The well-known cliché, “You are what you eat” has driven many diets for adults and helped many small children imagine themselves as giant bowls of ice-cream- with legs, of course. A study by a very large group of researchers may add a new but similar cliché: “You become what you exercise.” Even the most biologically naïve recognize that exercise changes muscles, connective tissue, and the cardiovascular system. Some who follow the science also know that exercise benefits brain health. With this extensive study, we can say that exercise affects practically every single organ system. Every system and every organ adapts to the physical training we put ourselves through in pursuit of fitness.
Medical science advances in fits and starts. Many of the advances depend on new methods of measurement and observation. In this case, the growing fields of study that end in “ome” or “omics” has propelled our understanding of our body’s metabolism several steps. This has coincided with advancing computer technology which enables the processing and analysis of huge amounts of data from such “omic” studies.
The “omic” studies refer to our present ability to measure changes in DNA, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and their intermediate metabolic steps. As the steps of metabolism and cellular functioning have been elucidated, our ability to simultaneously measure these multiple steps and compare them across organisms has advanced our understanding by a huge leap. In this study, multiple “omic” fields were combined by bringing in dozens of researchers focusing on their specific areas of expertise, pooling their collective data to understand how exercise affected various body tissues and organs.
By using various omics methods across 19 different organs/organ systems, they found that exercise protocols for their experimental rats produced extensive metabolic changes across all organs. Besides the expected effects, a wide variety of changes occurred at genomic, proteomic, and transcriptomic levels (the expression of genes, of proteins, and of messenger RNA respectively), not to mention the rest. Some of the changes were consistent across a wide range of organs. Some changes were specific to particular organs or small sets of organs.
The researchers are already looking at further research which builds off of this work. For example, they uncovered ways in which exercise lowers the fat content of livers affected by fatty liver disease. They are also now recruiting individuals to participate in a human study for further understanding.
Helping individuals restore and keep healthier more abundant lives requires research like this to advance our understanding. The functional medicine clinicians seeing patients in offices cannot put this kind of research effort together while caring for patients day in and day out. Someone has to put the time and effort into pure research so those of us on the clinical front lines can apply the latest science to the patient sitting across from us in the exam room.
Original Article:
David Amar, Nicole R. Gay, Pierre M. Jean-Beltran, Dam Bae, Surendra Dasari, Courtney Dennis, Charles R. Evans, David A. Gaul, Olga Ilkayeva, Anna A. Ivanova, Maureen T. Kachman, Hasmik Keshishian, Ian R. Lanza, Ana C. Lira, Michael J. Muehlbauer, Venugopalan D. Nair, Paul D. Piehowski, Jessica L. Rooney, Kevin S. Smith, Cynthia L. Stowe, Bingqing Zhao, Natalie M. Clark, David Jimenez-Morales, Malene E. Lindholm, Gina M. Many, James A. Sanford, Gregory R. Smith, Nikolai G. Vetr, Tiantian Zhang, Jose J. Almagro Armenteros, Julian Avila-Pacheco, Nasim Bararpour, Yongchao Ge, Zhenxin Hou, Shruti Marwaha, David M. Presby, Archana Natarajan Raja, Evan M. Savage, Alec Steep, Yifei Sun, Si Wu, Jimmy Zhen, Sue C. Bodine, Karyn A. Esser, Laurie J. Goodyear, Simon Schenk, Stephen B. Montgomery, Facundo M. Fernández, Stuart C. Sealfon, Michael P. Snyder, Joshua N. Adkins, Euan Ashley, Charles F. Burant, Steven A. Carr, Clary B. Clish, Gary Cutter, Robert E. Gerszten, William E. Kraus, Jun Z. Li, Michael E. Miller, K. Sreekumaran Nair, Christopher Newgard, Eric A. Ortlund, Wei-Jun Qian, Russell Tracy, Martin J. Walsh, Matthew T. Wheeler, Karen P. Dalton, Trevor Hastie, Steven G. Hershman, Mihir Samdarshi, Christopher Teng, Rob Tibshirani, Elaine Cornell, Nicole Gagne, Sandy May, Brian Bouverat, Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, Ching-ju Lu, Marco Pahor, Fang-Chi Hsu, Scott Rushing, Michael P. Walkup, Barbara Nicklas, W. Jack Rejeski, John P. Williams, Ashley Xia, Brent G. Albertson, Elisabeth R. Barton, Frank W. Booth, Tiziana Caputo, Michael Cicha, Luis Gustavo Oliveira De Sousa, Roger Farrar, Andrea L. Hevener, Michael F. Hirshman, Bailey E. Jackson, Benjamin G. Ke, Kyle S. Kramer, Sarah J. Lessard, Nathan S. Makarewicz, Andrea G. Marshall, Pasquale Nigro, Scott Powers, Krithika Ramachandran, R. Scott Rector, Collyn Z-T. Richards, John Thyfault, Zhen Yan, Chongzhi Zang, Mary Anne S. Amper, Ali Tugrul Balci, Clarisa Chavez, Maria Chikina, Roxanne Chiu, Marina A. Gritsenko, Kristy Guevara, Joshua R. Hansen, Krista M. Hennig, Chia-Jui Hung, Chelsea Hutchinson-Bunch, Christopher A. Jin, Xueyun Liu, Kristal M. Maner-Smith, D. R. Mani, Nada Marjanovic, Matthew E. Monroe, Ronald J. Moore, Samuel G. Moore, Charles C. Mundorff, Daniel Nachun, Michael D. Nestor, German Nudelman, Cadence Pearce, Vladislav A. Petyuk, Hanna Pincas, Irene Ramos, Alexander Raskind, Stas Rirak, Jeremy M. Robbins, Aliza B. Rubenstein, Frederique Ruf-Zamojski, Tyler J. Sagendorf, Nitish Seenarine, Tanu Soni, Karan Uppal, Sindhu Vangeti, Mital Vasoya, Alexandria Vornholt, Xuechen Yu, Elena Zaslavsky, Navid Zebarjadi, Marcas Bamman, Bryan C. Bergman, Daniel H. Bessesen, Thomas W. Buford, Toby L. Chambers, Paul M. Coen, Dan Cooper, Fadia Haddad, Kishore Gadde, Bret H. Goodpaster, Melissa Harris, Kim M. Huffman, Catherine M. Jankowski, Neil M. Johannsen, Wendy M. Kohrt, Bridget Lester, Edward L. Melanson, Kerrie L. Moreau, Nicolas Musi, Robert L. Newton, Shlomit Radom-Aizik, Megan E. Ramaker, Tuomo Rankinen, Blake B. Rasmussen, Eric Ravussin, Irene E. Schauer, Robert S. Schwartz, Lauren M. Sparks, Anna Thalacker-Mercer, Scott Trappe, Todd A. Trappe, Elena Volpi. Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance exercise training. Nature, 2024; 629 (8010): 174 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06877-w
Thanks to Science Daily:
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Scientists work out the effects of exercise at the cellular level.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 1 May 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240501125227.htm>.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
