Healthy foods or exercise alone are not enough to prevent chronic disease, new research shows. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t beat the cost of a poor diet, and healthy eating alone won’t prevent disease.
Most people know that exercising and eating well are critical components of overall health. but a large published study this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that going to the gym won’t counteract the consequences of eating high-fat foods, and that kale may not cancel out sedentary habits.
“Sensational headlines and misleading advertising of exercise regimens to lure consumers into the idea of ’exercising to eat what they want’ have fueled the circulation of the myth that ‘exercise beats a bad diet,'” they wrote. the study authors.
Previous animal studies as well as a few humans have backed this up, suggesting that, at least in the short term, strenuous exercise can counteract the effects of overeating.
So an international team of researchers looked at data from nearly 350,000 participants collected from the UK Biobank, a huge medical database with health information on people in Britain, and followed it up over a period of a decade. The study participants, with a median age of 57, were healthy at the start of the study, meaning they had not been diagnosed with conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer or chronic pain.
Analyzing self-reported questionnaires, the experts broke down people’s diets by quality. For example, high-quality diets had at least 4.5 cups of fruits and vegetables per day, two or more servings of fish per week, fewer than two servings of processed meat per week, and no more than five servings of red meat per week. week. The study did not measure discretionary foods such as soft drinks or desserts, said Melody Ding, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
The researchers also measured activity levels using responses to another questionnaire that asked about the total minutes participants spent walking and engaging in moderate physical activity, such as carrying light loads or cycling at a steady pace, and vigorous physical activity which lasted more than 10 minutes at a constant rate. weather. The authors wrote that it was the first study to examine diet and exercise together with overall mortality and specific fatal diseases, such as cancer.
Not surprisingly, people with higher levels of physical activity and better quality diets had the lowest mortality risk. Overall levels of physical activity were associated with a lower risk of mortality, but those who engaged in regular vigorous exercise, the kind that makes you sweat, had a particularly lower risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease. And even 10 to 75 minutes a week made a difference.
Regardless of your diet, Dr. Ding said, “physical activity is important. And whatever your physical activity, diet is important.”
“Any amount of exercise is protective,” said Salvador Portugal, a sports health expert and assistant professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Langone Health, who was not involved in the study. But you can’t rely solely on your training to maintain good health, he added.
These findings underscore what many doctors have seen in practice, said Dr. Tamanna Singh, co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Sports Cardiology, who was not involved in the study. For example, she said, there are many components to heart health, and “optimizing one thing won’t necessarily improve your cardiovascular risk.”
She sees patients who classify themselves as amateur or professional athletes and are surprised when they experience cardiovascular events, she said, regardless of their diet. “They often come to me after an event and say, ‘I work out a lot. Why did I have a heart attack?’”
On the other hand, even those on the most nutritious diets in the study fared considerably worse without some kind of regular exercise regimen.
That doesn’t mean people can’t treat themselves after exercise, Dr. Singh said. (She’s also a marathon runner and looks forward to nachos after a long run.) enough.”
The study highlights the importance of looking at food and exercise as components of holistic health, Dr. Ding said, rather than calculating how many miles a cookie can “pay off.”
“It’s not just about burning calories,” he said. “We need to change that thinking.”
