If you exercise regularly hoping to improve your health, you may wonder exactly how your huffing and puffing translates into better health. According to researchers at Sweden's  Karolinska Institute, exercise can actually change your DNA.
 

Previous research has shown that exercise can ramp up the activity of some genes or cause then to be less active, but scientists didn't understand the biological process. The answer may lie in a process called epigenetics. Epigenetics changes how genes operate, but doesn't actually change the DNA itself.  
 

Epigentic changes, says an article in the New York Times, occur on the outer layer of the gene through a process called methylation, which changes the ability of the gene to receive and react to signals it receives from the body.  
 

Methylation changes in reaction to lifestyle factors, including responses to diets and environmental factors such as pollutants, and can influence our health, depending on the particular genes affected.
 

In the latest study, researchers asked volunteers to bicycle for three months, using only one leg — the unexercised leg of each person serving as their own control. Biopsies were taken of both legs at the beginning of the study. At its end, the exercised leg showed expected physical improvements, but microscopic studies found that more than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle tissue taken  from the exercised leg showed changes in methylation patterns when compared to muscle tissue taken from the unexercised leg.
 

Most of the genes affected are known to influence energy metabolism, insulin response, and inflammation within muscles, all factors that play a major role indicating how healthy we are.
 

"Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money," said researcher Malene Lindholm, "we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life."

 

To read the entire New York Times article, go here.