BATON ROUGE, La. — About 120 scientists from around the U.S. are in Louisiana as part of a six-year, $170 million National Institutes of Health program to study the molecular nitty-gritty of exercise.
Decades of research have shown that exercise is good for people, but scientists don’t know what’s going on at the body’s most basic level.
“Basically, we’re looking to learn which molecules change in our bodies after exercise and which molecules transmit the benefits to the organs and tissues that aren’t directly involved in physical activity,” said Dr. Tuomo Rankinen, an associate professor at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and co-leader of Pennington’s share of the study.
Pennington is among 12 universities and institutions working together to study 2,400 sedentary adults and 300 who work out at least four hours a week. They’ll be looking for people from a variety of racial and ethnic groups. Forty percent of the sedentary people will be chosen at random for four hours a week of supervised endurance training, 40 percent for supervised resistance training and the rest will be assigned to remain couch potatoes.