Here’s good news for diabetics: New research shows that moderate exercise, such as walking, cycling, or jogging, can significantly reduce the risk of death for people with Type 2 diabetes. This study followed over 3,300 people and correlated their level of physical exercise with mortality to find that moderate exercise reduced the chance of cardiovascular death by 9%, and more vigorous exercise reduced the total chance of death by 33%.
To people with diabetes, this probably isn’t new news. Diabetics have long been advised to pursue physical exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise, in order to improve their overall health and reduce their chance of death. This study simply adds support to the notion that physical exercise is the number one way to enhance your health and avoid the downward health spiral associated with diabetes.
Interestingly, this research did not mention the fact that with enough exercise, and a few basic alterations to your food choices, you can eliminate diabetes altogether. Type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease; in fact, it’s almost a misnomer to call it a disease, since it’s more like a physiological effect caused by the consumption of refined carbohydrates and lack of physical exercise. It’s not as if an invader from the outside has caught onto your body and given it this terrible disease. Diabetes is simply a metabolic result that happens as a natural outcome of your lifestyle choices.
This is good news, because it means you can reverse this so-called disease by simply altering your lifestyle choices. Physical exercise is one component of this, and diet and nutrition is the other major component. By altering your food choice so that you avoid foods that cause diabetes — soft drinks, high-fructose corn syrup, refined carbohydrates, added sugars, refined white flour, and other similar ingredients — and by supplementing your diet with superior nutrition, you can utterly reshape the way you metabolism responds to foods. By superior nutrition, I mean those foods and super foods that are known to stabilize blood sugar, increase insulin sensitivity, and promote weight loss. These foods include: fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, soy products, and super foods like chlorella, spirulina, wheat grass, broccoli sprouts, sea vegetables and quinoa.
The bottom line to this research is that it shows very little exercise is needed to achieve a moderate reduction in the risk of death for diabetics — just 30 minutes a day of exercise on a bicycle, jogging, or swimming, can have a significantly positive impact on your overall health. For most people, that’s less time than they spend cooking or watching TV, or even reading the morning paper. Thirty minutes is an amount of time that every person can fit into their schedule if they make it a priority. When people tell me they don’t have time to exercise, what they’re really saying is they don’t want to make exercise a priority, because nearly everyone finds time to watch television and engage in other pointless activities that do nothing for their health. Thirty minutes a day is a very small investment to make in your health in terms of the benefit it produces.
