” adding:
They are highly connected with age and function similarly to our biological clock; we lose a small portion of the endcaps every time a cell divides. Consequently, our telomeres get shorter as we age.
This is when things start to get interesting. Tucker of BYU says he was able to correlate people’s relative telomere length with their different amounts of physical activity by sifting through the CDC study’s data, and he discovered something unexpected. If one were to categorize people’s levels of physical activity into four groups—sedentary, low, moderate, and high—Tucker discovered that the telomere lengths of those in the first three groups were approximately comparable.
In contrast, those who were physically active had “140 base pairs of DNA [more] at the end of their telomeres” compared to those who were not physically active. In the July 2017 issue of Preventive Medicine, Tucker’s research claims that this leads to a “biologic aging advantage of nine years.”
To put it simply and easily, if you are physically active, your cells will likely look more like those of a much younger person.
How beneficial is exercise, and how much of it is?
The BYU researchers had to draw a line somewhere, so they defined “high levels of physical activity” for the purposes of their study as jogging for 30 minutes for women and 40 minutes for men, five days a week.
That’s the kind of level that calls for dedication, but it’s probably not out of reach for anyone who wants to decide to change their health. Naturally, this is by no means the first study to look for a connection between more activity, improved health, and a longer lifespan.
For instance, Mayo Clinic researchers recently came to the similar conclusion—albeit for different reasons—that individuals who regularly participated in high-intensity interval training had cells that were more effective at producing new proteins, thereby “reversing a major adverse effect of aging.”
The specific mechanism by which exercise maintains telomere length was not examined in the BYU study, although Tucker speculates that it may be related to inflammation or oxidative stress. In any event, it implies that although aging is unavoidable, we have some control over how quickly we age.
Tucker stated in a news release that “being forty does not imply that you are biologically forty years old.” “Everyone has encountered individuals who appear younger than their true age. Our bodies experience less biological aging the more physically active we are.