More Bone (and Less Fat) Through Exercise

From the NY Times…

February 2, 2011, 12:01 am

Phys Ed: More Bone (and Less Fat) Through Exercise

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

For those requiring additional reasons to show up at the running path or at the gym in the dreary heart of winter, science has come up with a compelling new motivation. Exercise can, it appears, keep your bone marrow from becoming too flabby.

This idea is the focus of a series of intriguing recent experiments by Janet Rubin, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina and other researchers. For the work, scientists removed bone-marrow cells from mice and cultured them. The cells in question, mesenchymal stem cells, are found in bone marrow in both animals and people, waiting for certain molecular signals to tell them to transform into either bone cells, fat cells or, less commonly, something else.

Read on here.