What is your favorite way to get to work? Do you like to drive yourself or get on a bus or train? The matter, in which, you do decide to transport yourself daily to work can greatly influence your chances of getting diabetes, high blood pressure, or being overweight. There is a study out that has some amazing results attached to it. This study clearly states that those who commute to work with a bus or train, as opposed to those who drive themselves to work, are those who will lessen their chances to get diabetes, high blood pressure, and being overweight.
Dr. Hisako Tusji, who is the lead author, and director of the Moriguchi City Health Examination Center in Osaka, Japan, along with his colleagues, did present their findings in this study to the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Florida, in 2015.
Being overweight, obesity, and high blood pressure all are the things that do encourage heart disease. They are all well-known factors that do put one at risk for developing heart disease. Heart disease is the condition that is responsible for killing around 610,000 individuals each year in America.
Physical activity can indeed be the one thing to help lessen these risk factors. However, Dr. Tusji and his colleagues do note that this is unclear whether they are influenced in any way by a person’s work commute.
To learn the truth about what is what, the team did assess the data of 5,908 adults from Japan, and participants do undergo a health examination in 2012. Study subjects were also asked how they did get to work each day.
The test subjects were then divided up into three separate groups. These three separate groups were those who did use public transportation by bus or train, the group that walked or cycled to work, and those who got to work by driving themselves there. The average ages of all participants of these three groups were between the ages of 49 to 54 years old.
Public transit users are in better health than walkers and cyclists
Compared to those who drove their cars to work, the participants who made up the public transit to get to work group were the ones, which were at a 44% percentage of not being overweight. 34% percent were less likely to develop diabetes as a rule. 27% were also in the percentage group to not get high blood pressure.
Researchers were very surprised to learn about these very uncommon findings. This is because the risks associated with developing high blood pressure, being overweight, and developing diabetes was low for all those test subjects that did use public transportation as opposed to those who didn’t. The those who didn’t were those who walked or cycled to work straight away.
