The Biochemical Basis of the Health of Exercise

This publication could not have been more timely with the epidemic increases in obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that threaten today's world and the inherent social and economical consequences.

It is now clear that a gradual decreasing amount of physical activity and increasing consumption of calories and fat are at the basis of these epidemics and related (neuro)degenerative diseases.

Each essay has been written by world leading experts with complimentary expertise in human physiology and biochemistry.

Both the metabolic impairments that occur in the human body as a result of inactivity and disease, and the beneficial effects of exercise in correcting these mechanisms and improving health are described.

As a collective, the essays give clear mechanistic insight into the multitude of enzymes, signaling pathways, tissue - and bodily functions that benefit from relatively modest increases in physical activity.

Drugs simultaneously aiming at so many targets are unlikely to ever be developed, making exercise into a unique and incredibly efficient therapeutic treatment mode. The volume is the best compilation published so far of the hard experiment based evidence that exercise improves human health and wellbeing.

The volume is aimed at all final year undergraduate and 1st year postgraduate students and their teachers in the biological and medical sciences.

Also for the current generation of medical doctors, health professionals and dieticians and for policymakers in public health, this volume is a unique information source, illustrating the acute need for active interference of governments and health agencies to make the current and future world populations as least as physically active as we were 100 years ago.