Nitric Oxide
Nitric oxide (NO) regulates not only our blood vessels but also immune function, energy metabolism, and tissue regeneration. Physical activity is a built-in "NO pump"—just 5,000 steps daily reduce mortality risk by roughly 50%.
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In 2005, researcher Louis Ignarro published a popular science book titled "NO More Heart Disease: How Nitric Oxide Can Prevent and Even Reverse Heart Disease and Stroke."
A clever wordplay, where the two letters NO are capitalized. Here, NO doesn't just mean "no more heart disease"—it also stands for the chemical abbreviation for nitric oxide: NO.
You can claim a lot of things with confidence, can't you? But here's the thing: Louis Ignarro wasn't just anyone. He was the discoverer and the first to describe the importance of NO, especially in our vascular system. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this in 1998. So: the man clearly knew what he was talking about.
Since then, research on NO has literally exploded. Today we know that NO is not only the "vascular gas" that keeps our blood vessels healthy and protects them from disease. It also regulates our immune function, our energy metabolism (metabolic syndrome!!), and tissue regeneration.
For those who see these connections, it becomes clear that cardiovascular disease, dysregulation of energy metabolism (e.g., diabetes), immune dysfunction, and accelerated aging (= lack of tissue regeneration) are closely interrelated.
Anyone truly concerned about their health should therefore also care about healthy NO levels. We published a book on this important topic several years ago. Still relevant today. And this was exactly Louis Ignarro's intention back in 2005.
When Nobel Prize winners and highly decorated researchers bend down to us ordinary people and call out to us in the simplest language, it's because they are deeply convinced that their research could improve or even save millions of human lives.
There are various ways to maintain healthy NO levels. Let's quote from our book (Optimize Health, Boost Performance):
And of course: physical activity. In short: everything that promotes health also boosts NO.
For decades, we've known that exercise increases NO levels, especially in blood vessels and muscle. Muscles need NO to show any beneficial adaptations after exercise. The elevated NO in muscles is also responsible for exercise improving our energy metabolism.
More NO in blood vessels dilates them and increases blood flow. Additionally, it promotes new blood vessel formation and circulation. All beneficial effects during physical activity or exercise.
So physical activity is a kind of built-in "NO pump" that continuously releases NO... when we move. This is what a recent, massive meta-analysis suggests (17 cohort studies, over 220,000 participants), published by the European Society of Cardiology.
In this study, researchers showed: the more steps we take per day, the lower our risk of dying from any cause and from cardiovascular disease. Just around 5,000 steps per day lower the risk by roughly 50%.
At 10,000 steps, it's even between 70 and 80%. The researchers found an even stronger (non-linear) risk reduction well above 10,000 steps.
To be clear: anyone who walks 10,000 or more steps per day reduces their risk to incredibly low levels.
These are ranges that, until now, have not been described to this extent for any other intervention. We're not talking about sport here, but simply about steps—accumulated, for example, through walking.
The researchers emphasize that this mundane everyday behavior might work better than the most modern medications. While they don't establish a direct link to NO, there's good reason to believe NO is involved—as explained in detail in our recent blog article.
Possibly life-saving.
