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More Americans Are Walking for Exercise

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Walking for Health: 10 Reasons You Feel Better After a Stroll

It’s an easy, inexpensive way to get moving and reap the health benefits, experts say

Call it a step in the right direction: More and more Americans are trying to walk their way to better health.

The number of adults who took up walking for exercise or as a way to get from place to place increased significantly between 2005 and 2015, federal health officials reported Thursday.

During that time, the percentage of women who walk increased from 57 percent to 65 percent. Among men, the percentage increased from 54 percent to 63 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“People who are physically active have a lower risk of many chronic diseases — like heart disease, stroke and depression — and it supports the healthy aging process for older adults,” said study lead author Emily Ussery, a CDC epidemiologist.

On the downside, although more people are walking, the increase among men has stalled a bit in recent years, Ussery said.

And about one-third of adults said “they didn’t walk for at least 10 minutes a day,” she said. “There is still some work to be done to increase walking.”

It’s not clear why more people are walking, although it could be that messages promoting the benefits of exercise are getting through, Ussery said.

“It’s an easy activity to do. It doesn’t require a lot of special skills or equipment,” she said.

It’s also not known why more women than men have started walking. Maybe walking appeals more to women than men, Ussery said.

Regardless, people should engage in moderate exercise for at least two and a half hours a week, and walking fits right in, she added.

Communities can help get people walking by making streets safer and promoting walking programs. “People need access to convenient and safe places to walk,” she said.

As with other matters of health, there are racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities that exist between the people most likely to start walking and those who don’t, Ussery said.

Blacks and Hispanics walk less than whites, and less educated and poorer people tend to walk less than more educated and richer folks, she said.

The report was published June 30 in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Dr. David Katz is president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He said the CDC finding that “walking rates have trended up over recent years suggests the message is getting out, but progress is slow, and disparities are large and persistent.”

The people most in need of walking for health reasons are least likely to do it because of the usual social factors — education, economics and environment, he said.

“Affluent city-dwellers can rely on walking to get them many of the places they need to go. Not so for residents of many rural and suburban neighborhoods,” said Katz, who also directs the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Derby, Conn.

“There are some encouraging signs here,” he added, “but much work is clearly needed to create the level playing field of opportunity for health.”

Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist and exercise physiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, said walking is a good way to start an exercise program — it only takes a pair of shoes and the desire.

“Walking is free, we already know how to do it and it can be done virtually anywhere,” she said.

By: Steven Reinberg

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