Age extenders: fitness

AGE EXTENDERS: FITNESS

Maybe somewhere deep inside you lurks that crazy thought we all have in our more irrational moments. To wit: Can't this whole disease-threat thing just go away? Can't a society that put men on the moon and all of Merle Haggard's work on CD come up with some kind of high-tech anti-illness potion so that we can go on about our business?
Hang on, we have one for you. Behold our magic pill, guaranteed to significantly reduce your risk of disease. It's fun to take. It makes you feel good. It's 100 percent natural. It's cheap and available.
Okay, we exaggerate a tad-but only by the smallest of tads. It's not guaranteed (nothing is in medicine). It's not a pill. And it's not magic. But fitness through exercise is a proven disease risk-reducer. Go down the list of killers and exercise combats most of them.
In short, a regular fitness program should be the cornerstone of your anti-disease strategy, experts say.
"The numbers clearly show that people who are physically active have less disease," says Kerry Stewart, Ed.D., a clinical exercise physiologist and director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. "Particularly heart disease."
Since heart disease is the number one killer of Americans, that's no insignificant piece of information. Exercise works its wonders directly and indirectly. Directly, according to Dr. Stewart, it improves things like heart function and body metabolism. Indirectly, it works on the risk factors of disease. For example, exercise lowers high blood pressure, decreases your percentage of body fat, and improves your ratio of "good" cholesterol to "bad" cholesterol. All of those things are major factors in heart disease.
But fitness fights more than just heart disease. It's the treatment of choice for diabetes as well as your best bet to avoid it. And only recently has exercise's cancer-fighting value come to light, most notably (for men) as a risk-reducer for colon and prostate cancer.
Exercise not only keeps you alive but also keeps your life worth living. "Most of what people think of as 'growing older' isn't," says Walter M. Bortz II, M.D., clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Dare to Be 100. "It's disuse. They don't understand the power of exercise."

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GENERAL HEALTH

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