Daily HealthBeat Tip

Be active, live longer

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Spend more time being active and you could spend more time on earth � researchers say people who are physically active live longer. The benefit emerged when a researcher in the Netherlands looked at a long-running study of the lives of people in Framingham, Massachusetts. The National Institutes of Health supports the Framingham data.

Oscar Franco of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam says the people who weren't active at all had it worst.

"Life expectancy for sedentary people at age 50 years was found to be one-point-five years shorter than for people engaged in moderate daily physical activity" (10 seconds)

Moderate activity could be brisk walking 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

And the sedentary people had three-and-a-half years less in their lifespans than did people with high levels of physical activity.

Franco's study was in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: November 28, 2005

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