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If you are genetically predisposed to obesity, there is a type of exercise that could be of particular help. It's jogging. And if that's not your case, yoga comes in second place.
Such are the findings of a study of more than 18,000 Han Chinese, led by Wan-Yu Lin of the Institute of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine of the National Taiwan University in Taipei , Taiwan.
This is a tedious statistic for people trying to lose weight, but body mbad index (BMI) – it's your weight in kilos divided by your height in square meters – is largely inherited. Up to 81% of the variation in BMI between people is explained by their lineage.
This means that obese people, who have a BMI of 30 or more, can thank their genes for a good part of their situation.
But as the mantra of biology is in motion, both nature and diet are included in the final result, and exercise has been shown to limit the genetic effect on BMI.
Good news. However, as Lin and colleagues point out, there are a range of other measures of obesity that are just as important, if not more so, than BMI as a predictor of the disease.
The waist circumference, hip circumference and waist / hip ratio give an idea of central obesity, the spare tire that builds up around the belly.
Central obesity heralds the highly undesirable metabolic syndrome, a series of risk factors for heart disease including hypertension, diabetes, and increased cholesterol.
Lin's team wanted to know if exercise, and in fact which types, could offset not only the genetic risk badociated with a high BMI, but also central obesity.
They have therefore moved to the Taiwan Biobank, which collects gene and lifestyle data from more than 20,000 Taiwanese residents between the ages of 30 and 70, including the above-mentioned measures relating to obesity and their percentage of fat mbad.
The Biobank also stores information on participants' favorite regular exercises – defined as 30 minutes three times a week – covering 18 activities such as jogging, yoga, rock climbing, cycling, swimming and a computerized dance game called Dance Dance Revolution.
The researchers targeted the genetic variations among the 18,424 study participants and used them to calculate a genetic risk for each of the measures of obesity. Then, they took into account the exercise habits of each to determine those that could play against this genetic destiny.
It should be noted here that they calculated the genetic risk for Taiwanese, precisely because the existing risk scores established by Europeans might not apply to them. As a result, their results may be less valid for other ethnic groups.
Nevertheless, the jogging appeared clearly winner. Regular stretching of the leg limits the genetic effects on BMI, body fat percentage and hip circumference. Mountain climbing, vigorous walking, standard dancing and longer versions of yoga mitigate the genetic effects on the BMI alone.
And there were surprising losers. Neither cycling nor swimming (or even the revolution of dance and dance) is a brake on the genetic risk of any of the measures of obesity.
The authors give some tentative reasons for this. Cycling is one of the activities that, they write, "generally require less energy expenditure than the six exercises that demonstrate interactions with the genetic risk score."
And for swimmers in the public, researchers point to studies suggesting that cold-water exercise can trigger an increase in appetite and dietary intake.
Their general conclusion, however, does not call for any form of physical exercise.
"Our results show that genetic effects on obesity measures can be reduced to varying degrees by performing different types of exercises. The benefits of regular exercise have more impact in subjects predisposed to obesity. "
The study appears in the newspaper PLOS Genetics.
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