Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Exercise and the ‘Good’ Bugs in Our Gut

Exercise and the ‘Good’ Bugs in Our Gut
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

excerpts:

Being physically active may encourage beneficial germs to thrive in your gut, while inactivity could do the reverse, according to an innovative new study. The findings suggest that, in addition to its other health benefits, frequent exercise may influence our weight and overall health by altering the kinds of organisms that live inside of us.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the role that gut microbes play in whole-body health. A multitude of studies have shown that people with large and diverse germ populations in their digestive tracts tend to be less prone to obesity, immune problems and other health disorders than people with low microbial diversity, and that certain germs, in particular, may contribute to improved metabolic and immune health.

But little science had examined the interplay between physical activity and gut bugs in people. So, for a study published this month in Gut, researchers at University College Cork, part of the National University of Ireland, and other institutions, set out to learn more by turning to a group of people who exercise a lot: the national rugby team of Ireland...

For the sake of comparison, the researchers also recruited two groups of healthy adult men, none of them athletes. One group consisted of men with a normal body mass index. Most of the men in this group exercised occasionally but lightly.

The men in the final group were generally sedentary and had a body mass index that would qualify them as overweight or obese. This group was included, Dr. Shanahan said, because the rugby players, although supremely fit, were physically huge, with body masses well above normal. The researchers wanted to compare their gut microbes to those of men whose weight was similar, if not their musculature....

As it turned out, the internal world of the athletes was quite different from that of the men in either of the control groups. The rugby players had considerably more diversity in the make-up of their gut microbiomes, meaning that their intestinal tracts hosted a greater variety of germs than did those of the other men, especially the men in the group with the highest B.M.I.

The rugby players’ guts also harbored larger numbers of a particular bacterium, uneuphoniously named Akkermansiaceae, that has been linked in past studies with a decreased risk for obesity and systemic inflammation.

Interestingly, the rugby players’ blood showed low levels of markers for inflammation, even though the men were exercising intensely. Their muscles were being pummeled but, in physiological terms, recovering well....


http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/exercise-and-the-good-bugs-in-our-gut/

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