yes, young animals need to move. and move vigorously.. and too much of day care etc. involves being sedentary, "behaving." Recess no longer exists in most schools. Phys Ed often has the teacher closely keeping control of the class. Some kids really need to move / blow off steam and the rest should probably do it as well to develop muscle and bone. And people wonder why children are obese... often bribed with food to be still.
Maybe exercise insecurity should be a concern.. IMO even young adults under 30 in many cases do not move enough.. (Dancing in bars?? anyone??)
Jackie Gleason nailed it
Weight loss Regimen
then
A BIG PIECE OF APPLE PIE
Researchers are pretty skeptical overall as to whether the human heart can make new cells via stem cells once its mature (https://ipscell.com/2015/01/can-a-heart-fix-itself-via-stem-cells-perspe..., but I don't think there's much human data on children so this rat story might be onto something and the finding in rats that adults don't make more heart cells, but the cells get bigger kind of fits. Even if exercise doesn't make us humans have more more or bigger heart cells, it's good for the heart!
3
No treadmill for me. For decades I ran outdoors every day, sometimes twice a day. Now I've taken to chasing my pet rat around the house. Works for me and for my rat too!
2
I think I saw one of those athletic rats in my apartment, just this morning!
2
Two years ago I went to my high school 50th reunion.
Many of the people were instantly recognizable from my high school years, and many were almost impossible to recognize.
There was a powerful variable at play: The ones who I could recognize were former athletes. They were also the ones who, in general, had not gained much weight.
An "observational," not experimental study to be sure. But it brought home for me a couple of points.
One is that in my high school there were no sports for girls. And there were a lot of women who I knew very well in high school who I could barely recognize 50 years later. Our daughters played on sports teams in high school and continue to be active. I'm grateful for that change.
The other point is that getting people active early in life makes a difference.
And a worry for our grandchildren about how much more difficult it is now to be active than it was when we were children. We rode our bikes to school, and to cub scouts, and to the movies. We had three recesses every day: two of 15 minutes and one of however long we could steal after lunch. We threw a soccer ball out onto a field, divided teams quickly, and ran ourselves silly. On and on. Activity was naturally built into our days. No girls played soccer with us (they would now), but they played hop scotch and jumped rope. Nobody stared into a cell phone.
The study with rats is only one study. More studies are needed.
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As a nation we do seem to be getting fatter. The obesity in states like South Carolina is criminal. It may be attributable in part to all the electronic gadgets people have in their faces 24/7. Even at the gym, they will do an exercise then sit there for the next two or three minutes looking at their phones.
Let me get this straight. Exercise is healthy?
1
Yes, as science develops we hear more and more of the great benefits of exercise at all ages. Yet I get the feeling that in our society consumption of sugar and fat and a sedentary lifestyle have the upper hand over a healthy diet and exercise. Is it because one is much more profitable than the other?
I don't know... seems like common sense. Did you really need to sacrifice lab rats to tell you that? Not a fanatic. Think some use is justified. But for stating the obvious...?
As the article makes clear, it is far from obvious that it's possible to generate additional heart cells through exercise, and that these would persist into adulthood. That's what the study was trying to show, not that "exercise is good for you." It still needs to be shown that these findings apply to humans, but that's a separate question.
4
Knowing how the experiment was set up, with three groups of exercising rats, etc., could you have predicted the outcome without reading the rest of the article?
And while we know that exercise is good for us, maybe such specific results about the value of exercise in childhood will help to motivate society actually act on that knowledge.
1
Being made to run on a treadmill by an Australian scientist is not a known definition of exercise. My LA Fitness does not even have a treadmill, nor, actually, cages.
In Australian gyms,we do it tough!
1
Crib manufactures take note. Design a model with a built in crawling wheel and market it to millennials as the "Bannister Century" model. Guaranteed to make Jr. live past 100 and still be able to break the 4 minute mile.
4
When I was a kid, nobody was driven to school unless it was raining, and that meant actual drops, not just drizzle. I'm glad now that I had to do all that walking.
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I do not get all theses studies aiming to make people include running in their life
For what it’s worth , the most FUN you can have BY YOURSELF is a good run that challenge your heart rate
nothing compares to it
7
I used to love running, but can no longer do so. I agree with you, no other exercise comes close, except maybe riding a bicycle outdoors.
8
You clearly haven’t tried xc skiing yet— the most beautiful and fluid endurance sport! Obviously not possible everywhere, but if you do get the chance and you love running, cross country skiing is even better.
4
I ride a bike outdoors 1 or 2 hours a day. I've never been healthier. I'm 69.
7
Whether or not you believe these results can be extrapolated to include humans, keeping your kids physically active is a good thing.
Except on airplanes.
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Mouse studies do not belong in The New York Times.
4
But apparently RAT studies do.
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It would be great if this rat study does correlate somewhat to humans. I ran a lot as a kid and young adult, so if that will help to keep me healthier into my old age, it's fine by me. I'm still active but not running marathons and such anymore, I inherited my paternal grandmother's bunions :( But I think that whatever age you are when you start exercising, if you keep active, your quality of life will be better than if you are sedentary. It's more fun!
4
Instead of obsessing on whether exercise of the right type increases the number of heart cells, the focus should be on the results of that exercise and its significance. The result is a slower resting heart rate for the simple reason that the heart is a muscle and it becomes stronger with the proper workload. I don't know if a leisurely walk is sufficient, but something approaching lactate turnpoint probably is. Perhaps stronger cardiac muscle is less prone to heart failure?
4
Do we really have to kill rats to find out stuff like this? Or am I missing the meaning of "examined microscopically"? Why is it important to know the number of cells in a heart when we know the importance of exercise at any age???
12
We don't HAVE to kill rats we want to. If you ever had a few colonize your pick-up you'd understand the joy it brings to read of their demise. Die rat, die!
4
As I understand it, there are some human data to support the notion of increasing cardiomyocytes with exercise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4673228/ ("Exercise for the heart: signaling pathways'" published online 23 July 2015).
From that article:
"Over several decades, the concept that the heart is a post-mitotic organ without any regenerative capacity had taken hold [15]. However, more more recent evidence has shown that young hearts have robust growth and regenerative capacity supported by cardiomyocyte division and cardiac stem and progenitor cell activation. In fact, nearly half of the cardiomyocytes are replaced during a normal human lifespan [16]. Human cardiomyocytes retain some proliferative capacity through adulthood, which can be enhanced through physical exercise. For example, it has been reported that endurance swim training in mice induced cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and proliferation through decreased expression of the transcription factor C/EBPβ and increased expression of ED-rich carboxy-terminal domain 4 (CITED4)."
2
While road races today are majority women, my age group m 60-69 is dominated by men. My thought is that when I was growing up girls rarely played sports and cannot now exercise at this level. Of course thankfully things have changed dramatically and I expect we will see many more women in the older age groups.
10
@ Paul Gitlin
Before your time, we roller skated, ice skated; in gym we we played volleyball, softball, ran track, high jumped, etc. Too bad your generation of girls didn’t have these sports - or maybe you just were unaware that they did. And maybe women in your age group are exercising, just not doing road races.
1
The heart is a muscle, both literally and figuratively.
3
Bigger muscles? An enlarged heart is a prescription for disaster...
1
When I was a kid I used to run laps around the outside of my house. I wanted to be Wilma Rudolph or the person then known as Bruce Jenner. I didn't make the Olympics but I still run. Maybe all of that motion back then wasn't wasted.
16
Glad I exercise daily with aerobics, walking, treadmill, zumba dancing and weights to ward off osteoporosis.
13