Every month, I’ll be highlighting Diabetes research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: I DON’T EXERCISE!!!
Ya know, I DON'T exercise! I don’t have a gym membership, I don’t play pickle ball (nothing against it, I’m just not the “sports” type – I barely notice the teams I pay my taxes to Stadium Support for…I’m not sporty. I’m not gamey, either: I’ve learned to LIKE games, but except for my on-line “word search” and the occasional online Solitaire, I don’t play games as a first choice…)
So, I don’t “exercise”, either.
What I do is bike on the extensive bike trails around the city I live in. During the summer, I end up biking between fifteen to thirty miles a week. During winter, I go by hours – about 4-7 hours per week as trail bike is mounted on a trainer in the basement and I try and ride 30-45 minutes every-other-day. I don’t “exercise” though – I bike because I love to bike. I have four different trails of varying distance (between 4-14 miles) and variable difficulty: a five mile ride has a pedestrian bridge over an interstate that has a BRUTAL incline of about 20 degrees. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s quite a bit steeper than the automotive bridge I take on the return trip! A seven and a half mile ride is mostly on suburban streets and in the sense of difficulty, it’s pretty easy.
But, I don’t “exercise”.
I think I have stuck in my head the old Physical Education ideal of what exercise is – “activity requiring physical effort, carried out to sustain or improve health and fitness.” See, that part of biking is secondary to me. I bike because I love the sense of freedom. As we move into summer, I hit the trails earlier and earlier. When I do my “long ride (the seven mile one above), I have to cross over a heavily traveled county road. At THIS time, it's busy and I usually have to wait for the “perfect moment”. When I reach that same spot in the depth of summer, I can be there at four thirty in the morning – and I just drift across the same stretch of road without a care in the world.
But, I’m NOT exercising! I love the trails I’ve chosen to ride. The image today in place of the usual, is a shot I took on one of my rides; which I would never have seen if I wasn’t out on those trails! But I don’t ride to “exercise”; I ride to SEE things. It’s the same set of trails – about forty miles worth of trails, but the view changes every time I ride!
I don’t ride to exercise – I ride to LIVE. “Angiogenesis is the ability to form new blood vessels, and diabetes not only damages existing blood vessels, it hinders this innate ability to grow new ones in the face of disease and injury.”
This sounds horrific! But worse is yet to come! “SOD3 is an important natural antioxidant produced by muscle cells in the walls of blood vessels as well as skeletal muscle cells. These help maintain healthy levels of reactive oxygen species. We get these species whenever we breathe. The SOD3 tells our body what to do to clean too MANY of these reactive oxygen species out and stimulate the body to make proteins we need to stay healthy. In diabetics, high blood sugar levels result in high ROS levels that severely RESTRICT the making of these proteins.”
My diabetes not ONLY damages my veins, arteries, and capillaries; it also kills the ability of my own body to make proteins to keep me healthy! “SOD3 levels decrease with age and with some disease states like diabetes and hypertension.” What can I do? Do I have to join a gym and run ten miles a day? Do I have to get a weight set for my living room and workout while watching The Voice???
Nope: “…in the face of diabetes, even one 45-minute session of moderate intensity exercise enables more exosomes (submicroscopic packages filled with biologically active cargo, to deliver directly to those cells more of the protein, ATP7A) which can jumpstart angiogenesis.”
Just one session! And if I do more? It just continues the jumpstart! I bike because I LOVE it; but now I can rely on that body reaction to help repair the damage diabetes has done and IS DOING to the blood vessels in my body!
Link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220426101747.htm
Image: https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/339932022_2120679281603971_5456611471299698496_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s206x206&_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=aee45a&_nc_ohc=OMsU-zLHY8AAX-n4chP&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&_nc_ht=scontent.xx&oh=03_AdQdAqhZ8500eGFZybzk2HPhIq634f7anL2Nbuy0Qqa86Q&oe=646A5155
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