Couch potatoes offered hope for a healthy life

NEW YORK - Couch potatoes can lower their risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions if they start spending as much time exercising as they previously spent being inactive, new study findings suggest.

In the study, men and women whose health and fitness deteriorated when they volunteered to be physically inactive for six months, had a complete reversal of most of the subsequent deterioration in health measures when they increased their activity level during the next six months."

Inactivity is worse than we thought," said study co-author Jennifer L. Robbins, an exercise physiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Yet, she said, "a little bit of activity can make a big difference".

Robbins presented her team's findings to the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, held in Denver, Colorado.

"Although exercise is known to enhance health and wellness, the extent to which one can reverse the debilitating effects of physical inactivity is unknown," Robbins and her associates noted.

They studied mildly overweight but otherwise healthy individuals who had been assigned to a comparison group of a previous exercise study, in which they were instructed to not make any changes in their diet or exercise level - ie to continue their normal pattern of inactivity - for six months.

These participants afterwards elected to follow the study's exercise programme for an additional six months.

During their period of inactivity, the men and women experienced deterioration in 12 of the 17 variables studied, including their waist size, and their visceral fat.

After six months of exercise, however, the 33 study participants decreased their waist size, lost weight, and otherwise improved in 13 of the 17 variables studied.

The exercise returned these variables to "normal" or even led to improvements beyond those initial levels.

What's more, study participants who fared the worst during the sedentary period also experienced the greatest improvement during the exercise programme.

The study findings indicate that "it only takes a small amount of activity to make a difference and to keep cardiovascular risk factors at a manageable level," Robbins said.

- REUTERS