NEWS ABOUT EXERCISE FOR HEART HEALTH
The New York Times published "How Much Exercise Do You Need for Better Heart Health?" on February 17, 2021, reporting on encouraging and important recent extensive British research. The essence of the article is quoted here. A link to the full article appears below. A link to the original study is also included below. One reason the research is so important is because it is based entirely on objective evaluations without relying on participants' self reporting, which is often inaccurate. Passages underlined are my emphasis.
Article excerpts:
"If you want a healthy heart, the more you exercise, the better, according to an encouraging new study of the links between physical activity and cardiovascular disease. It finds that people who often exercise and stay active are much less likely to develop heart disease than people who rarely move, whether that exercise consists of a few minutes a day of jogging or multiple hours a week of walking.
"The large-scale study, which relied on objective data about exercise from more than 90,000 adults (from the U.K. Biobank), bolsters the growing evidence that almost any amount of physical activity seems to be good for cardiovascular health, with no apparent upper limit to the benefits."
"The U.K. Biobank is an impressively large database of health and lifestyle information about more than 500,000 adult men and women in the United Kingdom. Beginning in 2006, these volunteers provided blood, urine and saliva samples for genetic and medical testing, answered lengthy questionnaires about their lives and completed full health and medical screenings. More than 100,000 of them also agreed to wear activity trackers for a week, to carefully measure how much they moved."
"To no one’s surprise, being active was protective against heart disease. People in the least-active group, who rarely walked around or formally exercised, were more than twice as likely to have heart disease now as the most-active men and women. Just moving from the least-active group to the not-quite-as-inactive group dropped the risk of heart disease by almost 30 percent, even when the researchers controlled for body composition, smoking, socioeconomic status and other factors.
"The researchers also found no upper limit to the benefits. The men and women who moved the most, walking as much as 1,100 minutes a week, or more than two hours a day (a total that included both their actual exercise and everyday activities like grocery shopping or doing housework), while also often working out intensely for 50 minutes or more a week, showed no increased risk for heart problems. Instead, this group enjoyed the greatest risk reductions, with both men and women showing about equal benefits.
"The results “provide even stronger evidence than has been available previously” that “physical activity, including vigorous physical activity, is important for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Dwyer says. The benefits were “about double what had been found with most self-report studies."
"The large-scale study, which relied on objective data about exercise from more than 90,000 adults (from the U.K. Biobank), bolsters the growing evidence that almost any amount of physical activity seems to be good for cardiovascular health, with no apparent upper limit to the benefits."
"The U.K. Biobank is an impressively large database of health and lifestyle information about more than 500,000 adult men and women in the United Kingdom. Beginning in 2006, these volunteers provided blood, urine and saliva samples for genetic and medical testing, answered lengthy questionnaires about their lives and completed full health and medical screenings. More than 100,000 of them also agreed to wear activity trackers for a week, to carefully measure how much they moved."
"To no one’s surprise, being active was protective against heart disease. People in the least-active group, who rarely walked around or formally exercised, were more than twice as likely to have heart disease now as the most-active men and women. Just moving from the least-active group to the not-quite-as-inactive group dropped the risk of heart disease by almost 30 percent, even when the researchers controlled for body composition, smoking, socioeconomic status and other factors.
"The researchers also found no upper limit to the benefits. The men and women who moved the most, walking as much as 1,100 minutes a week, or more than two hours a day (a total that included both their actual exercise and everyday activities like grocery shopping or doing housework), while also often working out intensely for 50 minutes or more a week, showed no increased risk for heart problems. Instead, this group enjoyed the greatest risk reductions, with both men and women showing about equal benefits.
"The results “provide even stronger evidence than has been available previously” that “physical activity, including vigorous physical activity, is important for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Dwyer says. The benefits were “about double what had been found with most self-report studies."
Published June 27, 2021