Luke O'Neill

And if you do it for 30 minutes per day, that is what's recommended and the benefits are manifold.

I mean, as I mentioned, various things like your muscle, obviously, lower risk of heart disease, it'll lower your blood pressure, it'll decrease the risk of type 2 diabetes, which is actually a very common condition, of course.

And I guess the reason for this is you're burning glucose.

And type 2 diabetes means a bit too much glucose.

And then the last one is better mental health, which I will come back to.

Now, what about this effect in the brain?

Well, they looked at this closely inside the skull, as it were, using special imaging technology.

Now, it was done in mice.

Now, they often look at mice as models of exercise.

and they can measure things, and they can measure mice on treadmills.

That's where this sort of began.

But they could measure in the brains a real change in the brain happening after exercise.

Now, one reason is blood flow flowing around the place, and that seems to affect the brain.

But in this study, they measured brain activity

using a thing called MRI, which is a fancy machine.

They can look inside the brain.

And they saw an increase in activity in a part of the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus.

Now, there's a mouthful for you.

VMH for short.

It's a specific part of the brain.