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Younger Skin Through Exercise

By Gretchen Reynolds 
NY Times,  April 16, 2014

Exercise not only appears to keep skin younger, it may also even reverse skin aging in people who start exercising late in life, according to surprising new research.  Read Full Article.

This is an interesting article.  Exercise does not appear to reverse the effects of photo aging, however.  The key researcher in this work is Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of Mcmaster Medical School, in Ontario, Canada.  His group has done a lot of research on the effects of exercise on muscle, bone, skin and other organ systems.

Bad Hair Day?

"Dr. Regina Benjamin, the United States Surgeon General has a new message for American women: It’s O.K. to have a bad hair day.  'Often times you get women saying, ‘I can’t exercise today because I don’t want to sweat my hair back or get my hair wet,’” she said in an interview. “When you’re starting to exercise, you look for reasons not to, and sometimes the hair is one of those reasons.'"

"When researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina sampled 103 black women from the area, they found that about a third exercised less because they were concerned it would jeopardize their hair. Of those women, 88 percent did not meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for physical activity, which is 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise each week, or about 20 minutes a day.

"Dr. Amy McMichael, a professor of dermatology who led the study, said she had noticed over the years that some of her overweight patients would mention their hair when explaining why the gym was off-limits."

For more see: NY Times, "Health Over Hair"

Exercise and Illness

Gina Kolata had an important article buried in the December 25th New York Times: Don’t Starve a Cold of Exercise.   It turns out that two little-known studies that were published a decade ago in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise were so much in favor of exercise that the researchers themselves were surprised. 

There is no down-side to continuing an exercise or training program when one is "down" with an upper respiratory infection. Read this article to be convinced.  See references here: Download Exercise Colds