Cancer is one of the scariest diseases known. But you don’t have to sit there wondering if you’ll be a victim – You can reduce your risk today and every day.
The simple trick to cutting back on your chances of cancer: Do some exercise every chance you get.
I know the daily stress most of us face in our daily lives can seem overwhelming and too time consuming to squeeze in a workout. But exercise that reduces cancer risk doesn’t have to be all-consuming.
For instance, an analysis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that any kind of consistent exercise – intense or moderate – can help fight off breast cancer.
These researchers found that 10 to 19 hours a week of exercise were the sweet spot for cancer prevention, dropping risk by at least 30 percent. They discovered that it was particularly effective against what are called “hormone receptor positive breast cancers” – the most frequently occurring breast tumors in American women.
And a study at Stanford shows the same thing for lung cancer – when women are active, their risk of suffering lung cancer or dying from the cancer drops. Even if women smoke, this research demonstrates, exercise still helps protect them from cancer.
So when you don’t have time to spend hours at the gym, you may be able to fit in movement into your daily routine. If you commute to work, do some extra walking on the way to the office. If you go out to lunch, walk to the restaurant instead of driving.
At home, do some gardening in the evening hours after getting home (right now you’ve got the sun staying in the sky longer to illuminate your efforts).
As a matter of fact, Korean research into the effects of gardening shows that it not only may reduce your risk of cancer, it can also improve your cholesterol profile (shrinking your heart disease chances) and drop your blood pressure.
In fact, if you do as much research as I do, you’ll realize that exercise prevents just about any health problem. Even though so many of our modern conveniences are designed to reduce the need for physical effort, your body needs movement to make its move against deadly ills like cancer.
