According to a new study, running 50 minutes a week, at a pace between 10- and 7.5-minute mile, helped lower the risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other causes. Working out more than that didn't mean more health benefits, say the researchers, based on a review of a number of studies.
Because running is a popular form of physical activity, study coauthor Zeljko Pedisic and his workmates chose to take a bird's eye view of what past studies of running and the risk of death had concluded. The team collected 14 papers that collectively studied 230,000 people for the effects of running on cardiovascular, cancer and other causes. Most participants were from the US and Europe.
Pooling the results from these 14 studies showed that running led to lowering the risk of cancer-related death by 23%, the risk of cardiovascular-related death by 30%, and the risk of death from all other causes by 27%. Those benefits appeared even when people ran relatively slowly and for under an hour a week — less time than the World Health Organization recently suggests.
There are warnings to the research, though. Among other things, possibly these benefits were found because all the 14 studies of running and the cause of death only included healthy people from the get-go, the authors write. Also, only two of the papers recorded how people's running habits over the years, and how often people ran was self-reported in other papers.
Though the results suggest that people might need less of a workout than the WHO might suggest, that doesn't mean it's time to change these standards, Pedisic says. There are other health factors than need to be examined besides the risk of death, he says, and people need other ways to keep fit, too.
