On a cellular level, how does exercise make us healthy or improve our health?
In: Biology
On a cellular level. That is a tricky one. We know the body is made up out of organs, that are made up out of tissues, that are made up out of cells.
‘Exercise’ is something that happens on the level of the organism, it does change the collective health of the group of cells that make up the organism, but not really in a way that one cell can be ‘exercised’ and have a different footprint.
We usually look for parameters in the blood to decide on health, being no high blood pressure, normal count of different types of blood cells, not too much fat in circulation, not too much sugar in circulation, not too much waste products in circulation, enough oxygen etc…
You can compare it to a house, you can’t actually see the people living in the house, but if you can analyze the waste they put out (vegetable scraps or fastfood wrappers?) and you can see which groceries they bring in, you might have a good idea of the general health of the people in the house. Now, if you look at an apartment building, it becomes harder to define the building as healthy, as the guy from 3B is always smoking with his can of bud light, while the couple in 5D just returned from a weekend MTB trip. The same is true for the body, it’s hard to judge ‘overall’ health.
So,… what happens when you exercise. Exercise is actually muscle movement, which needs energy. Energy in the body comes from the food. The body stores energy in the liver and the fat tissue, so when you exercise, you take energy from that. Because you use your muscle tissue, the cells send out a signal that they are ‘heavily used’ and more muscle tissue grows. The fat tissue deteriorates when we burn more than we eat. It is still debated, but generally believed that it is the individual fat cells that reduce in size, and not the amount of fat cells that reduce (that amount is approx stable once you reach puberty).
So, on a cellular level, not too much happens, but the populations of cells, and their relative contribution to the body changes, also their energy streams change.
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