A microbiome-dependent gut–brain pathway regulates motivation for exercise, Dohnalová et al, 2022

Exercise exerts a wide range of beneficial effects for healthy physiology1. However, the mechanisms regulating an individual’s motivation to engage in physical activity remain incompletely understood.

An important factor stimulating the engagement in both competitive and recreational exercise is the motivating pleasure derived from prolonged physical activity, which is triggered by exercise-induced neurochemical changes in the brain. Here, we report on the discovery of a gut–brain connection in mice that enhances exercise performance by augmenting dopamine signalling during physical activity.

We find that microbiome-dependent production of endocannabinoid metabolites in the gut stimulates the activity of TRPV1-expressing sensory neurons and thereby elevates dopamine levels in the ventral striatum during exercise. Stimulation of this pathway improves running performance, whereas microbiome depletion, peripheral endocannabinoid receptor inhibition, ablation of spinal afferent neurons or dopamine blockade abrogate exercise capacity.

These findings indicate that the rewarding properties of exercise are influenced by gut-derived interoceptive circuits and provide a microbiome-dependent explanation for interindividual variability in exercise performance. Our study also suggests that interoceptomimetic molecules that stimulate the transmission of gut-derived signals to the brain may enhance the motivation for exercise.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05525-z

Author-provided access to the article: https://rdcu.be/c1Cfh

Summary thread on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1603061146256551938

 

The keen guys at my school soon learnt to miss lunch on Wednesday before the cross-country run.

So what's new?

 

Among many, many other factors being in play, some people just don't like exercise. Just as some people don't like music. Hell, lots of people don't even like sex. Or other people.

Nothing wrong with that. But the constant need to create a prototype of a normalized human being that must be this and do that has warped people's ability to see that it is our diversity that our strength, the fact that no one likes the same things. What a sad world that would be.

Quit trying to mold people into not-people and pathologizing that being human means being varied and diverse and there's nothing wrong with that.