Is the guidance on increasing exercise and causing dietary changes overwhelming? I think changing health behaviors is a particularly challenging task when you are sedentary and you are so aware of how appropriate you are.
So I thought that in this column, even small behavioral changes can make a difference.
While still looking at these benefits, what amount of exercise can you get away with doing? The answer depends on how you are suited to first. The lower your starting point from a fitness perspective, the less things you have to do to see the profits.
Therefore, if you are a completely sedentary person, you only need a small amount of exercise to see a reduced risk of the heart. From the starting point of virtually zero exercise, slow cycling or moderately paced walking for 1-2 hours a week may be all you need to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease death by up to 20%. Becoming a more fitter and increasing your exercise amount reduces your cardiovascular health and ultimately reduces your plateau. The profit seems to be the best after completing 4-6 hours of exercise a week. This means that for most people there is no additional benefit beyond this point.
The UK biobank is a useful source for assessing the impact of small-scale lifestyle behavioral changes. It is a large biomedical database and research resource that includes isolated genetic, lifestyle, health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants.
Using Biobank, a study recently published at BMC Medicine found that changes that combine small changes with everyday behavior can lead to longer lifespans. Researchers at the University of Sydney found that if people took the following combination of behaviors, the risk of early death was reduced by at least 10%: Additionally, add 1.6 minutes of moderate to intense exercise per day. Plus, eat half the vegetables per day.
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“The findings suggest that focusing on small changes across multiple behaviors may provide a stronger and sustainable strategy to improve health outcomes than targeting greater changes in individual behavior.”
Interestingly, when they saw individual behavior, they found that significantly greater effort was required to have a 10% lower risk of death compared to concomitant behavior. For example, as an individual behavior, this level of risk reduction required 60% sleep and 25% physical activity, but diet alone did not reduce the risk of death by 10%.
A Chinese researcher who works at the same UK data bank found that catching up to sleep over the weekend could reduce the risk of heart disease by up to 20%. To alleviate the effects of sleep deprivation, people who suffer from sleep deprivation while “sleep” on their days off are well known. Modern lifestyles mean that many people are sleeping at work and at school, and are trying to “catch up” to compensatory sleep over the weekend. And while this habit goes against established sleep hygiene advice, researchers at Beijing’s National Cardiovascular Disease Centre have found heart benefits to those who compensated with an additional weekend shut-eye.
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Separate studies with weekend angles found that having a week of exercise has a similar advantage when you find it difficult to make time for exercise in the week. A retrospective study of over 37,000 people found that people who had a week’s worth of physical activity over a week to two days reduced the same risk of vascular disease as those who spread their activity throughout the week.
And spending a short time outside is good for us. Just 15 minutes a day in nature is enough to boost our mood, focus and physical health.
mhouston@irishtimes.com
