Diet or Exercise, What is Good for Your Heart Health?
The answer wouldn't be quite straight-forward as you’d hope. It’s the age-old question: Is diet, exercise, or a combination of both the best way to protect your heart? Turns out, it doesn’t matter—as long as you lose weight doing it, new research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests. In the study, overweight, middle-age participants were split into three groups: One decreased calorie consumption by 20 percent, the second increased physical activity by 20 percent, and the third decreased calorie intake by 10 percent and moved 10 percent more. The researchers discovered that each of the three strategies was equally effective in improving measures of heart health like lowering blood pressure, decreasing bad cholesterol, and improving resting heart rate so it fell between the average of 60 to 100 beats per minuteas long as the participants lost weight in the process . In fact, those who lost at least 7 percent of their body weight re...