Latest Study Say Active Commuting Every Day Helps You Live Longer

Good health contributes a lot to how you spend the hours of the day. You wake up in the morning bouncing and come home at the end of the day, happy and content. If you are suffering from a type of health issue, however, the way you started and ended the day could be very much different.

You can help achieve better health by making some changes in how you live your life and in the food regularly consumed. For instance, there is a new study that revealed those who go to their workplaces using a certain method could give you lots of health benefits and improve life expectancy.

Active Commuting

This involves going from one place to another by walking or cycling or by combining such with other modes of travel such as car and walking or train and cycling. According to this new research, active commuting helps in reducing your risk of dying early by as much as 40%. It also lowers your risk of developing cancer by at least 45%.

Promising Findings

Researchers monitored the health of over 250,000 UK commuters in more than five years. They compared people who observed active commuting with those who rely on public transport. They found that of those studied, 2,430 had died, and 3,748 were found to be suffering from cancer while 1,110 had cardiovascular problems. The findings, which were published in the British Medical Journal, proved that going to work aboard a bicycle lowers the risk of death by 41%.

In another study, researchers from the University of Melbourne, University of Otago, and the University of Auckland found that people who cycle to their workplaces have a lower risk of dying. Their findings were recently published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Caroline Shaw, the lead researcher of the study, in an interview with ScienceDaily, said that people who cycle to work enjoy a 13% reduction in mortality. The researchers attributed this to their increased physical activities.

Researchers also found there is no mortality reduction for those who walked to work or rode public transport. Dr. Shaw and her team analyzed data from the New Zealand Census-Mortality Study, which linked mortality records with a census, to conduct follow-up observations of the population for approximately five years. According to Dr. Shaw, they studied 80% of New Zealand’s working-age population within a period of 15 years, so the study is highly representative.