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Lace Up, Exercise Cuts Risk Of 13 Common Cancers!

Daily exercise can cut down your risk of 13 common cancers! Need more incentives to hit the gym?

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If you needed some more reasons to hit the gym, then look no further.

A credible, new study offers some very strong incentives to stay fit. It claims that people who are more physically active have a reduced risk of 13 types of cancers.

You’ve always known exercise is good for you but the connection to 13 cancers is phenomenal: not only are the numbers huge, but the fact that around 1.4 million people were analysed over a decade to reach to this conclusion makes the conclusion striking.

And the potential cancer-fighting benefits of exercise were also seen in people who were overweight.

The Landmark Study

Daily exercise can cut down your risk of 13 common cancers! Need more incentives to hit the gym?
(Photo Courtesy: Tumblr/@pilates4all)

The idea that exercise reduces your risk of lifestyle diseases, like heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, even cancer is not new. But till now, studies mostly looked at the link between common cancers like, breast cancer in women, lung cancer in men and arrived at a result.

Whether physical activity, and more precisely, regular exercise, would also lower our risk for other cancers has remained an open question.

Exactly why this new study published in reputed medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine is important – scientists from Harvard Medical School and the National Cancer Institute (in USA), analysed data from 1.4 million people across America and Europe by putting them in 12 different study groups for 11 years.

Volunteers were asked whether they did moderate or vigorous exercise like walking, swimming, running. Their diets and genetics were taken into account and of the 26 cancers studied, the risk of 13 was slashed down drastically by regular moderate exercise.

People who were most active as opposed to the least, had a reduced risk of the following 13 types of cancers:

Daily exercise can cut down your risk of 13 common cancers! Need more incentives to hit the gym?
(Photo: The Quint)
In a surprise result, physical activity was linked to a 5% higher risk of non-advanced prostate cancer. Overall, high levels of physical activity were linked with a 7% lower risk of any cancer, according to the study.

“These findings support promoting physical activity as a key component of population-wide cancer-prevention and control efforts,” the researchers observed.

The types of cancer that did not seem to have a connection with exercise were non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, thyroid, gastric non-cardia, soft tissue, pancreas, lymphocytic leukemia, ovarian and brain.

Benefits Extend To People Of All Shapes and Sizes

Daily exercise can cut down your risk of 13 common cancers! Need more incentives to hit the gym?
For most cancers, people who reported exercising moderately, even if the time that they spent exercising was slight, had significantly less risk of developing 13 different types of cancer than people who were sedentary (Photo Courtesy: Tumblr/exerciseartists)

Amazingly the risk for any of these 13 cancers declined steeply as people exercised more. Now, what’s surprising is that the associations between exercise and reduced cancer risks held true even when the researchers factored in body mass.

All in all, working out regularly, even if the results are not visible, cut down the risk of all 13 cancer for the overweight and obese people as well. 

One big drawback with the study is that it did not take into account how intense the exercise should be or when in life people should start exercising to get these remarkable benefits. Scientists will now look into exactly how exercise lowers the risk of cancer – understanding the underlying mechanisms so that potential cancer prevention plans can be drawn.

Clearly, physical activity in any form is good for us. So the next time you’re struggling to make it to your zumba class, just think of all the cancer cells you’ll be fighting if you go.

Also Read: What Is the Best Exercise For a Sharp Brain?

(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)

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Topics:  Cancer   Exercise   Physical Activity 

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