On Healthy Living

One of the Yahoo! health experts blog deal with diabetes, and today’s article on it deals with the relationship between the metabolic syndrome and exercise (or, rather, the lack thereof). “Metabolic syndrome” is a term I met for the first time at the beginning of this year, when I decided to make efforts regarding my weight, and naturally came to growing some knowledge about causes, effects and various matters related to health and weight loss.

So what’s metabolic syndrome? The post explains it in a few words:

The metabolic syndrome, identified by the presence of blood glucose levels between 100 and 125 mg/dL, high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, and increased abdominal girth, is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease.

While I cannot give any link to the report itself (I’d sure like to!), the entry goes on with describing some of its findings:

The report looked at estimates of physical activity in 1626 men and women 20 years of age or older. The likelihood of having the metabolic syndrome was almost twice as great among those who did not engage in moderate or vigorous physical activity (36 percent of participants) during leisure time, compared with those who reported 150 minutes or more of such activity weekly (only 20 percent of participants). Please note that this amount of weekly physical activity, two and a half hours, can be achieved by investing as little as 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

Television, videos, and computer use are major contributors to a sedentary lifestyle. In this study both men and women who watched television or videos or used a computer outside of work for 4 hours or more a day (22 percent of participants) were twice as likely to have the metabolic syndrome than those who engaged in such activity less than one hour per day (only 11 percent of participants).

I must admit that it’s not encouraging to see how little most people exercise nowadays; on the other hand, if, by taking half a hour every day to “make the effort”, I can minimize the risks, I honestly think it’s not paying much for staying in good health.

Recently, I’ve heard of a 20-years old girl with pre-diabetes (I don’t know to what it’s linked), and it’s simply frightening. I don’t know more, and perhaps her case is really specific and not linked to exercising or being overweight, but no matter what, it made me realize that as long as we have the chance to prevent such illnesses from declaring, we should take it.

Half a hour a day, five days a week, to minimize the diabetes risk I already have due to heredity and overweight? Nope, really not too high a price to pay, and I’ll pay it gladly.

Yzabel wrote this on September 2nd, 2005 and filed it under Healthy Living, Diet & Exercise |