Investing One Minute in Exercise for Five Minutes of Extra Life [Podcast Series]

Dr. Euan Ashley is the Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University.
He is also the author of The Genome Odyssey.

“There really just is nothing that we have in our whole pharmacopeia. If you think about all the medicines we could potentially give, there is really nothing with the potency of exercise. If you think about its multi-system nature, and the fact that you really can improve the health of every system in your body, and that it not only has preventive benefits for health, it has treatment benefits for disease conditions.”

“I'm a practicing cardiologist here at Stanford, and have been for the last 20 years. And so we see a lot of patients, and we talk to almost all of them about exercise, frankly. However, if you think about most clinical visits with a doctor, rather than having, say, time with a sub specialist, you often are getting a 10 or 15 minutes slot, and that poor doctor may be a family practitioner, has 12,18, more patients in the course of a day, and they need to get to the key question that you have when you come in, and they need to give you the best answer. Part of their answer might include exercise but, but just mentioning it is never going to be enough. So I think the answer really is time.”

“But I was also really fascinated by the physiology of exercise, like, how is it that we take our bodies that operate for most people, of course, well sitting in a chair, and then transform that into sort of an engine of movement, and that requires interaction between all your body systems. And I was particularly interested in the heart, of course, in the heart’s response to exercise.”

“But when you have something as potent as exercise for both treating disease, as we've mentioned, and preventing disease, then maybe we should study that as well and work out how it works, and not that we're looking for an exercise pill, but rather it's so potent. There must be things we can learn about biology, and maybe there are ways eventually towards medications that could help people who, by studying the response to exercise and by studying people who are very fit, it's quite likely we're going to be able to learn things that can help people who are much less fit.”

“I was really struck by the extent to which every single tissue changed. It changed completely. Like your body on exercise is just different. And these, it's almost like these were different rats, right? There were different organisms after exercise. And it wasn't, you know, it was just a few weeks of training than they were prior. So that was kind of number one for me, was just how different they were.”

“So our hope is, by sharing the data, we can really supercharge globally the science that's happening at the molecular level around exercise.”

“I mean, it's really my favorite fact of any fact in the world, and it comes up because a lot of the time, and you just made this point well, that people feel they don't have time to exercise. And I get that. And there are lots of ways we can think of helping people answer that question, but, but the way I usually start, which I'm not sure what they think when I tell them this, but, but it's the way I usually start, is by telling them that you definitely have time to exercise, because data has clearly shown that one minute of exercise will buy you five minutes of extra life.”

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