Everywhere you turn these days, in magazines and newspapers, in those little pop up ads that follow you around as you browse the Internet, you will see advertisements for, and articles about the latest breakthrough in “anti-aging”. Usually it’s a cream, or a serum or sometimes even a pill or supplement. It usually costs quite a lot and the claims made in the advertisements seem a little far-fetched even to the most hopeful among us. And the results? Hit and miss at best and none at all much of the time.
Before you resign yourself to the idea that probably only painful (and ridiculously expensive) plastic surgery is the only way to really look even a little younger than your official age you may want to hear about a very interesting ongoing study being conducted in Canada.
Another Benefit of Exercise?
Whether we do it often enough or not, we all know that regular exercise offers all kinds of benefits. It improves overall health, helps you remain in the best possible shape, helps keep excess weight in check and it can even improve your mental health and general outlook on life. But keep the wrinkles at bay?
That sounds as far-fetched as the claims made for those pricey serums, right?
However, according to researchers from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, such claims may not be so off at all. To test their hypothesis that exercise could actually stave off the visible signs of aging, they began, as most scientific researchers do, with mice.
Using mice genetically engineered to age prematurely, they split them into two groups; one that had unlimited access to an exercise wheel and one that had no form of ‘gym equipment’ in their cages at all.Both groups were fed the same diet though.
At the conclusion of the experiment every aspect of the health and appearance of the mice who exercised was better. Where the non exercising had graying fur and even bald patches, the active mice had nothing of the sort.
The Research Continues
Buoyed by those results the researchers moved onto humans. Working with thirty test subjects and skin taken from the buttocks (to avoid the variable of the effect of sun exposure on skin) the researchers basically repeated the mouse experiment (using access to a real gym, not a wheel though.) They documented their initial findings in the New York Times as follows; “after age 40, the men and women who exercised frequently had markedly thinner, healthier stratum corneums and thicker dermis layers in their skin. Their skin was much closer in composition to that of the 20- and 30-year- olds than to that of others of their age, even if they were past age 65.”
The research is now ongoing using subjects exclusively over the age of 65. But the results so far have been encouraging enough for more and more people to begin realizing that the connection between exercise and looking younger may be very real. So, if you were looking for another reason to haul yourself to the gym after work, however tired you are, then we think this is a very good one.
