The time is here to start exercising. But may it also benefit your offspring and grandchildren in the future?
Provocative new research suggests that it might be. The results, which are based on studies using mice, show that the exercise we currently engage in leaves its mark on our cells in ways that can be handed on to future generations.
In the study, female mice who exercised before and during pregnancy had an impact on the health of their offspring and offspring's offspring, even if those offspring never exercised at all.
Although you might think that a study on mice has little application to people, Laurie Goodyear, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, said that the concept that one generation's lifestyle influences the health of the next is "quite well-recognized" scientifically.
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According to her, mothers and fathers with poor nutrition who experience diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic illnesses frequently pass on a propensity for such conditions to their offspring. This has been shown in both animal and human research. This tendency is unrelated to upbringing or way of life. In other words, even if their parents had been eating properly and maintaining a lean body until then, babies born to parents with metabolic issues tend to experience the same conditions as adults.
This procedure is known as developmental programming. They hypothesize that it is influenced by both the womb environment during pregnancy and epigenetics, or minute adjustments to our genes' function based on our lifestyle and diet. Mothers or fathers may convey these epigenetic alterations to their children, which may increase or decrease their chance of contracting certain diseases.
But Goodyear and other researchers have discovered that physical activity also contributes to developmental programming, albeit of a more favorable kind. Studies from her group and others have shown that even if mouse moms eat high-calorie food and do not exercise, their pups are somewhat protected against acquiring obesity and diabetes as they grow up if the mothers run before mating and throughout pregnancy.
Whether their mothers exercise or not, fathers who run before mating can also convey stronger metabolisms to their offspring. In a 2018 study, running males fathered pups with healthier brains from birth than mice fathered by sedentary dads.
Studies, however, had not examined the possibility that these defenses would be strong enough to pass on to grandkids, even if their parents are sedentary.
Goodyear and her colleagues made young, female mice run on wheels for the latest study, which was published in June in Molecular Metabolism. Some people ate typical fare, whereas others followed a poor, high-fat diet. On the same food, a different group of female mice did not run. The females all bred with sedentary male animals after that, and the runners continued to run throughout each of their subsequent pregnancies. (Mice appear to like running; on most days, even those that were highly pregnant skittered on their wheels for almost a mile.)
And thus they had babies. To prevent their metabolisms from being significantly altered by the epigenetic and other changes that exercise would otherwise bring about, none of their offspring ran. Through this sedentary generation, the researchers planned to follow the effects of their moms' exercise. They avoided any potential negative impacts of womb conditions on the offspring by only breeding males from this middle generation for the same reason.
Both the male and female grandchildren who were born as a result lived sedentary lives and ate typical diets.
However, the mice with active grandmothers were slimmer at birth than the others, and the males had stronger, denser bones. The most intriguing finding was that as the animals reached middle age, those with inactive grandmothers started to exhibit deteriorating insulin sensitivity and poorer blood sugar regulation, potentially indicating pre-diabetes. Both in humans and rodents, these diseases are frequently brought on by aging and inactivity.
However, if Grandma fled, they did not appear. Despite being sedentary, the mice with an active grandma remained relatively healthy in terms of blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity well into their old life. (The researchers also discovered that it was the exercise that mattered, not the grandmothers' high-fat or regular diets.)
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Ana Alves-Wagner, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School and the study's lead author, called it "amazing." "Multiple generations' metabolic health have been enhanced by exercise."
This was plainly a mouse study, and it would take decades of time and harsh compulsion over people's hobbies, diets, and mating preferences to replicate it in humans. Additionally, it didn't look into how exercise altered the animals' biology at the molecular level in such a way that the effects persisted between generations.
Nevertheless, Goodyear thinks epigenetics is a major factor, and the findings probably apply to humans as well given that we and mice have many similarities in our metabolisms and physiological reactions to exercise.
If so, the conclusions take on a practical and meaningful quality.
Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University who researches how physical exercise influenced our species during evolution, stated, "I was really intrigued when I heard about this study. It appears that our metabolisms have been modified to react to environmental cues from different generations. The processes through which this happens in mice are still a mystery to us. However, this study supports the idea that exercising has benefits for others as well.
Naturally, the study is not intended to be critical of any future parents who choose not to exercise before to having children or who are unable to do so, according to Goodyear. But the outcomes provide those of us who want to think about it one more justification. We can go on a hike or a ride today, in part for the benefit of our future grandchildren.
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