A study indicates that men who are physically active cut their risk of dying from heart disease in half, no matter what their cholesterol level.
Assessing the New Guidelines
The main goal of the study was to assess changes to cholesterol guidelines from the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III.
Data was collected on more than 19,000 men, aged 20 to 79 years old. Some 58 percent met the criteria for being "at or below LDL cholesterol goal" under the new guidelines; 18 percent fell in the category of needing "therapeutic lifestyle change" to lower low-density cholesterol (LDL), and 24 percent were in the category that, under the new guidelines, would result in their getting a recommendation for taking LDL-lowering drugs.
In over a decade of follow-up, men who required changes in diet and exercise proved to be at twice the risk of dying, while men who needed drug therapy were at almost seven times the risk.
Preventing Metabolic Syndrome With Exercise
However, men who were physically active reduced their risk of dying by 50 percent regardless of their cholesterol level. This may be because exercise reduces the risk factors of metabolic syndrome, which is connected with high cholesterol counts.
Metabolic syndrome means having three or more of the following symptoms:
The findings led one researcher to suggest that metabolic syndrome be renamed physical inactivity syndrome.
This is yet another study that comes as no surprise to anyone who has looked at the real causes and treatments of heart disease. Exercise helps treat the actual underlying factors that are causing the problem.
Medications like statin drugs, on the other hand, do a great job of lowering your cholesterol ... without actually doing anything about the problems that caused your illness in the first place, or making you any safer from dying of heart disease -- unless, of course, the dangerous statin drugs themselves kill you first.
If you're looking for the right exercise plan, I have plenty of free resources on my Web site to help you get started. I also urge you to review some of the more recent pieces posted by contributing editors and exercise gurus, Paul Chek and Ben Lerner.