Recent research shows that exercise benefits the body in different ways depending on the time of day, and it is well established that exercise improves health. Scientists don't know why the timing of exercise produces different effects. The most comprehensive study to date of exercise performed at different times of the day was carried out by an international team of scientists.
Their research shows how the body makes different signaling molecules in different organs depending on the time of day. The signals have a broad impact on health. The journal Cell Metabolism published their findings.
Professor Juleen R. Zierath from the Karolinska Institutet and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center says that a better understanding of how exercise affects the body at different times of day might help maximize the benefits of exercise for people at risk of diseases.
A faulty body clock can be fixed with exercise.
A circadian rhythm is the amount of time cells regulate their biological processes. This means that the effects of exercise on different tissues can be different at different times of the day. The health-promoting effects of exercise can be improved by exercising according to our rhythm.
The team of international scientists carried out a number of experiments on mice that exercised in the early morning or late evening to understand the effect. Blood samples and different tissues were collected and analyzed. The scientists were able to detect hundreds of different signaling molecule in each tissue, and to monitor how they were changed by exercising at different times of the day.
The 'Atlas of Exercise Metabolism' is a map of signaling molecule present in different tissues following exercise at different times of the day.
"As this is the first comprehensive study that summarizes time and exercise dependent metabolism over multiple tissues, it is of great value to generate and refine systemic models for metabolism and organ crosstalk," says Dominik Lutter, Head of Computational Discovery Research from the Helmholtz Diabetes Center.
New insights include a deeper understanding of how tissues communicate with each other, and how exercise can help to'realign' faulty circadian rhythms in specific tissues, which have been linked to increased risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes. The study identified new exercise-induced signaling molecule in multiple tissues that need further investigation to understand how they can individually or collectively influence health.
"We show how different tissues respond to exercise at different times of the day, but we also propose how these responses are connected to induce an orchestrated adaptation that controls systemic energy homeostasis," says Associate Professor Treebak.
There is a resource for future exercise research.
There are several limitations to the study. The experiments were done in mice. The differences between mice and humans are similar, but they also have different characteristics. The type of exercise that was limited was treadmill running, which can produce different results compared to high-intensity exercise. Sex, age and disease were not considered in the analysis.
"Despite the limitations, it's an important study that helps to direct further research that can help us better understand how exercise, if timed correctly, can help to improve health," says Assistant Professor Shogo Sato from the Department of Biology and the Center for Biological Clocks Research at Texas A
Kenneth Dyar, Head of Metabolic Physiology from the Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz Munich, stressed the utility of the atlas as a comprehensive resource for exercise biologists. This resource provides important new perspectives about energy and signaling, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. He says that they show some examples of how data can be used to identify new tissue and signaling molecule.
The University of California-Irvine, the University of Texas A&M University, and the University of Copenhagen collaborated on the study.
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