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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Fitness is still the Key to Live Longer! People who are obese or overweight are likely prone to health issues like heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, stroke and so on. However, a paper published in Journal of the American Medical Association on December 4, 2007 showed that men and women who were fit but were overweight or obese had a lower death risk than those of normal weight but with low fitness levels. In order to examine how physical fitness and body fat affected death rates, about 2,600 people of age 60 and above were tracked over a period of over 12 years by the researchers from the University of South Carolina. It was found that those in the lowest fifth in terms of fitness had a death rate 4 times higher than participants ranked in the top fifth for fitness. In other words, fitness did provide protection against mortality in the participants, whether they were of normal weight, overweight or obese. Obviously, sedentary lifestyles of the people in the United States and many other countries have caused the obesity rate to remain high. No doubt, obesity should not be ignored, but focusing entirely on obesity and forgetting the activity and fitness portion are also not desirable. This is the advice from the researchers.
In assessing the fitness, treadmill test was used to see how long the participants could walk while the treadmill’s incline increased. Their body mass index, waist circumference and body fat percentage were also measured. Even with some effort to improve physical activity could actually provide health benefits, as indicated in the study. For example, participants in the bottom fifth in terms of fitness were about 2 times more likely to die than those in the next fifth. Nevertheless, obese or overweight persons should not feel that they are useless to be physical active. Neither should they require drastic steps. What they need to do is very simple: start taking 3 10-minute walks a day (or 30 minutes a day) and 5 times a week. Such activity obviously would not help them lose a large amount of weight, but it would definitely help them to be much healthier, according to the researchers. Meanwhile, they should never ignore to adopt a healthy diet including lots of fruit, vegetables and whole grains. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in United States reveals that more than a third of Adults in United States are obese. Moreover, CDC also identifies obesity as a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer and the most common form of diabetes. In the meantime, CDC reports that half of adults do not have regular physical exercise, and stresses that exercise would reduce the risk of dying of coronary heart disease, as well as the risk for stroke, colon cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure.
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