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Updated
Reading 2 mins.
in collaboration with
Raphaël Gruman (nutritionist)
Medical validation:
July 27, 2022
According to a new study published in the medical journal “British Medical Journal”, physical activity alone cannot compensate for your excess food. It is the combination of the two factors – regular physical activity and good food hygiene – that allows you to stay in good health.
This combination would in particular greatly reduce the risk of death – all causes combined.
A large study involving 346,627 volunteers
Researchers at the University of Sydney relied on data from 346,627 Britons collected from the national UK Biobank database. They analyzed their exercise and eating habits and categorized this data by age, gender, smoking status, type of job and overall amount of physical activity per week. People with a pathology (cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurological disorder, abnormally low BMI, etc.) were excluded from the survey.
The volunteers’ diet was classified into three categories: the so-called poor quality diet, the average quality diet and the high quality diet (which included five fruits and vegetables per day, two servings of fish per week and little red meat). .
The main objective of this work? To determine whether intense physical activity compensated for the effects caused by a poor diet.
A drop in the number of deaths
After eleven years of follow-up, the researchers noticed that the volunteers who exercised very regularly and who had a “high quality” diet saw their risk of death drop (-17% from all causes).
Participants also had a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease (-19%) and cancers (-27%), compared to those who were inactive and ate poorly.
“Some people 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 shows that this is unfortunately not not the case”assures Melody Ding, professor and lead author of the study.
Rapahaël Gruman, dietitian-nutritionist, shares this observation and underlines how much it is the combination of physical activity and a balanced diet that allows you to adopt a healthy weight.
“Often, patients tell themselves that if they do a lot of sport, they can afford to eat badly. However, to eliminate just a pain au chocolat, you have to run between 10 and 15 km. The combination of these two good habits, sport and food hygiene, is therefore essential”confirms the dietitian-nutritionist, before adding “The sport will also allow to densify the muscular mass and to increase the metabolism, therefore to burn more calories even at rest”.