Self eating is key to exercise benefit

We all know that exercise is good for us. It strengthens muscles, keeps weight down, and appears to protect against diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease. The question is how? A series of recent articles commented in Science confirms earlier suggestion that autophagy, the process by which a cell eats itself, is triggered by exercise.

Cellular "self-eating," which helps cells meet their energy demands, may account for some of the benefits of exercise. It seems that the benefit comes from the recycling of our own components triggered by the energy requirement of exercising. Exercise training leads to more autophagy, which basically means cleaning up your cell and recycling its constituents.

Using different types of mice mutant in some autophagy pathway, it has been shown that autophagy is key to both short and long-terms effects of exercising. On the short term, autophagy-impaired mice couldn't lowers glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, as normal mice do. They showed that this is linked to the relocation of a glucose transporter to the cell membrane, and doesn't happen in autophagy deficient mice. On the long term, fattened mice were put through 2 months of daily treadmill workouts. Unlike the normal mice, the autophagy deficient ones were unable to reverse their diabetes through physical training. Exercise also brought down elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels in these normal mice, but not in the autophagy-impaired mice.
One proposed mechanism links exercise to the induction of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an enzyme that reprograms cells to boost energy production. Exercise training also causes lasting adaptations in muscle, including the replacement of old mitochondria, organelles where cellular energy is generated, with new, fuel-efficient ones.
This reminds me of the old prank that alcohool drinking cleans up your brain by getting rid of the old neurons. So keep running and drinking, it's good for you!

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