Moving for just one hour a day can slash your risk of diabetes

The availability of activity trackers is changing this and giving researchers, like Ding, fresh insights into people’s behaviours and activity levels.

So, for the study they looked at 59,325 adult participants who wore activity trackers and followed up with their health outcomes seven years later.

They also looked at the health behaviours of the participants and found that those who were the least active (doing less than five minutes a day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity) were also more likely to smoke, have a poor diet, be overweight and have depression.

After adjusting for these and other possible confounding factors – like age, gender and socioeconomic status – the impact of physical activity on T2D risk was still strong and significant.

“Our study found the more active you are, the lower the risk for T2D,” Ding says, adding that moderate-to-vigorous physical activity can be anything that gets our heart rate up and makes it hard to sing while doing it. These can include gardening or briskly walking stairs.

While those who did about 30-60 minutes of activity a day reduced their risk of T2D by 60 per cent compared with the least active participants, the risks kept dropping for those who were the most active – doing 68 minutes a day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.

The findings are “quite extraordinary but not unexpected”, says Professor Rob Newton from Edith Cowan University’s Exercise Medicine Research Institute.

“As an animal species, humans have evolved over millions of years to be highly physically active every day to survive,” he explains. “When humans are sedentary all of our body systems are compromised, ultimately failing and causing the development of diseases such as T2D.”

While the researchers did not look at the type of physical activity people were doing, gentle or light-intensity activities – like going for a stroll – did not appear to reduce the risk, unless people moved for seven hours or more a day.

“We need to change the narrative and I hope that this paper will contribute,” Newton says. “I can understand the public health messaging to just get people off the couch and moving and to not set too high barriers for people to exercise. However, with T2D we are dealing with a terrible disease that creates enormous illness and ultimately death.”

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If exercise is used as medicine to treat disease, he says, it may not necessarily be pleasant to push ourselves, but it might be the only way and should include resistance exercises, as well as those that increase our heart rate:

“Resistance training increases the quantity and quality of skeletal muscle in the body and this is the major tissue with the capability to reduce glucose in the blood and respond with increased sensitivity to insulin.”

And although any level of physical activity is beneficial, says the CEO of Diabetes Australia, associate professor Sof Andrikopoulos, the more we do, the better we can prevent the progression to T2D.

“This is particularly true for people who are more genetically prone to developing the condition,” he says. “While a healthy diet is clearly important in weight loss and weight loss maintenance, physical activity is critical in improving insulin sensitivity, provides protection to the heart, and indeed for one’s mental health.”

As for Ding’s father, who is “very active”, Ding says that while physical activity reduces the risk it doesn’t eliminate it completely.

Still, she says physical activity plays an important role in diabetes management.

“People who have T2D, when they’re physically active, they’re less likely to have complications, they’re less likely to die prematurely. The story doesn’t stop there when he had his diagnosis.”

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