Exercising 15 Minutes a Day Adds 3 Years to Life Expectancy, Study Finds

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-15/exercising-15-minutes-a-day-adds-3-years-to-life-expectancy-study-finds.html

Exercising for 15 minutes a day adds three years to a person’s life expectancy, according to the first study to show there’s a health benefit from even low levels of physical activity.

In a study involving more than 400,000 people, those who exercised for 90 minutes a week were also 14 percent less likely to have died after eight years than those who were inactive, researchers at Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes wrote in The Lancet medical journal today. Every extra 15 minutes of exercise reduced the risk by a further 4 percent.

The World Health Organization recommends adults aged 18 to 64 years exercise for at least 150 minutes a week. While one- third of American adults meet that goal, less than one-fifth of the population in East Asian nations such as China, Japan and Taiwan do, the authors wrote. The study shows that even a small amount of exercise can lower an individual’s risk of death and disease, and a nation’s health costs, they said.

“This advice is very simple and probably easily achievable,” Anil Nigam and Martin Juneau, researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Governments and health professionals both have major roles to play to spread this good news story and convince people of the importance of being at least minimally active.”

[Dreamer Tatum]

1. Soon to be reprinted in The Quarterly Journal of No Shit. nt

[bemildred]

2. So let's see ....

Three years == 3 * 365 * 24 * 60 == 1,576,800 minutes.

Fifteen minutes a day for, say 40 years == 40 * 365 * 15 == 219,000 minutes.

So every minute you invest in exercise gets you 7.2 minutes of longer life.

So then, if you work out 150 minutes a day, you will live 30 years longer; and with 10 hours a day of exercise, you could live 120 years longer.

:-)

[xchrom]

3. Oh fuck it. Now I'm tired after reading that. Nt

[bemildred]

4. Well, damn, you just went and shortened your life.

You better do some exercise. Quick.

[xchrom]

5. after i have a nap & a smoke.

i do the gym thing -- but i'm more of a Bitter Queen than a Snappy Gym Bunny.

[stopbush]

6. Yeah, but those 3 years come at the END of your life, when you're incontinent

and your mind is going. What's the point?

[HuckleB]

7. K & R.