What’s the ‘poop’? Exercise and eating right really matter

When I struggle to start an article — as I am doing right now — it’s not from a lack of good material.

It’s because I want you to receive the maximum benefit from that material, and I realize that if the beginning of an article fails to capture your attention and you fail to keep reading, you’ll receive no benefit at all. Absolutamente nada, senor.

The problem today: I’m preoccupied with a study about marathon runners and their fecal matter that serves as further proof that eating well and exercising regularly benefits your well-being. But I know that not every reader is exactly enthralled by long-distance running.

Or, for that matter, foul-smelling excrement.

So please, even if you find a one-mile jog as repulsive as the vile stuff in the disposable diaper, picture yourself as the runner in the following story and read it in its entirety. The most important parts of it really do apply to you.

**********

You know that having goals helps you exercise on those days when the motivation to do so is a bit lacking. What you didn’t know until last summer is that — for your age and the amount of time you’re willing to commit — you’re really a pretty good distance runner, despite having absolutely hated those timed runs that your high school field hockey coach made the team do during summer practices years ago.

That’s why beating the goal time your girlfriend who ran cross-country in high school had for herself in the local 5k race last spring, 25:06, the equivalent of averaging 8 minutes per mile, was such a pleasant surprise to you. It’s also why you have been running more and have a new goal.

In an upcoming race that’s a bit hillier and double the distance of your first one, you want to run even a little bit faster, which means clocking a time just under 50 minutes.

**********

So how amazing would it be to absolutely smash that goal time by running six and a half minutes faster, 43:30? Not that amazing at all, really — if the study done at Harvard University with lab mice and marathoners’ fecal matter and published this July by the journal Nature Medicine is accurate.

And if it is accurate, it means that outstanding athletic feats, such as improving your best running race time by 13 percent, could result not from changes in your training but changes in your gut bacteria.

Initially, Jonathan Scheiman, the lead researcher of the study, procured stool samples from Boston Marathon participants before and after the race. When these samples were compared with samples from non-runners, they weren’t dramatically different, except the marathoners had far more of one group of bacteria after they ran the race: veillonella.

According to an article written by Jonathan Lambert for National Public Radio, even though he was doing postdoctoral research at that time, Schmeiman needed to read up on veillonella to understand the significance of the increased amount of it in the post-race stools. He learned that it’s a bacteria that feeds on lactate, an acid the body produces in muscle cells and red blood cells during intense exercise.

That lead to Scheiman and his associates to extract the veillonella from the marathoners’ stool samples, inject it into lab mice, and then have the mice run to exhaustion against mice injected with another strain of gut bacteria.

The average difference in the mice’s times created the sort of improvement runners dream about: the equivalent of bettering your best time in a 10k by six and a half minutes.

Add this result to prior studies that showed exercise in general changes the types of bacteria in the colon, that the microbiome of athletes differs positively from non-athletes, and that more healthy bacteria were found in lean individuals than a control group after a six-week exercise program, and it’s easy to argue that exercise does far more good for your belly than reduce its circumference.

Moreover, the Harvard study accentuates an opinion of mine that I have shared with you frequently: that eating is never “neutral.” That every time you consume food or beverage you are either helping or hurting your health — and that the helping or the hurting doesn’t end after digestion.

Since the prospect of running a faster 10k time may not motivate you to improve or fine tune your diet, consider the possible consequences of having too much harmful gut bacteria.

Bad gut bacteria have been linked to weight gain, high cholesterol levels, high triglyceride levels, blocked arteries, heart disease, stroke, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel syndrome, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, poor brain health, depression, and other mental health disorders.

Conversely, good gut bacteria — besides improving endurance athletic performance — reduce the incidence of all the aforementioned as well as strengthen the immune system and reduce the incidence of certain cancers, including leukemia.