RECENT STUDIES SHOW: YOUR BAD CHOLESTEROL CAN BE EFFECTIVELY LOWERED BY USING A NEW PHYSICAL ACTIVITY RECORDER

Cardiovascular diseases are the killer No.1 in all industrialized countries such as USA, Western Europe and Japan. High blood cholesterol plays a major role and is an important risk factor for coronary heart diseases and stroke.

Cholesterol is a lipid (fat) substance produced by liver and obtained from animal diet. It is important for body since it is a part of cell membrane and precursor for many hormones. However, excess cholesterol accumulates to blood circulation and forms deposits or plagues that can clog blood vessels. This condition is atherosclerosis and the plague can cause heart attack or stroke, the most frequent death causes in many countries.

Blood cholesterol is formed from HDL-cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol. HDL- cholesterol is “good”, because it removes cholesterol from blood circulation. On the contrary, LDL-cholesterol is “bad”, because is does form atherosclerotic plagues resulting in increased cardiovascular mortality. Recent recommendations from the American Heart Association give information about the acceptable cholesterol levels. The blood levels of total cholesterol should be below 200mg/dL and those of LDL-cholesterol below 100 mg/dL and put you at lower risk for coronary heart disease. Blood HDL cholesterol level over 60 mg/dL is considered protective against cardiovascular diseases.

How to avoid high blood cholesterol levels?

Expert medical recommendations contain four items that lower high blood cholesterol: 1) appropriate physical activity, 2) balanced diet with low animal fat and sugar, 3) avoid smoking and 4) treatment with drugs. Recent cholesterol-lowering drugs are effective but expensive and cause side-effects. It is true that by right physical activity and diet in most cases decrease high blood cholesterol.

Physical activity and blood cholesterol

Many scientific studies demonstrate that physical activity decreases blood cholesterol. However, those studies do not exactly tell us, what kind of a physical activity is good for lowering blood cholesterol. Previous studies show that “bad” LDL-cholesterol decreases by 3 – 5%, when the moderate physical activity lasting for 30 min is repeated three times a week, but there are also similar studies in which no effect have been observed. One reason for negative findings is there that the intensity of the physical activity has not been previously measured.

The use of intensity-based physical activity recorder lowers blood cholesterol dramatically

A recent study was conducted at the Medical Faculty of the University of Oulu, Finland. In this study the quality and quantity of daily physical activity was measured continuously for 12 months by a recorder developed by Newtest Ltd, Oulu, Finland. The recorder analyses the force (g values) and number of each step. Totally 80 premenopausal women participated into the study and they were divided into two groups of which one performed aerobic-type physical activity 2 – 3 times a week and the other served as a control.

The main finding was that effective physical activity lowered blood total cholesterol and “bad” LDL-cholesterol by 10 – 15 % when compared with normal physical activity. This is a dramatically good result, because in previous studies the maximum decrease has been as low as 5%. The cholesterol-lowering effect was the greatest, when the intensity of the physical activity was between 1.1 – 2.4.g and the number of steps over 600 a day as shown by the recorder. This corresponds about to jogging of a mile a day. It was important that mere walking was not effective at all.

The results of the referred study show that proper physical activity significantly lowers blood cholesterol, the most important cardiovascular risk factor. The study also reveals for the first time the limits for the physical activity useful for lowering blood cholesterol. The developed recorder makes it possible to follow daily or weekly that physical activity has been sufficient.

References: Article in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, volume 39, pages 756 – 763, 2007.
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