Diabetic? Try lifting weights

A new study suggests that lifting weights may help diabetics keep their blood-glucose levels under control.

Researchers from the University of Michigan say that lifting weights can increase white muscle – the type of muscles found in athletes requiring short, intense bursts of energy – which in turn may help keep diabetes in check.

“We wanted to figure out the relationship between muscle types and body metabolism, how the muscles were made, and also what kind of influence they have on diseases like type 2 diabetes,” said head researcher Jiandie Lin.

Just as poultry has light and dark meat, humans also have a range of muscles: red, white and those in between. Red muscle, which gets its colour in part from mitochondria, prevails in people who engage in endurance training, such as marathon runners. Sprinters and weightlifters tend to have a lot of white muscle.

“Most people are in the middle and have a mix of red and white,” Dr Lin said.

While resistance training in humans can increase white muscle, interestingly, diabetes and ageing also tend to induce a whitening of the mix of muscles.

“For a long time, the red-to-white shift was thought to make muscle less responsive to insulin, a hormone that lowers blood sugar,” Dr Lin said. “But this idea is far from proven. You lose red muscle when you age or develop diabetes, but is that really the culprit?”

To find out, the team set out to find a protein that drives the formation of white muscle in mice studies. After finding the protein, called BAF60c, Dr Lin’s team made a transgenic mouse model to increase BAF60c only in the skeletal muscle, essentially meaning they had more white muscle.

Then the researchers fed one group of transgenic mice a “Super Size Me” diet, causing them to double their body weight in two to three months.

When compared to both a group of normal mice which ate the “Super Size Me” diet and a group of transgenic mice which ate normal diets, the obese transgenic mice were found to be better at controlling blood glucose.

Source: The Star/Asia News Network

Category: Education