Bone metabolism in response to oat bran consumption and jogging exercise in young males

Background

Adopting a physically active lifestyle along with consumption of nutritional supplementation is a strategy for improving health-related quality of life. We aimed to investigate the combined effects of oat bran consumption and jogging exercise compared to oat bran consumption alone and jogging exercise alone on bone metabolism in young males.

Methods

Forty-seven sedentary male university students with mean age 20.9 ± 1.7 years were recruited. They were randomly assigned into sedentary control (C), oat bran supplementation alone (OB), exercise alone (EX) and combined oat bran and exercise (OBEX) groups. The participants in OB and OBEX group consumed 18 g of oat bran powder with 3.6 g of β-glucan daily for 8 weeks. The participants in Ex and OBEx group performed jogging exercise with moderate intensity, i.e. 55–70% of their age-predicted HR_max, 30 min per day, 3 days per week for 8 weeks. Participants’ anthropometric parameters and bone metabolism markers were measured at pre- and post-intervention. Repeated measures ANOVA was performed for statistical analysis.

Results

In OB group, no significant changes in bone metabolism markers were observed. In EX group, there was a significant increase (p < 0.05) in carboxyterminal telopeptide of type 1 collagen (CTX-1). However, there were no significant changes in bone metabolism markers in OBEX group.

Conclusion

Eight weeks of jogging exercise alone elicited significant effects on bone turnover marker in young sedentary males. Nevertheless, future studies with longer exercise duration and higher dosage of oat bran are warranted to investigate the combined effects of jogging exercise and oat bran consumption on bone metabolism markers in this population.