Yes, Running is Good For You
This mouse will live longer and look better than her lazy cousin!
In the continuing debate on whether running is helping or harming you, we turn to a recent article by Gretchen Reynolds, over at the NY Times Well blog.
Building on previous animal studies, researchers at McMaster University studied the skin of volunteers and found that people who got regular exercise had skin that appeared younger at a cellular level.
To see if the difference was truly due to exercise and not some other factor, the researchers put a group of sedentary volunteers on an exercise program and examined their skin before and after.
“I don’t want to over-hype the results, but, really, it was pretty remarkable to see,” said Dr. Tarnopolsky (the principle investigator), himself a middle-aged exerciser. Under a microscope, the volunteers’ skin “looked like that of a much younger person, and all that they had done differently was exercise.”
Of course, the skin they were looking at was hidden from the sun beneath the volunteers’ running shorts, so there is nothing to indicate that exercise can protect your face from the ravages of the sun. For that, you should probably continue to wear sunscreen.