You Just Gotta Walk!

People who exercise can add three years to their life, and their hearts reap benefits from something as simple as brisk walking a half-hour a day, two studies suggest.

"Three years of extra life: It’s a very clear message that makes it easy to grasp what might be the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle," said Dr. Oscar Franco, co-author of one of the studies and a researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In the Rotterdam study, researchers analyzed more than four decades of data from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running health analysis of suburban Boston residents.

The researchers grouped 4,121 people into three levels of physical activity: low, medium and high. The volunteers, who had kept track of how long they spent doing various activities each day, received scores based on the estimated oxygen consumed for their activities.

Life expectancy at age 50 for the medium activity group was 1.5 years longer than for the low activity group. The high activity group lived 3.5 years longer.

The extra years were lived mostly free from heart disease. The study didn’t give details quantifying high, medium or low activity.

In the second, smaller study, researchers examined what type of real-world walking program would improve heart health.

They found several routines worked: Walking for 30 minutes five or more days a week, either moderately or briskly, improved cardiorespiratory fitness. It worked just as well to walk briskly three to four days a week.

Only fast-paced walking on five or more days a week also led to short-term progress in cholesterol levels.

The study of 492 sedentary adults was not conducted in an exercise lab, but in the real world where demands on people’s time and energy got in the way of their walking goals, said lead investigator Michael Perri of the University of Florida.

That led to one of the study’s most important findings, Perri said: People who were supposed to walk 150 minutes a week actually were walking only 90 minutes a week–and still achieving health benefits.

Doctors should consider prescribing daily walking, just to get people to walk a few days a week, Perri said.

"If you aim for exercising every day, you’ll probably do four or five days," Perri said. "If you aim for three or four days, you’re likely to get maybe two days done."

The studies appeared in last week’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Martha Gulati, a cardiologist and fitness researcher at Northwestern University, said both studies are significant and should guide doctors’ advice to patients and public spending on health.

"We need to know how to prescribe this and how to implement this," Gulati said. "If we don’t, we’re never going to get to the point where we do prevention. We’re always going to be treating chronic disease." –By Carla K. Johnson AP

Dogs may be more than man’s best friend; they may also be a tool for losing weight, according to a new study that shows making a commitment to walk a dog–your own or someone else’s–leads to increased exercise and weight loss.

The goal of the study, according to Rebecca Johnson, was to encourage sedentary overweight people to exercise and specifically to walk.

"We know that walking is good for people but we don’t know how to get people to continue to do it. We wanted to see whether bonding with a dog might be a motivator to continue walking," said Johnson, who is an associate professor of nursing and director of the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The dog-walkers in the study started by walking 10 minutes per day three times per week and eventually walked up to 20 minutes per day 5 days per week. One group walked for 50 weeks while another walked for only 26 weeks.

For the study, the participants walked with loaner dogs–trained and certified "visitor" animals that were provided by the Pet Assisted Love and Support (PALS) Program.

According to Johnson, the 50-week walkers lost an average of 14 pounds during the one-year program. "That’s a better result than most of the nationally known weight-loss plans," she told Reuters Health.

The walkers "bonded with the animals, improved their flexibility, balance and ability to walk, lost weight and felt better about themselves so it was a very positive thing all around," Johnson added.

It’s important to realize, she said, that these were a sedentary, economically disadvantaged group of people with multiple chronic illnesses. Some had trouble walking even 10 minutes per day three days per week at the beginning of the study but they gradually improved their ability to walk.

"We had one lady," Johnson said, "who relied on an electric scooter when she was outside of her apartment and by the end of the 50 week program she was able to walk to the neighborhood grocery store and back."

The 26-week walkers did not lose as much weight as the 50-week walkers "so we know that it takes a year see the weight come off," Johnson said. Having a dog or being responsible for walking someone’s dog may be just the motivating factor to keep people walking or encourage more people to walk, she said. –By Megan Rauscher Reuters Health