What if the time you choose to exercise could affect your health, especially if you have type 2 diabetes? This is a question that scientists are trying to answer.
They have found out that being active is good for your heart, but they’re not sure if exercising at a particular time of the day could give you extra benefits.
The Research
A group of researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center and others, has done a study to explore this question.
They published their findings in a medical journal called Diabetes Care. The study looked at whether the timing of exercise can affect heart health and risk of disease in people with type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The Findings
The researchers worked with 2,035 people. They found out that men who did their workouts in the morning were at the highest risk of getting heart disease.
This was true no matter how much or how hard they exercised each week. On the other hand, men who were most active around midday had lower levels of fitness.
In women, the researchers couldn’t find a connection between the timing of activity and the risk of heart disease or fitness levels.
What Does It Mean?
The main takeaway from this study is that regular exercise is very beneficial for health. But researchers are saying that the time of day might also be an important factor to consider.
Dr. Jingyi Qian from Brigham said, “We should think about timing when we study the effects of physical activity.
This way, we can give better advice to the public about how the time of day might affect the relationship between exercise and heart health.”
How Was the Study Done?
To do their research, the scientists used data from a previous study called the Look AHEAD study.
This study started in 2001 and followed the health of more than 5,000 individuals with type 2 diabetes and overweight. More than 2,000 of them had their physical activity measured.
To learn more about the participants’ exercise habits, the researchers looked at data from devices that participants wore on their hips for a week.
These devices tracked the time of day that participants did moderate-to-vigorous activity. This includes not just traditional exercise, but also hard physical work.
The researchers then used a well-known scoring system to estimate the participants’ risk of experiencing heart disease over the next four years.
What’s Next?
The researchers think that the differences between men and women might be due to the different ways their bodies work.
But they also think there could be other reasons. For example, they couldn’t account for the differences in participants’ natural daily rhythms.
Moving forward, the researchers are excited to continue studying how the timing of exercise relates to heart health.
They are particularly interested in how this might affect patients with diabetes who are at higher risk of heart problems. They hope that their work will help people better manage their health through exercise.
If you care about diabetes, please read studies about the leading cause of death in type 2 diabetes, and if you have diabetes, coffee, and green tea may help you live longer.
For more information about diabetes, please see recent studies about Keto diet could help control body weight, and blood sugar in type 2 diabetes, and results showing that blueberries strongly benefit people with metabolic syndrome.
The study was published in Diabetes Care.
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