Exercise

NPR - There are lots of good reasons to exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss. Now, science has found yet another one: It turns out that a regular exercise habit can make your fat tissue healthier. And that, in turn, keeps you healthier. To find out how exercise impacts fat tissue, researchers at the University of Michigan recruited 32 adults with obesity. Half of them were consistent long-term exercisers. They’d been doing aerobic exercise like jogging or biking regularly at least four times a week — for at least two years. The other half of the study group was composed of non-exercisers, but they were otherwise similar to those in the first group in many ways.

“On appearance they looked very similar. They had the same amount of body fat. They carried their body fat in the same manner. They were the same weight,” says Jeff Horowitz, a professor of movement science in the University of Michigan’s School of Kinesiology, who led the study. The subjects were also matched for age and biological sex.

But when the researchers took samples of the subjects’ belly fat tissue from just underneath their skin — known as subcutaneous fat, the kind of fat you can pinch — they found stark differences in the regular exercisers.

“We found that their fat tissue had more blood vessels there, the tissue itself was less rigid. We also found there was less inflammation going on in their fat tissue,” says Cheehoon Ahn, the study’s first author. He conducted the research, which was published in the journal Nature Metabolism, as part of his doctoral dissertation while at the University of Michigan.