Though Exercise Can Increase Mood, Its Health Benefits Have Been Oversold.
Moderate exercise can reduce the possibility of diabetes in individuals at risk. Exercise may reduce the risk of heart disease and breast and colon cancers.
While the evidence is mixed, exercise may also provide benefits for individuals with osteoporosis.
Exercise alone will not lead to sustained weight loss or reduce blood pressure or cholesterol.
Exercise has forever been boasted as the panacea for everything that ails you. For better health, just walk for 20 or 30 minutes a day, boosters say, and you don’t even have to do it all at once. Count a few minutes here and a few there, and just add them up. Or wear a pedometer and keep track of your steps. However you manage it, you will lose weight, get your blood pressure under control and decrease your risk of osteoporosis.
If only it were just that simple. While physical activity has undeniable benefits, many, if not most, of its benefits have been oversold. Sure, it can be entertaining. It can increase your energy. And it may increase your mood. But before you turn to a fitness program as the solution to your particular health or weight concern, ponder what science has proved.
Moderate exercise, such as walking, can decrease the risk of diabetes in obese and sedentary people whose blood sugar is starting to rise. That outcome was shown in a large federal government research in which participants were randomly assigned either to an exercise and diet program, to take a diabetes drug or to serve as controls. Despite trying hard, those who dieted and worked out lost very little weight. But they did manage to maintain a regular walking program, and fewer of them went on to develop diabetes.
Physical activity also may reduce the risk of heart disease, though the evidence is surprisingly mixed. There seems to be a threshold effect: Most of the heart protection appears to be realized by people who go from being sedentary to being moderately active, usually by walking regularly. More intense exercise has been shown to give only slightly increased benefits. Yet the information from several large studies have not always been clear, because those who exercise seem to be very different from those who do not.
Active people are much less likely to smoke; they’re thinner and they eat differently than their sedentary peers. They also tend to be more educated, and education is one of the strongest predictors of good health in general and a longer life. As a result, it is impossible to know with confidence whether physical activity prevents heart disease or whether individuals who are less likely to get heart disease are also more likely to be exercising.
Scientists have much the same problem evaluating exercise and cancer. The same sort of studies that were done for heart disease find that people who were physically active had lower rates of colon and breast cancer. But whether that result is cause or effect is not well established.
Physical activity is often said to stave off osteoporosis. Yet even weight-bearing activities like walking, running or lifting weights has not been shown to have that effect. Still, in rigorous studies in which elderly people were randomly assigned either to exercise or maintain their normal routine, the exercisers were less likely to fall, possibly because they got stronger or developed better balance. Since falls can lead to fractures in people with osteoporosis, exercise may prevent broken bones but only indirectly.
And what about shedding pounds? Lifting weights builds muscles but will not make you burn more calories. The muscle you gain is minuscule compared with the total amount of skeletal muscle in the body. And muscle has a very low metabolic rate when it’s at rest. (You can’t flex your biceps all the time.)
Jack Wilmore, a physical activity physiologist at Texas A & M University, figured out that the usual amount of muscle that men gained after a serious 12-week weight-lifting program was 2 kilograms, or 4.4 pounds. That additional muscle would increase the metabolic rate by only 24 calories a day.
Physical activity by itself, in the absence of weight loss, has not been shown to reduce blood pressure. Nor does it make much difference in cholesterol levels. A decrease in weight can decrease blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but if you want to lose weight, you have to diet as well as exercise. Exercise alone has not been shown to bring sustained weight loss.Just ask Steven Blair, a physical activity researcher at the University of South Carolina. He runs every day and even runs marathons. But, he adds, I was short, fat and bald when I started running, and I’m still short, fat and bald. Weight control is difficult for me. I fight the losing battle.
The difficulty, Dr. Blair says, is that it’s much easier to eat 1,000 calories than to burn off 1,000 calories with exercise. As he relates, An old football coach used to say, ‘I have all my assistants running five miles a day, but they eat 10 miles a day.’
There can be moments you really should investigate the quality of an individual, especially if you need to trust said person with your well being (such as a lawyer). Maybe you are looking for someone’s criminal records or maybe you’d like to find someone’s civil records? Our tools can help you. This supplied info can possibly save you a lot of time and money.
Are you searching for one way links to climb your site up the Google ladder to the top slots so that you’ll get huge amounts of web site traffic? Just sign up for you free membership now!