Study after study since then has shown that exercise produces extraordinary benefits. Going for regular walks reduces the risk of heart attack or stroke by 31 percent. An analysis of 655,000 people in 2012 found that being active for just eleven minutes a day after the age of forty yielded 1.8 years of added life expectancy. Being active for an hour or more a day improved life expectancy by 4.2 years.

As well as strengthening bones, exercise boosts your immune system, nurtures hormones, lessens the risk of getting diabetes and a number of cancers (including breast and colorectal), improves mood, and even staves off senility.

As has been noted many times, there is probably not a single organ or system in the body that does not benefit from exercise. If someone invented a pill that could do for us all that a moderate amount of exercise achieves, it would instantly become the most successful drug in history.

Our bones do a lot more than keep us from collapsing. As well as providing support, they protect our interiors, manufacture blood cells, store chemicals, transmit sound (in the middle ear), and even possibly bolster our memory and buoy our spirits thanks to the recently discovered hormone osteocalcin.

Until the early years of the twenty-first century, no one knew that bones produced hormones at all, but then a geneticist at Columbia University Medical Center, Gerard Karsenty, realized that osteocalcin, which is produced in bones, not only is a hormone but seems to be involved in a large number of important regulatory activities across the body, from helping to manage glucose levels to boosting male fertility to influencing our moods and keeping our memory in working order.

Apart from anything else, it could help to explain the long-standing mystery of how regular exercise helps to stave off Alzheimer's disease: exercise builds stronger bones and stronger bones produce more osteocalcin. Remarkably, even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn’t spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream (or scoffing ultra-processed fast food ordered online).

These days the legacy newborn babies bring into the world with them isn't a lack of nutrition but the opposite. So they are not only being born into households where people eat more and exercise less, but have an innate and enhanced vulnerability to succumb to the diseases that poor lifestyles bring.

It has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less healthy lives than those of their parents. We aren't just eating ourselves into early graves, it seems, but breeding children to jump in alongside us.

In short you should exercise more, eat less (but healthily) and stop sitting around soiling your sofa!

See also "How to Build a Healthy Brain: Reduce Stress, Anxiety and Depression and Future-proof your Brain" by Kimberley Wilson.

Don't be lured into drinking Semi-Skimmed where everything is removed with the fat and replaced artificially. As my old chum from Unigate Dairy said "If you see what they do to it you'd never touch it".

But did you know …

🔹It is actually called WHOLE MILK meaning you get all the goodness and benefits.

🔹Milk is on average only 4% fat that’s 96% fat free!

🔹Milk and milk products have a good balance of protein, fat and carbohydrate.

🔹Drinking whole milk leaves you feeling fuller for longer.

🔹500ml of milk a day is recommended to obtain the nutrients of concern; potassium, B12, calcium and vitamin D, which are lacking in many diets 🔹Milk is one of the most healthy and nutritious products your money can buy.

What are you waiting for? Pour yourself a glass! Be healthy, drink whole milk! 🥛

Watchet Physical Training & Amateur Boxing Club