Exercise & Health

The Best Medicine

 

We all have heard at some point that “laughter is the best medicine” but, seriously, it is actually ‘exercise’. In fact, there is overwhelming scientific evidence supporting Covert Bailey famous quote: “If exercise were a pill, it would be the most widely prescribed medicine in the world.”

 

Hippocrates (460-370 BCE), known as the Father of Scientific Medicine, is said to have been the first physician to prescribe exercise to his patients. “The Exercise is Medicine (EIM) initiative was founded in 2007 by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) with the goal of making physical activity assessment and exercise prescription a standard part of the disease prevention and treatment paradigm for all patients.” (USA National Library of Medicine / National Center for Biotechnological Information)

 

Regular exercise reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other health problems. It can also help people with some mental health conditions to feel better (neurotransmitters are released, such as endorphins, endocannabinoids, and dopamine when exercising, creating/boosting the feel-good factor and restful sleep). The UK government guidelines for physical activity recommend that adults do at least 2.5 hours of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week.

 

But what is exercise?

 

Physical activity refers to any type of movement which uses up energy. ‘Exercise’ may be defined as structured physical activity that challenges the body, with the intention to achieve goals connected to health and physical fitness improvement. Outcomes, however, can vary widely, depending on exercise type and duration.

 

How Much Exercise Do We Need and Why?

 

“To try to quantify it all, back in the late 1980s, Bill Haskell at Stanford University in California came up with a benchmark to compare exercise against sitting quietly. When seated, we expend about 1 kilocalorie per hour for each kilogram of body mass. Haskell and his colleagues called this a metabolic equivalent, or '1 MET'. For an 80-kilogram person, this resting metabolic rate represents around 1,920 kcal's per day [= 80 MET x 24 hours].” (New Scientist Essential Guide No 16)

​

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends at least 150-300 minutes of moderate or 75-150 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. It measures intensity using MET, which is the ratio of metabolic rate during exercise against that at rest. Different activities have vastly different METs.

 

For example:

 

Resting – 1 MET

 

MODERATE EXERCISE:

Vacuuming – 3.5 MET

Walking – 4 MET

 

MODERATE TO VIGOROUS:

Jogging – 8 MET (at 8km/h)

 

VIGOROUS:

Swimming – 11 MET (fast crawl)

Rowing – 12 MET (over 9km/h)

Running up hill/stairs – 15 MET

 

When exercising regularly, the body is challenged to adapt. Decades of studies have produced evidence showing that “muscles act as control centres, hosting proteins that sense the body’s increased activity and drive widespread changes to deal with the challenge.” Those changes are called physiological adaptations to increased physical challenge. The release of messenger molecules (resulting from muscle contraction as result of falling energy levels or flood of calcium ions) that stream to various organs, initiate a range of responses. Those molecules “might ask the brain to grow fresh neurons [nerve cells], for example, or stimulate bones to get stronger.”

 

Our body gets stronger and healthier due to the process of physiological adaptation to exercise, organically and without undesired side effects, like no other medicine, which makes it undoubtedly “the best medicine”.

​

​

*N.B.: physical exercise must be part of a healthy lifestyle, which must also include a healthy diet and not using harmful substances (e.g. tobacco, drugs and excessive consumption of alcohol).