MU Exercise Physiology Professor Frank Booth doesn’t just talk the talk on exercise. He runs the run. His regiment, when it allows, is to jump on treadmill in his office — yes, in his office — twice a day for high-intensity interval training.
Booth also regularly runs the 1.3-mile route from his home to his office, using his car only for big errands like trips to the grocery store.
And sometimes, his dog – a lab-boxer mix named Run — yes, Run — comes along for the jog.
But Booth’s hobby is indiscernible from his work life. His main goal through his research is to inform people of the true danger of not getting enough exercise. And in the early 2000's he coined a term in for this very risk: sedentary death syndrome.
Booth argues that 35 chronic conditions – including many types of cancer, diabetes and heart disease – may be caused or amplified by physical inactivity.
“I’m really passionate about doing this because I think that a lot of people in the United States are going to have many chronic diseases and get unable to be able to see their grandchildren because their quality of life will be so low and they’ll die early,” Booth said.
Since early 2009, Booth has selectively bred a population of rats based on their natural tendencies to run on exercise wheels in their cages. The selection process is meticulous. In Booth’s lab, he breeds rats based on phenotype. With each new generation, he separates the rats into two groups — high and low runners. The rats who run the most in a six-day period then mate with the other high-runners. The low runners do the same.
The product? Well, now that he’s in the fifteenth generation of breeding, he has rats that are super-runners – racking up over 3 miles each night – and others that barely move around at all.
"The driving force for trying to make animals that are lazy and really don't want to run long distances is to understand why there's a lack of motivations for most people in the United States to be sitters and sedentary and not want to be physically active," he said.
Some of the genetic differences Booth observes between the high and low runners are in the reward and pleasure center of the brain, a small area called the nucleus accumbens, responsible for dopamine release. In a 2014 study, Booth found that rats bred to be high-runners increased expression of genes related to growing new, more mature neurons in the nucleus accumbens.
This suggests that running may actually be less rewarding for the lazy rats. However, this is just the first leg of Booth’s research marathon. Now that he’s bred fifteen generations super runners, he can finally study what he calls “the apex.” Simply put — around twenty or thirty years old, we reach a peak in our ability to use oxygen when exercising.
“As you grow up as a child you reach the highest level for your whole life of certain physiological functions," Booth said. "One of those functions is the maximal ability to burn oxygen and make fuel so you can be working at your aerobic maximum.”
And like a car with lots of mileage, our ability to burn fuel wears out, and we gradually become less physically active with age. Booth is trying to figure out what genetic factors contribute to this decline with hopes of pushing the apex back. What he’s found is that exercise alone doesn’t do the trick. Booth’s high-runners, split again into two groups, were either given a running wheel to exercise on, or nothing. Regardless, both groups showed a peak in physical activity at the same age.
The next step? The introduction of drugs, particularly one that ramps up the body’s ability to generate energy. Pushing back this apex would allow people to continue to maximize their exercise potential as they get older, avoiding the serious risks that come with a sedentary lifestyle.
“I think the most important thing to know is you may not see your grandchildren because if you’re really sedentary then your body starts to wear out faster and you can’t do things at maximum," Booth said. "You get tired doing menial things, and that allows these diseases to creep in and make you sick.”
Booth doesn’t have any grandchildren of his own but he hopes that his legacy of working toward a more healthy society will be recognized, so much so that he made a commitment to giving over $1 million of his own money to the university in November in order to support his own research. This money, which Booth saved diligently since graduate school, will also create an endowment to support future graduate students in exercise physiology at MU.
Booth knows some of his ideas will outlive him, and this way, the research he’s started will be able to continue for many years to come. But at 71, he has no plans to slow down any time soon.
