Walk to lower your risk of stroke

Walking not only improves your overall health, but greatly reduces the risk of stroke – especially in women. These findings are based on a study examining the exercise behaviors of more than 39,000 female health professionals, with an average age of 54. The results indicate that women who walked at a pace of 3 miles per hour had a 37% lower risk of suffering from a stroke, and women who engaged in walking 2 or more hours a week had a 30% reduced risk of suffering from a stroke.

Jacob R. Sattelmair, MSc, Harvard School of Public Health states: “Physical activity, including regular walking, is an important modifiable behavior for stroke prevention and is essential to promoting cardiovascular health and reducing risk of cardiovascular disease, and walking is one way of achieving physical activity.”

For more information on this study visit Web MD: http://bit.ly/ceL87K

 

Walking Linked to Improved Memory

Lacing up not only improves your overall health, it has now been associated with decreasing the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. In the October 13, 2010 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, it was announced that walking regularly may shield mature brains from decreasing in size, subsequently preserving one’s memory. Study author Kirk Erickson, PhD at the University of Pittsburgh states: “Brain size shrinks in late adulthood, which can cause memory problems. Our results should encourage well-designed trials of physical exercise in older adults as a promising approach for preventing dementia and Alzheimer's disease.”

Find out more about walking and the prevention of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease at: http://www.naturalnews.com/walking.html

Dog Walking

Dogs are great walking buddies. They are very persistent and can even act as your own personal trainer. If you start walking with your dog, or a friend or family member’s dog, you will find that they are always ready for a walk when you are, always extend the walk as long and as far as possible and rarely talk back. Dogs provide great motivation to get up and go for a walk, multiple times a day!

Cindy Lentino, an exercise scientist at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, conducted a study of the health of 916 middle-aged adults under three categories: 1) those who owned dogs and walked them frequently; 2) those who owned dogs and didn’t walk them and; 3) those who did not own dogs.

Lentino discovered benefits of dog walking to include lower risk of high blood pressure, a leaner waistline and less chronic health conditions and concluded that regular dog walkers had a lower BMI and fewer depressive conditions compared to those who didn’t walk with a dog. Lentino states, “The big one is that people who did not own dogs had over three times the odds of being treated for diabetes than those who walked their dogs”!

 

To find out more information about this study visit: http://bit.ly/bb72DS