Physical Activity and Type 2 Diabetes
Because we know that physical activity is so important for both preventing diabetes before it occurs, or primary prevention, and preventing the progression or worsening of the disease, secondary prevention, we're going to talk about physical activity specifically here and the role it plays in diabetes. In the two studies focused on primary prevention, participants who had impaired glucose tolerance or people who were likely to develop diabetes but didn't have the disease yet reduced their risk of developing diabetes by 58% just by being physically active for about 150 minutes per week or meeting our national recommended guidelines, and losing a very modest amount of weight, about 5% to 10%. And so here we've learned that physical activity improves the body's response to insulin, and physical activity also helps people to maintain or reduce weight. So these are two ways that physical activity is associated with the primary prevention of diabetes, but in people who already have the disease—so we're talking about secondary prevention here—we also saw, through previous research, that an exercise training intervention showed that HbA1c—and again, those levels are simply a marker of your blood glucose levels over the previous couple months—those levels were lower in an exercise training group compared to a control group, and the exercise here was a little bit more intense than the 150 minutes we saw in the primary prevention studies. But together, these studies show the importance of being physically active, and in some cases also losing weight, to both prevent diabetes from ever occurring, or primary prevention, and also to improve cardiovascular health and to improve worsening of the disease or progression of the disease.