Putting It All Together: EXERCISE ISN'T MAGIC -- BUT DO IT!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Doctors harp on exercise and this is the last time I’ll harp on it at length, too!

Despite the harping – or in my case, perversely because of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.

Even so, as I read more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.

So I dug into the sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird thing…” kind of meme.

10) “The complicated nature of the physical activity variable, combined with lack of knowledge regarding possible biological mechanisms operating between physical activity and cancer, warrants further studies including controlled clinical randomized trials.”

Translation?

We haven’t got a good, clear idea of why exercise makes some kind of difference because we can’t quite dig deep enough or look small enough into the Human body to really understand this.

It seems clear that we know a few things: exercise gets rid of fat cells that make estrogen and estrogen drives cancer cell growth; exercise makes insulin more effective; exercise reduces the amount of leptin (which gives cells more cancer receptors) in your blood because you have fewer fat cells to make it; exercise suppresses the production of LH, FSH and “other ovarian hormones” like estrogen and progestogens. At MUCH lower levels, exercise can mimic the effect of the anti-cancer drug, tamoxifen; exercising means that more fat is metabolized and you don’t need as MUCH of the hormone to do the work of fat destruction so there are fewer hormones to drive cancer cell growth; exercise decreases the markers of inflammation; exercise boosts the immune system by circulating more wbcs and T cells, lowers the chemicals that cause swelling, lowers the number of fat cells which make estrogen which strengthens breast cancer cells and keeps the immune system working like this LONGER; and lastly, even the exercise of DAILY MOVEMENT can increase the effectiveness of insulin in those who are insulin resistant.

So we know that exercise is helpful in preventing and recovering from breast cancer. I guess that’s a big “duh” for me. Of course keeping the body healthy would prevent and fight breast cancer.

But now we know the HOW – and that’s been my goal all along!

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