Exercise found to be equally as important for heart health as diet and lowering cholesterol

A new study has found that exercise is equally as important for keeping your heart healthy as eating a healthy diet or lowering your cholesterol. The researchers found that after a single session of endurance training, there was greater expression of genes that repair DNA damage.

The findings are important to better understand how exercise offers protective effects to the heart. The researchers are hopeful that greater understanding of the processes that exercise affects in the heart can lead to greater drug-free treatments for chronic heart problems.

The researchers studied mice who ran on a treadmill for 30 minutes. They then looked at gene expression of the mice and compared the results with hearts of mice who did not exercise. The researchers suggest that their findings could translate to humans because these mechanisms work similar among mice and humans.
Co-author Professor Stephen Roth explained, “The genes that are important for genome stability are upregulated in the heart tissue after a single bout of endurance exercise. This may contribute to the protective effects of exercise on cardiovascular health.”

The study furthers the notion that exercise is an integral part of heart health.

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