I'm not going to go into detail on all of those because really, they aren't saying anything new. The one that I did find interesting though was the one about better eye health:
Also, vigorous exercise has now been linked with significantly reduced onset of cataracts and age-related macular degeneration. In the study, detailed in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, researchers reviewed the eye health of 41,000 runners over seven years and found that both men and women had significantly lower rates of these two diseases than the general public.
It's kind of a strange finding (and it also seems strange that someone would actually want to do research on this...) and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I guess it's something that they at least have a starter study on and can hope to do more research to find out why exactly exercise seems to reduce the chances of cataracts and other eye related degeneration.
Finally, I thought this last part of the article was interesting:
So, are there any studies out there that link exercise with a negative outcome?
In a recent study published in the journal Obesity, Dolores Albarracín, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, did find that people who are shown posters with messages like "join a gym" or "take a walk" actually ate more after viewing these messages than those that saw messages like "make friends."
"Viewers of the exercise messages ate significantly more (than their peers, who viewed other types of messages)," Albarracín said. "They ate one-third more when exposed to the exercise ads."
Why would that be? Who were the subjects of this study? I found the summary of the study here and it turns out the subjects were just your typical college students, this wasn't a research study just dealing with specifically people who were obese. Anyway, the conclusions are a bit strange and I'm not sure that what they are insinuating can really be concluded from what they found.
They presented a variety of pictures to the subjects, some exercise related, some not and then afterwards placed 20 raisins (or other small amounts of peanuts, raisins, and M&Ms) in front of the students and told them they could eat as many as they want. They then counted up the number of remaining pieces of food left and determined that those that saw the pictures of the exercise messages ate more.
I'm not quite sure what to make of that or why that happened. Is it because (as the study seems to think) that this is a way of the body eating extra food because it thinks exercise is coming and it wants extra energy stored for it? It seems to go against all that we know about advertising and subliminal messaging where being shown something tends to lead us to want that (example: seeing pictures of popcorn at the concession stands at the movie theater leads us to want to eat popcorn).
In my opinion, a lot more work needs to be done to investigate this some more before we start thinking that seeing advertising of exercise leads us to immediately want to eat.
www.leanbodyfitness.com
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