Excellence Unveiled: Abbie Smith-Ryan

Press play above to listen

Each month, WCHL will feature stories highlighting Carolina excellence from outstanding Tar Heels to share why they’re passionate about their work and shine a light on their important contributions to the community, state and beyond.

Tune in to Excellence Unveiled during morning, noon and evening drive times to hear their stories and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Excellence Unveiled is an exclusive program on WCHL, sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill. You can listen to WCHL at 97.9 FM or 1360 AM.

Read a transcript of the segment below:

Chancellor Lee H. Roberts: Welcome to Excellence Unveiled, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Chancellor Lee Roberts, and it’s my pleasure to shine a light on our talented Carolina community and its outstanding work. This month, we feature Abbie Smith-Ryan, professor and associate chair for research in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science, to talk about her mission to improve health and quality of life through science.

Abbie Smith-Ryan: I am very passionate about improving health and quality of life for all people, with a special interest in women. And I think my passion started as a young, active girl searching for more knowledge, and, as I’ve been more in science, really using the evidence to find more questions that exercise and nutrition doesn’t have to be hard. So really inspired by the ability to make it more translatable and usable in day to day. The hard part is we never have enough time to exercise. And so one strategy that I’ve researched is the use of high-intensity interval training. That’s not because it’s necessarily any better than other forms of exercise, but it’s more time efficient. So, in reality, 10 minutes of exercise at a high intensity can have huge impacts on our heart health in a short period of time. It also can help metabolic health and metabolic function. And so this approach to exercise has really allowed a feasible and effective way to implement exercise into very busy lifestyles and dramatically impact our health over time. I think we’re in a really cool place at UNC that a lot of my work is funded. But I also have the freedom to do some interesting work based on the resources that we have.

I think one of the most exciting projects is the one I’m currently working on, looking at protein or fasting before high-intensity interval training in perimenopausal women, to understand what’s happening metabolically, cardiovascularly and for their muscles — really with this idea of how can we optimize exercise and nutrition to really have an impact on health and metabolic function.

We are about to start one of the first studies with resistance training in perimenopause, as well as a group including creatine supplementation. It will give us some really good insight on how women in midlife, how their bodies change and can change based on different lifestyle behaviors — which I think, and I hypothesize, will be very well received and will have a good impact.

So I think there’s so many gaps, and one that I’m in the middle of is really trying to help women identify and advocate themselves in perimenopause. And really that’s because it’s hard to identify when you’re in perimenopause, and a lot of the symptoms are both brain and body. And so we’re trying to understand when does perimenopause start and what are those physiological changes. I think it’s a huge opportunity because now there’s a lot of conversation about hormone therapy, which is great and empowering for women. But regardless of that, we still need these lifestyle behaviors. We still need exercise. We still need nutrition. And there’s so much noise, and it’s so hard to know what should we actually do. And my research is really aimed at how do we narrow this down into ways that you and I can implement in our day to day — with full-time jobs, as moms — to really have an impact on our health that is not hard and that is effective and that we can still enjoy our health and quality of life.

Chancellor Lee H. Roberts: This has been Excellence Unveiled, proudly presented by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.