Ten minutes of efficient exercise triggers metabolic transformations that last at least an hour. The unfair news for panting newbie: The more fit you are, the more advantages you just might be getting.

We all recognize that exercise and a good diet are significant for health, protecting against heart disease and diabetes, among other conditions. But what precisely causes the health development from working up a sweat or from eating, say, more olive oil than saturated fat? And are some people biologically inclined to get more advantage than others?

They’re among questions that metabolic profiling, a new field called metabolomics, aims to answer in hopes of one day optimizing those benefits — or finding patterns that may indicate danger for disease and new methods to treat it.

Dr. Robert Gerszten mentioned that he is only starting to list the metabolic variability between people.

The researchers calculated biochemical changes in the blood of a diversity of people: the healthy middle-aged, some who became short of breath with effort, and marathon runners.

Primary, in 70 healthy people put on a treadmill, the group found more than 20 metabolites that change during exercise, naturally created compounds involved in burning calories and fat and improving blood-sugar control. Some weren’t known until now to be concerned with exercise. Some revved up during exercise, like those involved in processing fat. Others involved with cellular stress decreased with exercise.

Those are pretty wonky findings, a first step in a multifaceted field. But they back today’s health recommendation that even brief bouts of action are good.

Gerszten also said that ten minutes of exercise has at least an hour of effects on your body, and he found some of the metabolic changes that began after 10 minutes on the treadmill still were measurable 60 minutes after people cooled down.

Your heart rate quickly drops back to standard when you quit moving, usually in 10 minutes or so. So finding lingering biochemical changes presents what Gerszten calls “tantalizing evidence” of how exercise may be building up longer-term advantages.