
Little Exercise, Big Effects: Reversing Aging  - jamesbritt
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/32/11578.short?rss=1
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Alex3917
For what it's worth, cannabis also prevents neuroinflammation, even in
extremely low doses:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uVXs6CY2ps>

<http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/clinical.pdf>

The endocannabinoid system seems to be the main mechanism our bodies use to
naturally regulate inflammation. My understanding is that there is a growing
belief among cannabinoid researchers that our cannabinoid receptors can get
blocked as we get older, and so there may be a need to either supplement with
phytocannabinoids and/or employ various techniques to unmethylate our CB1
receptors. There are a number of folks doing pre-clinical research on
cannabinoids as potential treatments for alzheimers and other inflammatory /
autoimmune diseases using various cannabinoids.

Here is a cool paper about how colorectal cancer seems to result from the CB1
receptors being knocked out:

[http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/turned-off-
cannabinoid-...](http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/turned-off-cannabinoid-
receptor-turns-colorectal-tumor-growth-5233.html)

It's possible that most cancers result from the same mechanism, although we
don't really know yet. What we do know is that regular marijuana users have a
62% lower chance of head and neck cancers, and that there are an enormous
amount of studies showing that cannabinoids can promote both apoptosis (cell
death) in cancer cells and are anti-angiogenic, meaning they cut off the blood
flow to the tumors.

~~~
d2
The problem is that I feel less smart and less motivated for 2 weeks after
smoking a joint.

~~~
Alex3917
Then don't smoke a joint. The standard sized joints that NIDA hands out for
research are 0.7 grams. The amount needed to get this anti-inflammatory effect
is roughly .02 grams, in other words 1 / 35th of a joint. There are also two
different ways that you can get the same health benefits without any
psychoactive side effects. First, you can get high-CBD weed. CBD is a non-
psychoactive cannabinoid that basically cancels out the effects of THC.
Second, if you juice raw cannabis it is basically non-psychoactive, because
without heating or drying it the THCA never gets decarboxylated into THC. Here
are a couple articles about this:

<http://cannabisinternational.org/info/hightimes.pdf>

<http://cannabisinternational.org/info/treatingyourself.pdf>

~~~
roel_v
"The standard sized joints that NIDA hands out for research are 0.7 grams."

Really? That seems like _a lot_. I was a sporadic recreational smoker about 15
years ago, we bought marihuana one gram at a time and that gram would last us
a weekend. Maybe the difference is in THC content; I bought in the Netherlands
where quality is generally high and THC concentrations relatively high in
higher-end varieties, from what I understand (I don't have experience with
foreign varieties to compare it with). Then again, our usage customs are
different from elsewhere in the world, too; we rolled joints out of tobacco
and only sprinkled on some marihuana. When I told that to Americans they'd
look at me as if I was crazy.

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freesciencenow
Paywalls for scientific research are evil.

Here's the full paper: <http://209.20.67.195/misc/littleexercise.pdf>

(See profile for why I do what I do.)

~~~
amirmc
Your profile does not really explain why you do what you do (it basically
repeats what you've said here). Care to expand?

~~~
freesciencenow
As my profile says, "I do this both to help the discussion and as an act of
civil disobedience."

Was there something more you wanted to know?

~~~
wisty
I that really civil disobedience? I though the point of civil disobedience is
you try to take the blame, proving how brutal and unfair the system is.

If you mean "activism, without being an idiot who breaks stuff" then I'm cool
though.

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jamiegull
The 0.7km/week for a house mouse translates to about 7.5 miles/week for a 5'8"
tall man compared to a 10cm long mouse. Lots of assumptions, but 7.5 miles is
way more than the average sedentary person jogs in a week. It's also very easy
to reach for a recreational jogger. Lots of assumptions in there.

~~~
brfox
And animal models of disease (or aging) are much simpler than real life human
biology. One big reason being that lab strains of mice (and maybe the rats in
this study, too) are inbred and very homogeneous - genetically speaking. So,
something which has a big effect in a lab animal might be due to some strange
combination of genes that most "outbred" species (like humans) don't ever
have.

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jonnathanson
As an additional benefit to exercise: cardiovascular health is closely
correlated with mental health and performance, due to the maintenance (or
improvement) of blood flow to the brain.

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m0nastic
My girlfriend just told me about a study that also seemed to show that
exercise can be useful in treatment of schizophrenia (by promoting hippocampal
development).

This appears to be the study (she read it in Psychology Today, which didn't
reference it by name):

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20124113>

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bennesvig
This is what Art De Vany and the New Evolution Diet preaches. Short, high
intensity exercise.

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asifjamil
Interesting article.

I remember reading somewhere the opposite hypothesis. The argument went like
this:

more exercise --> faster metabolism --> faster consumption of your body
utilities --> lower life expectancy

~~~
AngryParsley
Exercise does cause damage to your body, both structural and oxidative.
Fortunately, that damage triggers repair mechanisms which make you stronger
than before. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Physical_exercise>

An aside: Reading this article made me wonder why I tasted blood after
particularly hard workouts. Apparently the heart can pump with enough pressure
to rupture some of the capillaries in your lungs. A tiny amount of blood leaks
out and gets aerosolized. At least, so says this paper:
[http://abughrai.be/Vulnerability%20of%20pulmonary%20capillar...](http://abughrai.be/Vulnerability%20of%20pulmonary%20capillaries%20during%20severe%20exercise%20821.full.pdf)

~~~
sliverstorm
Seriously, how can one not already realize this? You can of course work
yourself to death, but you'd think people would have noticed how much
healthier they feel when they have been exercising, and how quickly they
deteriorate when they haven't.

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ed2417
In rats.

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ristretto
The HN title gives the impression that they reversed aging. They only reversed
changes in memory performance in old mice that are infected with E.coli.

It would be interesting to know how they assessed memory performance - are
they using spatial memory tests?

~~~
amirmc
Good question. Appears that they use contextual fear conditioning to assess
memory.

From the research article: _"We chose to use the immediate-shock fear
conditioning paradigm (Fanselow, 1990; Rudy et al., 2002) as the learning
task. Here, foot shock is delivered very quickly upon exposure to the
experimental context on the fear conditioning day. However, the rats are
preexposed to the context at an earlier time. The preexposures are required so
that the subjects are able to form a 'conjunctive representation' of the
context, so that it can be associated with the shock on the conditioning day
(Rudy et al., 2002). We chose this fear conditioning paradigm because it is
highly and specifically dependent on the hippocampus (Rudy et al., 2002), and
we have already shown that E. coli interferes with memory of this task in
aging rats (Barrientos et al., 2006)"_

