Features
Working Out the Fat
Learning how exercise can help prevent, delay diabetes keeps HHNS prof hopping
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Prof. Graham Holloway studies the effects of exercise on health and keeps in shape himself as a former varsity athlete. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
For many people, the arrival of kids means less time spent at the gym, arena or playing field. Not for Prof. Graham Holloway, who joined the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences (HHNS) last year. Since his wife, Tanya, gave birth to twin boys 19 months ago, he has only redoubled his resolve to stay active and eat well.
Partly, Holloway wants to be a good role model as Spencer and Carter grow up. In addition, an active lifestyle is de rigueur for this former varsity athlete who now studies the effects of exercise on health here at his alma mater. And as if he needed further incentive, Tanya is an exercise physiologist at the University Health Network in Toronto, where she routinely provides advice about exercise and heart health.
Links between exercise and another growing health problem are the research focus for Graham Holloway. He studies the impact of activity on Type 2 diabetes, which is affecting an ever-larger number of people. “It’s a huge problem that’s getting worse and worse,” he says.
According to the Canadian Diabetes Association, more than three million people in this country have diabetes. About nine out of 10 have Type 2 diabetes, which means their body makes too little insulin or uses it ineffectively.
Besides diet and weight control, physical activity is listed as a lifestyle measure to help prevent or delay the onset of the disease.
Holloway studies fuel use and storage and the role of mitochondria, or the cell’s energy factories. People with diabetes have trouble using fat in skeletal muscle. Without exercise, fat gets stored in the muscles and interferes with insulin operation, he says.
He refers to a 2004 study by HHNS professor Arend Bonen that uncovered the connection between insulin resistance and fat storage in skeletal muscle in people with diabetes. Holloway hopes to learn more about these mechanisms, including how mitochondria break down fats for energy in skeletal and cardiac muscle.
His work may help physicians and other health practitioners.
“Exercise has an effect on improving the quality of life,” he says. “People always look for drugs, but exercise has a more potent effect.”
His work involves a range of experiments, from studies of individual mitochondria and muscle fibres to tests of subjects during exercise and aerobic training.
Holloway’s research has developed from his PhD studies here with Prof. Lawrence Spriet and from a Guelph post-doc he held until his faculty appointment last summer. He completed a master’s degree at the University of Waterloo and did his undergraduate work in kinesiology at McMaster University.
He’d thought about becoming a physician or clinician, but after a part-time position at a sports medicine clinic, he figured he’d prefer research. “There’s a never-ending list of questions,” he says — a list that seemed to expand rather than narrow with each successive degree.
Holloway also enjoyed teaching as a grad student. He will teach a lifestyle and genomics course in the fall, as well as a new fourth-year human biology course. He’s also team-teaching a PhD course with Spriet and Bonen.
If exercise is such a potent force, why don’t more people use it to lessen their chances of acquiring diabetes or other ailments? “You’d have to talk to the Psychology Department for that,” he says.
Growing up in Brampton, Holloway played all kinds of sports, especially baseball. He played catcher in 1998 for the Ontario Blue Jays in the American Amateur Baseball Congress, in the same year he was named baseball rookie of the year at McMaster. After playing ball for two years in Hamilton, he switched to volleyball for a year, then returned to baseball at Waterloo.
Today he spends time regularly with exercise equipment — elliptical machine, treadmill, stationary bike — at home in Burlington. He usually gets in a workout four times a week, 45 minutes to an hour at a time. His team sport these days is hockey once a week with other faculty and staff.
At the dinner table, he and Tanya limit red meat, eating plenty of fish and chicken instead and lots of vegetables and fruit.
Does he avoid anything? “I pointedly eat anything. My view on diet is, everything in moderation.”
Having kids has only sharpened the point for both of them. “We’re no longer choosing just for us. We have a responsibility for what we put in their bodies.”