Thursday, January 02, 2020

Exercise Changes Our Gut Microbes And Reprograms Your Brain

Anymore excuses not to exercise on a regular basis or to procrastinate on your respective New Year's resolutions!

"Physical activity, the results showed, generated a unique microbiome in the guts of the mice, independent of the animals’ diet: specifically, the mice that exercised hosted Faecalibacterium, Clostridium, and Allobaculum, while the sedentary mice did not. The high-fat diet also caused inflammation in the guts of the sedentary mice, which was not seen in the mice that ate the fatty diet and exercised.  ... They also aligned nicely with a longitudinal study in humans published in 2018 that found lean, sedentary people who exercised for six weeks also developed higher levels of Clostridiales, Lachnospira, Roseburia, and Faecalibacterium in their guts, but those microbes returned to baseline levels when the individuals stopped exercising. ... Exercise might also change the composition of mucus in the gut, which would affect bacterial species that live there, such as Akkermansia muciniphila—a bacterium with anti-inflammatory properties that appears to increase in abundance in response to exercise"

"In October, ... team reported that the brains of rodents that ran had greater than normal histone acetylation in the hippocampus,  ... The epigenetic marks resulted in higher expression of Bdnf, the gene for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). By [promoting] the growth and maturation of new nerve cells, BDNF ... and higher levels of it correlate with improved cognitive performance in mice and humans."


Exercise Changes Our Gut Microbes, But How Isn’t Yet Clear | The Scientist Magazine®: Physical activity, independent of diet, shifts the composition of bacteria in the intestines, spurring researchers to search for species that might provide benefits akin to working out.


How Exercise Reprograms the Brain | The Scientist Magazine®: As researchers unravel the molecular machinery that links exercise and cognition, working out is emerging as a promising neurotherapy.

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