THE HIDDEN BENEFITS OF EXERCISE

"Physical activity has long been known to bestow such benefits as helping to maintain a healthy weight and reduce stress, not to mention tightening those abs. Now a growing body of research is showing that regular exercise-as simple as a brisk 30-45 minute walk five times a week- can boost the body's immune system, increasing the circulation of natural killer cells that fight off viruses and bacteria. And exercise has been shown to improve the body's response to the influenza vaccine, making it more effective at keeping the virus at bay.

Medical experts say inactivity poses as great a health risk as smoking, contributing to heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, depression, arthritis and osteoporosis....Even lean men and women who are inactive are at higher risk of death and disease....

One study of 3,000 women being treated for breast cancer, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that for those patients with hormone-responsive tumors, walking the equivalent of three to five hours per week at an average pace reduced the risk of dying from the disease by 50% compared with more sedentary women...."

All Street Journal, 1/5/10

Editor's note: How wonderful that we can help ourselves with such a simple technique which does nothing to alter our chemistry and raises our mood and conditions our muscles etc while healing/preventing disease.