That’s the dream, right? You’d like to eat everything you want, including fast food, then exercise and remain healthy and fit. But does that work? Can you simply outrun your poor diet choices? Scientists at University of Sydney led study found that people who had high levels of physical activity, but a poor diet still suffered from detrimental effects of unhealthy food.
Exercising is better than staying lazy, but you cannot outrun your poor diet. Image credit: Mobius6 via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Food is something that we need. However, you need to make smart choices about your food – not all food is created equal. While you can burn off the calories and lose weight, it doesn’t mean that you can become immune to the effects of your less-healthy choices.
Scientists analysed data of 360,600 of British adults from the UK Biobank. They took a better look at the risk of mortality, physical exercise and diet. For example, a high quality diet was considered one including at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day,two portions of fish per week and lower consumption of red meat, particularly processed meat. This study showed that people who have both high levels of physical activity and a high-quality diet have the lowest risk of death. In other words, they are healthier than those who eat everything and exercise a lot.
Researchers have found that participants who had high levels of physical activity and a high-quality diet had a mortality risk reduced by 17 % (19 % from cardiovascular disease and 27 % from selected cancers) compared to those who were inactive and had the worst diet.
Associate Professor Melody Ding, lead author of the study, said: “Both regular physical activity and a healthy diet play an important role in promoting health and longevity. Some people may think they could offset the impacts of a poor diet with high levels of exercise or offset the impacts of low physical activity with a high-quality diet, but the data shows that unfortunately this is not the case.”
Scientists are looking forward to future studies, because the long-term effects on how diet and physical activity interact with each other are currently less explored. It seems like you can remain at a relatively healthy weight if you exercise a lot, even if your diet is not the highest quality. But you cannot eliminate detrimental effects of a poor diet entirely just by exercising.
And this isn’t really surprising. While exercising is essential to good health, it doesn’t remove all the toxins and other harmful substances from your food or your body. The damage is still being done, even if you exercise it continues to be done. You cannot outrun your smoking, drinking or eating junk food habits – you need to get rid of them.
Source: University of Sydney