I eat my vegetables, but I’m guilty of thinking you can have your cake and eat it too, as long as you get enough exercise.
So did Melody Ding, Associate Professor at the Charles Perkins Center at the University of Sydney. That was until she conducted the latest study on her.
We can’t ‘outgrow’ the effects of a bad diet, say the authors of a large new study.Credit:Getty
“I’m very active and eat generally healthy, but sometimes I feel like I could ‘chill out’ a bit because of how active I am,” says the epidemiologist and behavioral scientist. “I think many around me share the same sentiments.”
However, when he reviewed the research, he could only find several short term studies. These suggested that it was possible to mitigate some effects of poor diet through exercise, with high-intensity exercise. protecting against inflammation, insulin resistance, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
But Ding and his team wanted to learn about the “interactive effects” of diet and physical activity on long-term health and lifespan.
For a new study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on Monday, they examined the diets and exercise patterns of 360,600 British adults over the course of 11 years.
They looked at how much exercise each participant did in an average week and how vigorous it was, with the idea that we could “beat a bad diet” with more vigorous exercise. And while diet can be measured in many ways, for this study, a “bad diet” consisted of low consumption of fruits and vegetables, no fish, and a lot of red meat, especially processed meat.
Needless to say, perhaps, people with high levels of physical activity and a high-quality diet fared better, reducing their risk of death from any cause by 17 percent. Compared with people who had low levels of physical activity and a poor-quality diet, they were also 19 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 27 percent less likely to die from certain types of cancer.
The researchers explain that diet and exercise have complementary and interactive effects on energy, lipid, glucose, and metabolic homeostatic processes.
