TMFBro (< 20)

Retirement sucks if you have small gonads

March 03, 2011 – Comments (6)

Retirement will be no fun if you're too sick or dead to enjoy it. So while you work to build your wealth, don't ignore your health. 

Along those lines, a recent study has found that mice who exercise can delay the physical manifistations of aging (as reported by the New York Times). The study used mice that were programmed to age faster than normal. One group was didn't exercise, one group spent 45 minutes on a wheel three times a week, beginning at three months of age. 

Here's what the article said about the mice who didn't exercise: "By the time they reached 8 months, or their early 60s in human terms, the animals were extremely frail and decrepit, with spindly muscles, shrunken brains, enlarged hearts, shriveled gonads and patchy, graying fur. Listless, they barely moved around their cages. All were dead before reaching a year of age."

As for those on the wheel: "At 8 months, when their sedentary lab mates were bald, frail and dying, the running rats remained youthful. They had full pelts of dark fur, no salt-and-pepper shadings. They also had maintained almost all of their muscle mass and brain volume. Their gonads were normal, as were their hearts. They could balance on narrow rods, the showoffs."

The article concluded: "The potential benefits have attractions even for the young. While Dr. Tarnopolsky, a lifelong athlete [and the person who conducted the study], noted with satisfaction that active, aged mice kept their hair, his younger graduate students were far more interested in the animals’ robust gonads. Their testicles and ovaries hadn’t shrunk, unlike those of sedentary elderly mice. Dr. Tarnopolsky’s students were impressed. 'I think they all exercise now,' he said."

Protect those nest eggs!

Robert Brokamp, CFP®, is the senior advisor for the Fool's Rule Your Retirement service.