November 15, 2005
You can walk your way to better health Exercise could add 3 years to a person's life expectancy, 2 studies conclude By Carla K. Johnson Associated Press November 15, 2005
CHICAGO -- People who exercise can add three years to their life, and their hearts reap benefits from something as simple as brisk walking a half-hour a day, two studies suggest. "Three years of extra life: It's a very clear message that makes it easy to grasp what might be the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle," said Dr. Oscar Franco, co-author of one of the studies and a researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In the Rotterdam study, researchers analyzed more than four decades of data from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running health analysis of suburban Boston residents. The researchers grouped 4,121 people into three levels of physical activity: low, medium, high. Life expectancy at age 50 for the medium activity group was 1.5 years longer than for the low activity group. The high activity group lived 3.5 years longer. The extra years were lived mostly free from heart disease. In the second, smaller study, researchers examined what type of real-world walking program would improve heart health. Walking for 30 minutes five or more days a week, either moderately or briskly, improved cardiorespiratory fitness. It worked just as well to walk briskly three to four days a week. Fast-paced walking on five or more days a week led to short-term progress in cholesterol levels. The study of 492 sedentary adults was not conducted in an exercise lab but in the real world, where demands on people's time and energy got in the way of their walking goals, said lead investigator Michael Perri of the University of Florida. That led to one of the study's most important findings, Perri said: People who were supposed to walk 150 minutes a week actually were walking only 90 minutes a week -- and still achieving health benefits. The studies appeared in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine.