With its positive impact on the bones, the muscles, the brain, and a person’s weight management, exercise is one of the healthiest activities that you can do. And not only does it offer improvement on the body, as regular exercise also lowers the risk of developing deadly diseases, such as cancer.
According to a literature review of an international group of exercise oncologists last fall, exercise lowers the risk of developing different types of cancer by 10 to 25 percent. But they weren’t sure as to how exercise can lower the risk of developing the disease.
There are plenty of theories involving things like hormone levels, blood sugar, chronic inflammation, and oxidative stress, but no one has put all the pieces together.
Now, a new theory has been proposed by a group led by Peter Biro of Deakin University in Australia. The opinion piece can be found in the journal Trends in Science.
Biro and his colleagues propose a new theory in which the link between exercise and cancer is explained by what they call “energetic capacity.” In short, fit people are able to ramp up and sustain high levels of energy consumption, which gives them the ability to mount a more robust immune response when cancer cells attack and also helps them to withstand the energy-sapping effects of tumors that do get a foothold.
More details about this over at Outside Online.
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