Ride your bicycle and jack-in some Autophagy.

Autophagy: a self-eating (yum) process by which cells recycle their constituents; self-cannibalism.

A paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre has determined what it is about exercise that protects against a host of illnesses from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.

Essentially, exercise jack-starts a physiological mechanism known as autophagy.  From the literature it’s hard to know where the threshold of activity starts that jacks-out the mechanism to crank the autophagy response.

The term derives from the Greek for “self-eating”, and is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.   Autophagy is a hot topic in medicine; biologists seem to think it helps protect the body from all kinds of ailments.

Scientists believe it probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients.  Animals that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot.  Most intriguingly of all, its seems that it can slow the process of aging.

Near starvation diets apparently also slow aging and Dr Levine has shown that near starvation diets also jack-start the autophagy mechanism.  The moral of this story: go out and exercise so you don’t have to starve; allows for more beer and wine drinking.  Animaux.

If we survive the Peloton we might live longer than diabetics and common, run of the mill drunks.

Sources: http://tp-apg.genes.nig.ac.jp/autophagy/

Econmist: http://www.economist.com/node/21543129 (where I read an article)

Cannibaux Animaux!