Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

Exercise is the closest thing there is to a magic bullet for healthy aging.

So says our guest on this episode, investigative health journalist Judy Foreman,

author of the new book, Exercise is Medicine, How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging.

Judy says it's not just the passage of time that makes our bodies fall apart as we get older.

It's lack of exercise.

And we can't wait to talk about this with you, Judy.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Thank you.

Talk to us about why you became interested in the link between exercise and aging and how the book came about.

Well, I've been a science writer professionally my whole life.

I've been a science writer at the globe and then a nationally syndicated health

columnist at the globe and a whole bunch of other papers.

So I've always had a tropism for science, but I've also been an exercise in my whole life.

And kind of the two strands came together a few years ago.

Like everybody else, I already knew exercise is good for you, but the science writer in me really wanted to know exactly why at the deep molecular cellular level.

And I found out.

So explain more about that, Why you say exercise is medicine.

It's medicine because it's not a drug, we should say, but it acts all over the body. The body is a very

tightly interconnected system. Bone tissue talks chemically to muscle tissue, which talks chemically to bone tissue.

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