Exercise and heart disease

The BBC reports that a new study has found that moderate exercise does not reduce your risk of heart disease. It is the intensity of exercise that is important, not the duration, says the report produced by John Yarnell of Queens University Belfast.

Current health guidelines suggest a brisk for half an hour, five times a week, is good for your heart. But this research found no such effect. Even the effects cited for intensive exercise are not huge. Those who had engaged in more intensive exercise showed a reduction of 16 percent in early mortality and 27 percent in deaths due to heart disease.

Would it be cynical of me to suggest that the advice to engage in moderate exercise, like the advice to eat five pieces of fruit or vegetables a day, is an attempt by the authorities to get us to participate in something, to demonstrate that they are our moral leaders?

Brisk walk 'not healthy enough', BBC News, 14 April 2003