It’s a proven fact that the right exercise not only maintains your heart, your lungs, your muscles, your bones, a healthy level of body fat and even your intestinal function, but also some more subtle functions, like insulin and your body’s dealing with sugar.

It has been known for more than fifty years that lack of exercise leads to glucose intolerance. However, not long ago research has shown that getting of the couch and start moving, not only maintain insulin function to deal with the sugar, but it also can reverse decades of damage. Insulin dependent diabetics, for example, using the right exercise program, can increase insulin efficiency so much that some patients, who have used insulin daily for years, no longer need it.

In healthy people, the right exercise completely protects glucose tolerance against the degenerative changes in insulin metabolism that lead to adult-onset diabetes. Healthy old men who maintain a lifelong exercise program, have the same healthy insulin efficiency as young men. A high sugar diet, which progressively destroys insulin metabolism, makes it virtually mandatory to exercise if you want to avoid glucose intolerance as you grow older.

Most physicians believe that hardening of the arteries, a degenerative process, is inevitable. Dr. Lakatta at the National Institute on Aging Research Center in Baltimore, is showing in ongoing experiments, that regular exercise maintains arterial elasticity and even reverses arterial hardening that has already occurred.

I could fill many pages citing numerous bodily functions which are maintained by regular exercise. But I will keep it short. Research recently undertaken has revealed the major way in which exercise protects you against all diseases. It started with the evidence that exercise increases the overall number of white blood cells. Followed by more precise findings that moderate exercise increases bodily production of lymphocytes, interleukin 2, neutrophils and other disease fighting components of the immune system. There is no doubt that the right exercise strengthens your immunity. And it also strengthens your resistance to all forms of damage, decay, bacteria, viruses, toxins and even radiation. Closing with the wise words of Louis Pasteur, the father of modern medicine:“Host resistance is the key.”