Covert Bailey, in his excellent book Fit or Fat (published way back in the 1990s) concluded that exercise was the most important variable in weight loss/maintenance and fitness. Clearly the popular press and many (if not most) diet programs and experts place the emphasis on food and calories, and mention little about exercise. My personal experience, collected through my 6 decades of life, supports Covert's exercise emphasis; it is a fact that with proper exercise, metabolic and other system-wide changes occur in the body that are huge. I believe that most "experts" and diet gurus (and companies) emphasize food and calories because they know the average American either does not want to exercise or does not have the time. They also make a greater profit by selling their food-related programs and supplements to a public that is becoming more and more convinced that exercise plays little (if any) role in health and weight management.
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| One of the Fit or Fat covers |
I'm not saying dieting and eating correctly are useless. I say that the most critical factor in health and weight maintenance is exercise.
In Fit or Fat, the author states that regular aerobic exercise makes a change in the working muscles at the cellular level that cause them to "burn" fat more easily, even when not exercising. However, he fails to identify the detailed process and states that he doesn't want to bore us with the science. I have always wished he would have "bored" us with a little more of the science in this particular chapter! However, the change in the "muscle chemistry" he described is really quite well documented with other sources. In a nutshell, regular aerobic exercise, when done long enough and frequently enough, proliferates Mitochondria.
Here is a simple definition of Mitochondria from the Free Dictionary Dot Com:
A spherical or elongated organelle in the cytoplasm of nearly all eukaryotic cells, containing genetic material and many enzymes important for cell metabolism, including those responsible for the conversion of food to usable energy. Also called chondriosome.
Here is a supplemental note from Biology Online:
They produce large amounts of energy through oxidative phosphorylation of organic molecules during cellular respiration. That is, they are capable of using glucose and oxygen to produce energy (and releasing carbon dioxide and water in the process) for use in many metabolic processes. Thus, it is not surprising to find several mitochondria in high energy-requiring cells, such as muscle cells.
They are semi-autonomous, self-reproducing organelles because they contain their own genome. In fact, their DNA has become an important tool in tracking genetic histories since their genetic material is present in only one copy, and does not recombine in reproduction.
According to the endosymbiotic theory, mitochondria might have been the remnants of early bacteria engulfed by ancient eukaryotic cells a billion years ago that might have evolved and become energy-yielding structures within eukaryotic cells at present.
Word origin: from Gk. mitos - thread + khondrion - little granule.
Related forms: mitochondrial (adjective).
Also known as: chondriosome."
To simplify, Mitochondria are in charge of taking food energy, from Fatty Acids and Glucose, and transforming it into ATP (adenosine triphosphate), a nucleotide that is further broken down and used as the energy source for all metabolic functions.
What does this mean to those of us that want to get a grip on our health and weight? Plenty. The amount of Mitochondria in a cell is utterly dependent on its need. In a muscle cell, there can be thousands; in a hair cell, a few. They proliferate based on energy need. Therefore, again a simplification, the more we exercise, and the higher the energy needs of the used muscles, the higher the number of Mitochondria in the muscle cell. And the bonus, the point of the discussion really, is that Mitochondria are never at rest. Once a huge number of Mitochondria are present in a cell because of increased exercise, they continue to turn fatty acids and glucose into ATP when the muscle is at rest. This translates to an elevated metabolism, or the ability to burn fat when we are at rest.
After about 7 days of inactivity, the Mitochondria begin to decrease in numbers and the metabolism begins to slow down. With continued aerobic exercise, the amount of Mitochondria is maintained.
According to a number of reliable sources, the proliferation of Mitochondria plays a key role in not only weight control and health, but also in drastically reduced rates of type 2 Diabetes.
I plan on continuing discussion on Mitochondria in the coming weeks at the ol' blog here, including personal experience, as I study this through. Meanwhile feel free to "Google" mitochondria and do some research for yourselves!
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