From a look back at this year's Phys Ed column posts in the NYT:
Scientists advanced, for instance, our understanding of the effects of exercising — and not exercising — on the mind and brain. Several different studies found that exercise significantly improves the brain health of people with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease and also, encouragingly, lessens healthy, middle-aged people’s risks of suffering from what one scientist described to me as “a C.R.S. problem,” or Can’t Remember Stuff.
Another study explored how exercise can improve mood, with Swedish researchers showing that, in mice, a substance produced abundantly in the bodies of both mice and men during exercise crosses the blood-brain barrier and buffers brains against stress and depression.
And, in perhaps the most novel exercise-neuroscience experiment this year, researchers explored how sitting may affect the brain, by having one group of rats remain sedentary while others ran. The sedentary rats soon displayed changes in the shape and function of certain neurons in their brains, while the running rats showed no such changes. The neurons involved play a role in how well the body regulates blood pressure, so the researchers concluded that not exercising had remodeled the animals’ brains in ways that undermined their health.
Meanwhile, plenty of other studies this year underscored how wide-ranging the benefits of exercise really are. In various experiments, physical activity was found to lessen and even reverse the effects of aging on human skin; protect against age-related vision loss;improve creativity; lower people’s risk of developing heart diseaseeven if they had multiple risk factors for the condition; increase the numbers of good bacteria in athletes’ guts; raise exercisers’ pain tolerance; and alter, in desirable ways, how our DNA works.
Being in good shape also, in a sense, keeps us young, according to a large-scale study published in October. Fit people were biologically younger than others of the same chronological age, the study concluded, and generally lived longer. “There is a huge benefit,” the study’s senior author told me, “larger than any known medical treatment, in improving your fitness level to what is expected for your age group or, even better, to above it.”
But the benefits of exercise are not limitless, as science gently reminded us this year. Working out spurs many people to gain weight, primarily in the form of body fat, a pitiless but important October study showed. It also can be harmful to the teeth, if the exercise is prolonged and strenuous. And if practiced in a gym, exercise may expose us to more indoor pollution than many of us might have expected.
Luckily, this exposure will be minimal for those of us embracing theone-minute workout.
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