THE NEW SCIENCE OF EXERCISE
Ever since high school, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky has blurred the line between jock and nerd. After working out every morning and doing 200 push-ups, he runs three miles to his lab at McMaster University in Ontario. When he was younger, Tarnopolsky dreamed of becoming a gym teacher. But now, in his backup career as a genetic metabolic neurologist, he’s determined to prove that exercise can be used as medicine for even the sickest patients.
“People would always say to me, ‘Exercise? Come on. Scientifically, you can’t come up with a mechanism, so it’s a complete waste of time,’ ” Tarnopolsky says. “But as time goes on, paper after paper after paper shows that the most effective, potent way that we can improve quality of life and duration of life is exercise.”
Tarnopolsky has published some of those papers himself. In 2011, he and a team studied mice with a terrible genetic disease that caused them to age prematurely. Over the course of five months, half of the mice were sedentary. The other half were coaxed to run three times a week on a miniature treadmill.
By the end of the study, the sedentary mice were barely hanging on. The fur that had yet to fall out had grown coarse and gray, muscles shriveled, hearts weakened, skin thinned—even the mice’s hearing got worse. “They were shivering in the corner, about to die,” Tarnopolsky says.
But the group of mice that exercised, genetically compromised though they were, were nearly indistinguishable from healthy mice. Their coats were sleek and black, they ran around their cages, they could even reproduce. “We almost completely prevented the premature aging in the animals,” Tarnopolsky says.
