Scientists in the U.K. seem to have unearthed yet another benefit of exercise: It could make our bodies better at using up certain kinds of fat.
In a new study out this week, researchers found that endurance athletes were much better at burning off saturated fat compared to sedentary people with type 2 diabetes—a distinction that began to emerge in the diabetic group once they began to exercise as well. The research was led by scientists from the University of Aberdeen. They were interested in unraveling a particular biological mystery, known as the .
Studies have found that endurance athletes and type 2 diabetics both tend to store higher amounts of fat inside their muscle fiber cells compared to others, despite being very different otherwise. Athletes are typically at much lower risk of cardiovascular disease than diabetics, for instance, and usually have high insulin sensitivity (by definition, those with type 2 cannot respond to or produce insulin effectively). To get a better grasp on how this phenomenon happens, the researchers recruited 29 male endurance athletes and 30 patients with diabetes for an experiment.
First, the volunteers were injected with small amounts of different fats intravenously and had their thighs scanned via MRI to see how these fats were used by muscle cells. They also had their thigh muscle cells biopsied and had basic measurements of their metabolism taken. Then the volunteers basically swapped lives for the next eight weeks, with the exercise.