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Exercise best way to keep off weight at all ages

Athletic male body builder holding red apple

Athletic male body builder holding red apple

It’s not a secret exercise and a good diet will keep you in good health. There have been plenty of studies showing the effectiveness of running in losing weight, but which is the driving force in keeping fit?

A recent study – one of the largest and most detailed in recent years – looked at this in the American population, one reasonably similar to Canada’s. They tracked moderate and vigorous physical activity, such as running and other sports, in 5,000 individuals of a racially and ethnically diverse population between the ages of 20 and 70, split nearly evenly between males and females.

Unsurprisingly, both a healthy diet (which became more prevalent as people aged) and increased exercise correlated with smaller waistlines, though exercise seemed to be a better indicator as to someone’s weight.

“We observed clear age-related trends for measures of weight status, physical activity, and diet quality in US men and women. [Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity] was very consistently related to weight status in both genders,” write the researchers. “The relation between diet quality and weight status was less consistent.”

The new work was published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise April, though the data was older, collected between 2003 and 2006.

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