By Ken Reed
A sedentary lifestyle is worse for you than smoking.
That’s the conclusion of a new study published recently in the journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic studied the activity levels of 122,007 patients from 1991 to 2014.
They found a “clear connection” between a healthy, longer life and cardiovascular exercise.
“Cardiorespiratory fitness is inversely associated with long-term mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit,” according to the study. “Extremely high aerobic fitness was associated with the greatest survival and was associated with benefit in older patients and those with hypertension.”
The conclusion of the study is that a sedentary lifestyle (dubbed by some health experts as Sedentary Death Syndrome) is equivalent to having a major disease. The cure? Not an expensive pharmaceutical. But inexpensive cardiovascular exercise. The research was straightforward: The more people exercise the more their mortality rates drop.
As human beings, at a basic level, we’re all athletes. And as athletes we need to move on a regular basis.
This new study is just the latest evidence of that.
— Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Books
