If you are determined to change your lifestyle and opt for a balanced diet and start doing some physical activity, you will love what follows, since a study found the type of exercise you should do according to your blood type.
If we all start the same exercise routine tomorrow, some will get much fitter, some will get a little fitter, and a few may lose it. Individual responses to exercise can vary so wildly and, as yet, unpredictably. But a fascinating new study of more than 650 men and women suggests that the levels of certain proteins in our bloodstream could predict whether and how we’ll respond to various exercise regimens.
The study needs to be replicated and expanded, but it represents a significant start toward a blood test that indicates the best types of exercise for each of us, and whether we can expect to get more or less benefit from the same training as our spouse, offspring, or others. training partners or rivals. The response to exercise is a topic that should probably be discussed more often and openly than it is. We know that exercise is wonderful for our health. Countless studies show that people who exercise tend to live longer, happier, and with less risk of many diseases than sedentary people.
But those results refer to general averages. If you look closely at the data from the studies, you can find a dizzying array of responses, ranging from huge gains in health and fitness in some people to none in others. (The same goes for responses to weight loss programs.)
Unfortunately, little about our bodies and lives currently predicts how we will respond to exercise, including our genetics. Studies show that identical twins, with identical DNA, can react very differently to workouts, and the same goes for people who are equally lean, obese, or physically fit at the start of a new exercise program. Some, for mysterious reasons, end up fitter and healthier than others.
These puzzles intrigued researchers at Harvard University, Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and other institutions. Scientists have long been interested in understanding how exercise alters the molecular environment within the body, how those changes influence health, and how diverse the alterations can be.
they decided to see if certain molecules in people’s blood might be related to how their physiologies react to workouts. To find out, they first turned to the rich dataset produced during the large-scale Heritage study, which had delved into the exercise and health of parents and their adult offspring. The Heritage study included precise laboratory tests of people’s aerobic fitness, as well as blood draws, followed by 20 weeks of moderate aerobic exercise and further testing.
The researchers now extracted the records of 654 men and women who had participated in the Heritage, spanning a range of ages and ethnicities, and began to thoroughly examine their blood. They focused on the variety of large, complex protein molecules that are created in tissues throughout the body and that, when released into the bloodstream, spill over and start biological processes elsewhere, affecting how our bodies work.
Using state-of-the-art molecular tools, the scientists began enumerating the number and types of thousands of proteins in the bloodstream of each of the 654 people. They then tabulated those figures with data on each other’s aerobic fitness before and after their five months of exercise.
And clear patterns emerged. The researchers found that the levels of 147 proteins were strongly associated with people’s baseline physical condition. If some of those protein numbers were high and others low, the resulting molecular profiles indicated the person’s fitness.
And what is more interesting: another set of 102 proteins tended to predict people’s physical response to exercise. The highest and lowest levels of these molecules—few of which matched the proteins associated with people’s basic fitness—prophesied the degree to which someone’s aerobic capacity would increase, if at all, with exercise..
Finally, because aerobic fitness is so closely linked to longevity, the scientists compared the levels of various proteins related to aerobic fitness in the blood of people enrolled in another health study that included mortality records, and found that protein signatures that implied a response of lower or higher aerobic capacity also meant shorter or longer lives.
Taken together, the results of the new study suggest that “molecular profiling tools could help tailor” exercise plans, said Robert Gerszten, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of cardiovascular medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center. Deaconess, who led the new study with its lead author, Jeremy Robbins, and others.
A person whose protein signature in the bloodstream suggests they might gain little fitness from a standard, moderate routine of walking, cycling or swimming, for example, might be guided to higher-intensity or endurance training, Gerszten said.
However, both he and Robbins pointed out that this field of research is still in its infancy. Scientists will need to study many more people, with much wider disparities in health, fitness, age and lifestyle, to determine which proteins are most important in predicting an individual’s response to exercise. The researchers also hope to go back and find the origin of these molecules to better understand how exercise remakes our bodies and shapes our health. Gerszten says that it is to be hoped that more precise results will be obtained in a few years.
