We would all like to eat everything we feel like, fast food included, and be able to stay healthy and fit just (alone?) exercising. But does that work? Can we just leave our poor food choices behind?
A team of scientists from the University of Sydney, in Australia, studied the risk of mortality, physical exercise and diet of 360,600 adults from data from the UK Biobank with the aim of examining how the relationship between these three variables was. A small number of studies previously found that high-intensity exercise can counteract the harmful physiological responses of overeating. However, the long-term effects on how diet and physical activity interact with each other were less explored. The findings of this study now confirmed the importance of both physical activity and quality diet quality in reducing the risk of mortality. It was observed, for example, that for those who had high levels of physical activity and a good diet, their risk of mortality was reduced by 17% from all causes, 19% from cardiovascular disease and 27% from certain types of cancer, compared to those with worse diet and physically inactive.” 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 show that, sadly, this is not the case,” said lead author Melody Ding, from the Charles Perkins Centre and the University of Sydney’s School of Medicine and Health.
