Preventing Chronic Diseases with Exercise
Staying physically active can prevent diabetes, heart disease, cancers, and dementia
As summer comes, more of us are thinking about getting out and getting active. We try to fulfill our new year’s resolutions or maybe our doctor’s recommendations. Exercise is not just about changing your physical appearance, though, it can also be about significantly improving your health. When it comes to preventing chronic diseases, exercise’s role is almost crucial.
Over 40% of Americans have chronic diseases that are uncurable and long-term. Exercise has helped me deal with chronic pain before and improved any difficult digestive problems I have faced, and it similars similar function for many others. Overall, 150 minutes of weekly exercise is highly recommended for good health, spread out over approximately 5 days with at least 2 days of muscle group work. It can prevent or delay the symptoms of the development of chronic diseases themselves, including Type 2 diabetes, heart diseases, cancers, and dementia.
Type 2 diabetes
Almost 10% of Americans now have Type 2 diabetes and a total of 76 million additional Americans are in some stage of pre-diabetes. Our higher calorie diets and consumption of artificial foods, alongside the growing problem of obesity, have made this form of diabetes that develops over time extremely common.
One important step to combatting the development of Type 2 diabetes is a mobile lifestyle. Exercise allows muscles to use glucose and insulin more efficiently and maintain the balance of sugars and hormones in the body with less excess of either involved. Overall, 30 minutes of exercise or other low-intensity activity combined with a low-fat diet was found to decrease chances of developing diabetes by 58% in a clinical trial by the National Institutes of Health. Even low-intensity physical activity like walking can instantly reduce blood sugar to safer levels.
When one already has diabetes, exercising can be a little trickier. Keeping blood sugar levels between the range of 100 to 240 mg/dL before partaking in physical activity is important. Monitoring levels to make sure they are not too high, which can lead to fatigue and dehydration, and not too low, which can lead to numbness and headaches, is crucial when exercising.
Heart Disease
Exercise lowers blood pressure, cholesterol, and the overall risk of heart diseases and heart attacks, making it an efficient form of preventative care when it comes to ailments of the cardiovascular system.
High blood pressure occurs when blood puts excessive pressure on the artery walls, which can then weaken artery flexibility over time and lower blood flow. This can then weaken the cardiovascular system and its ability to pump blood efficiently to the body. A sedentary lifestyle can escalate the risk of developing high BP by 35%, and therefore, heart disease.
Higher cholesterol is also associated with less exercise. Cholesterol can clog blood vessels and also interrupt blood flow. Exercise increases the presence of “good cholesterols” or HDLs that help absorb excess “bad cholesterols” or LDLs and flush them out of the body through the liver. It also decreases the production of these “bad cholesterols” and helps blood vessels stay clean and obstruction-free.
Overall, exercise was found to decrease the chances of developing coronary artery disease by 50% in an observational study. Not only could exercise prevent heart disease but also halt its progression into more lethal forms of it, including heart attacks and deaths associated with heart failure. When it came to heart attacks, there was a direct correlation between a delayed death rate and exercise when comparing heart attack patients in a formal exercise program to a control group. 20-25% of patients who regularly exercised had significantly longer lifespans than those who did not.
Cancer
Exercise has a role in preventing various types of cancers that affect all parts of the body. In general, exercise limits excessive insulin (glucose is broken down with greater efficiency with existing insulin) and growth factor production. Since insulin and growth factors both speed tumor growth, exercise can halt the development of cancerous tumors through the suppression of these cancer growth triggers.
Examples of cancers that are significantly less prevalent in those with active lifestyles include esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, and endometrial cancer (of the uterus lining). There is over a 10% reduced risk of developing these cancers in individuals with active lifestyles. Additionally, exercise can diminish estrogen production, decreasing the risk of developing breast cancers, and improve bowel movements, limiting bodily contact with cancer-causing agents in wastes that can cause cancers of the digestive tract.
Overall, 1 hour of daily moderate physical activity or 30 minutes of daily vigorous activity is ideal for preventing various types of cancers and limiting the presence of carcinogenic agents in the bloodstream.
Dementia
Exercise can slow the loss of brain tissue and improve brain connectivity, decreasing the likelihood of memory loss as individuals age. Dementia and memory loss are significantly accelerated by sedentary lifestyles that limit neural activity associated with physical movement, therefore, weakening the brain. In fact, frequent aerobic exercising was associated with a small increase in hippocampus size in senior citizens in a clinical trial. This increase in hippocampus size was enough to reverse 1-2 years of neural shrinkage associated with memory loss.
Despite the benefits of exercise in reversing the growing issue of dementia and memory loss in seniors, very few senior citizens actually regularly exercise. Less than 20% of the American population over the age of 65 engages in recommended levels of physical activity, accelerating the development of memory loss diseases such as dementia.
Overall, physical exercise has been found to reduce the instance of dementia by up to 30%. More specifically, it has been found to reduce the instance of Alzheimer’s by up to 45%. As the prevalence of Alzheimer’s rapidly increases in developing countries, it is important to recognize the role of methods of prevention such as physical activity in curbing rates of this disease.
Staying physically active and working your muscle groups can provide numerous long-term benefits, one of the most important ones being the prevention of chronic diseases. Living with chronic diseases is by no means easy and in a world where they are becoming increasingly prevalent, it is important to take the right steps for a healthy life.
An interesting post to read. Thorough enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing.