SLASH Cancer Risk In 4 Minutes A Day!
If you want to reduce your risk of cancer, you must improve your lifestyle.
These changes are often big—like giving up sugar and junk food or quitting smoking (no small feat for anyone who has done it!).
But it turns out small changes can significantly move the dial too.
In fact, researchers recently uncovered one small change that can SLASH your risk of cancer in a BIG way.
Studies show that adults who don’t exercise have an increased risk of 13 different cancers, including breast, endometrial, colon, liver, lung, kidney, and head and neck.
But now scientists say you don’t have to live at the gym or spend hours every day working out to significantly reduce your risk.
A new study focused on more than 22,000 people with an average age of 62 years who didn’t exercise regularly—not even recreational walks.
In other words, they were like most sedentary seniors these days.
The study participants used a wearable wrist device to track their activity levels for a week to determine their average vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity or VILPA.
VILPA is short bursts of movement that we do naturally throughout the day. This could involve housework, carrying heavy grocery bags, wrestling with the grandkids, or walking up a hill to retrieve the mail.
The researchers followed the participants for about seven years.
Compared with people who did no VILPA, a minimum of 3.5 minutes was linked to an 18 percent reduction in cancer incidence.
And just 4.5 minutes of VILPA daily was tied to a 32 percent drop in cancers related to lack of physical activity.
The majority of the VILPA was done in bursts of just one minute.
If you want to exercise in a gym for an hour every day, be my guest.
But studies like this show that natural activity spread throughout your day can have remarkable health benefits.
This is, after all, the way nature intended.
P.S. A recent study found that folks who fall into THIS one common category have a 60 percent high risk of cancer. The good news? There’s something you can do about it. CLICK HERE for the full story.
SOURCE:
“Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity and Cancer Incidence Among Nonexercising Adults: The UK Biobank Accelerometry Study.” JAMA Oncol. Published online July 27, 2023. doi: 10.1001/jamaoncol.2023.1830