Exercise Can Slow Aging By Nine Years

Exercise, actually lots of exercise, can slow your body’s biological aging by as much as nine years. That’s the verdict of researchers at Brigham Young University, who looked at the length of telomeres (nucleotide endcaps of our chromosomes that correlate with age) in 5,823 adults who participated in the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, one of the few indexes that includes telomere length values for study subjects. The researchers then correlated telomere length with 62 activities participants might have engaged in over a 30-day window. A Brigham Young University news release reports that the researchers found that the shortest telomeres came from sedentary people—they had 140 base pairs of DNA less at the end of their telomeres than highly active folks. Surprisingly, they also found that there was no significant difference in telomere length between those with low or moderate physical activity and the sedentary people. So what exactly does it take to be “highly active”? To be highly active, the study required women had to do 30 minutes of jogging per day, and men had to jog for 40 minutes, five days a week.

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