ISLAMABAD  - Among people with low physical activity and a high risk of diabetes, those who walk more throughout the day are less likely to actually get the blood sugar disorder, according to new research.
The study, published in the journal Diabetes Care, is part of a growing body of evidence that for people who get very little exercise, “even small amounts of activity will provide a really good return on their investment,” said Catrine Tudor-Locke, who studies walking and health at Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was not involved in the research, Medical Health news Reported.
Daily walking recommendations typically point to a minimum of 10,000 steps per day. Tudor-Locke said a good rule of thumb is that 2,000 steps equals about one mile.
Earlier studies, based on questionnaires, have shown that walking more is tied to a lower risk of diabetes. But few studies have used precise measures of how many steps people take each day, said Amanda Fretts, the lead author of the new report and a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle.
To get a better sense of walking potential benefits, Fretts and her colleagues asked more than 1,800 people to wear a pedometer on their hip for a week to tally the number of steps they typically took each day.
All of them came from native American communities in Arizona, Oklahoma and North and South Dakota that are known to have low physical activity levels and high rates of diabetes.
About a quarter of the group were considered to have very low activity, taking fewer than 3,500 steps a day, while half took fewer than 7,800 steps per day.
At the beginning of the study, none of the participants had diabetes. But after five years of follow-up, 243 people had developed the condition.
About 17 percent of the people in the lowest activity group developed diabetes, compared to 12 percent of the people who took more than 3,500 steps a day.
After taking into account people’s age, whether they smoked and other diabetes risk factors, Fretts’s team determined that people who walked the most were 29 percent less likely to develop diabetes than those who walked the least.
“Our finding wasn’t surprising given that other studies have shown that even light activity is associated with a lower risk of diabetes,” he wrote. He findings don’t prove that walking more is responsible for the lower risk of diabetes, but the researcher offered some possible explanations for how walking might help.
“Increased physical activity may prevent weight gain and promote weight loss, a major determinant of diabetes risk,” she said.
Indeed, when Fretts took into account how large people were, based on a measure called body mass index (BMI), she found that extra walking didn’t provide any benefits to reducing people’s diabetes risk. “BMI is one of the plausible biological mechanisms by which physical activity (or walking) may lower diabetes risk - that is, walking may promote weight loss - and weight loss is a major factor related to diabetes risk,” Fretts said.
Physical activity also has effects on inflammation, glucose and other molecules in the body that could help lower diabetes risk, said the researcher. Tudor-Locke added that the potential benefits of moderate levels of walking are “only for those who are really inactive to begin with” and don’t mean others should decrease their activity levels.
Too much TV linked to heart attack
Too much time spent watching TV or sitting in front of a computer may increase your risk for heart disease and even shorten your life.
Although some evidence suggests that prolonged sitting is linked to a higher cardiovascular risk regardless of physical activity participation, studies with hard outcomes are scarce, Health News reported.
To examine the independent relationships between television viewing or other screen-based entertainment with all-cause mortality and clinically confirmed cardiovascular disease events, researchers collected data on 4,512 adults who responded to the 2003 Scottish Health Survey, which among other things asked about leisure time activities. During 4.3 years of follow-up, 325 of these people died and 215 had a cardiovascular event.
It was found that compared with those who spent less than two hours a day in front of a screen, those who spent four or more hours watching TV or playing or working on the computer had a 48 percent higher risk of dying from any cause and a 125 percent higher risk for having a heart attack, stroke or heart failure.
Moreover, the risk calculations remained even after taking into account factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, weight, social class and exercise.
Importantly, participation in exercise did not seem to mitigate the harm associated with excessive screen time.
In addition, biology appears to play a role. For example, one-fourth of the link between screen time and heart attack was associated with high levels of C-reactive protein, which is a marker of inflammation along with weight and cholesterol, suggesting that inflammation and high cholesterol, combined with sitting, may increase the risk for cardiovascular events.
One way to keep healthy is to limit the amount of time spent sitting in front of a TV or a computer, recommend the researchers.
New invented vaccines may reduce weight: Study
New study suggests the positive effects of somatostatin vaccines in not only inhibiting weight gain but also stimulating weight loss in mice.
According to the study the vaccines, JH17 and JH18, play an important role in promoting weight loss in the animal models, Press TV reported.
Somatostatin, as a peptide hormone, slowdowns the function of growth hormone (GH) and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), which both increase metabolism and led to weight loss.
These vaccines, considered as the world’s first anti-obesity vaccine, have been tested in two groups of diet-induced obese male mice.
Both groups had been fed a high fat diet for eight weeks prior to the study and continued to eat the same food during the six-week research period.
Four days after the first injection of modified the vaccine, the vaccinated mice have 10% reduced body weight while this result was not seen in the mice receiving saline shots.
“The results showed that both vaccines induced antibodies to somatostatin and significantly reduced body weight, without affecting normal levels of the growth hormone IGF1, or insulin levels,” said Keith Haffer from Braasch Biotech LLC, South Dakota in the United States
“Although further studies are necessary to discover the long term implications of these vaccines, treatment of human obesity with vaccination would provide physicians with a drug-and surgical-free option against the weight epidemic,” Haffer explained.