Aerobic exercise vs. aging
If you want to battle the negative biological effects of growing old, you might want to take up an
aerobic exercise such as jogging or swimming. German scientists recruited 124 middle-aged
men and women who were healthy but didn’t exercise and assigned them workout routines for the next six months. By the end of the study period, those who had been asked to jog or walk briskly for 45 minutes three times a week, or to do a high-intensity interval program, had developed longer telomeres in their white blood cells, reports The New York Times. Telomeres are tiny caps on the
ends of chromosomes that protect DNA from damage. These caps shrink as humans get older, eventually resulting in cell death and disease. But aerobic exercise appeared to lengthen the participants’ telomeres, dialing back the aging process. Scientists found no lengthening in the telomeres of participants who took up weight training. The message of the study, says lead author
Christian Werner, is that aerobic exercise is good for people of any age. “It is not too late,” he says, “to keep your cells young.”
Body fat and breast cancer
Older women with excess body fat have a heightened risk of developing breast cancer, reports CNN.com—even if they have a normal body-mass index. Researchers tracked the body composition of 3,460 American women ages 50 to 79, all of whom had gone through menopause and had a supposedly healthy BMI, for an average of 16 years. Of those women, 146 developed estrogen-dependent breast cancer. The researchers found that an 11-pound increase in whole-body fat mass was linked to a 35 percent increased risk of contracting the disease. A similar fat mass increase in
the torso was linked to a 56 percent rise in risk. An 11-pound mass increase was also connected to a higher risk of invasive breast cancer: 28 percent for wholebody weight gain, and 46 percent for
an increase in torso fat. BMI is calculated through a formula involving height and weight, and doesn’t factor in fat. But “it makes sense that if you have excess fat, you will also have increased inflammation and elevated cancer risk, even if BMI is normal,” says lead author Andrew Dannenberg, a cancer specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine.