Now that saturated fats are good for you and cholesterol is no longer a ‘bad guy’, there is still one tried and true method to improve your heart health that medical doctors and healers of all stripes agree on: exercise.
A new study from Uppsala University and the Karolinska Institute has shown that your risk of heart failure—the leading cause of death—is inversely proportional to the amount of exercise you do. They followed 39,805 people between the ages of 20 and 90—all free from heart failure at the beginning of the study—for 13 years from 1997 to 2010, and compared the risk of developing heart failure across study participants with different activity levels.
People who spent more than an hour a day doing moderate exercise like riding a bike or swimming reduced their risk of heart failure dramatically, by 46%. But doing any exercise at all still had a benefit, even just taking the stairs instead of the elevator or leaving your car at the far end of the parking lot. There’s never been a better time to start.
(Source: Circulation: Heart Failure, August 2014 DOI: 10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.113.001010)
