Your good diet is not sufficient. Or rather, you need to incorporate some physical activity.
YOU ALREADY KNOW A HEALTHY DIET is essential for good health and nutrition. Eat well and lower your risk of chronic diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
I try to eat various foods while consuming less added salt, refined sugars, and highly-processed items (including ones chock full of trans fats).
You know the drill: Staples such as cereals (barley, rye, and wheat are examples) or some starchy tubers such as yams. Legumes, including lentils and beans, are not high on my list, but you should eat them for health!
I am most proud of increasing my fruit consumption, even as I have work to do in the vegetable realm. Consume various brightly-colored fruits and vegetables, and you should get lots of vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, antioxidants, and plant protein.
Add in some foods from animal sources (such as fish, eggs, or meat), and you are in line with the World Health Organization’s recommendations for diet.
What is clear is that healthy food alone is not sufficient to prevent all chronic diseases. Getting exercise alone is not sufficient, either. A recently reported study is a stark reminder of these observations.
Diet or exercise alone is insufficient — study design
I plead guilty: I frequently advance the view that getting some physical activity is essential to optimizing your health.
Here is me selling the benefits of walking:
Although I do try to address diet (for example, the perils of too much sugar):
But you already know that physical activity and eating well improve your health. Now comes a remarkable study published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that reminds us that exercise does not counteract the consequences of eating bad food. The reverse is also true: A good diet does not undo the badness of a sedentary lifestyle.
Here’s how an international group of researchers figured it all out. They analyzed nearly 350,000 subjects in the United Kingdom Biobank, an enormous repository of British individuals’ health information for over a decade.
The study participants had a median age of 57 years and appeared healthy at the start. None carried a diagnosis of chronic conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, or chronic pain.
After analyzing questionnaires, the researchers broke subjects’ diets down by quality. For example, those defined as having a high-quality diet consumed at least 4.5 cups of fruit daily, two or more servings of fish weekly, and no more than five servings of red meat per week. Interestingly, the study did not track discretionary foods such as desserts or soft drinks.
The researchers also tracked physical activity, querying subjects about the total minutes spent walking and engaging in moderate physical activity (such as biking at a steady pace), and vigorous physical activity lasting more than ten minutes at a time.
Diet or exercise alone is insufficient — study results
Let’s turn to the results of the first study ever to measure diet and exercise along with both general mortality and specific potentially lethal diseases such as cancer.
Your good diet is not sufficient: For the rest of the story, here is a free link to my Medium piece:
