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REPs Council Member Ann Gates takes a look at how exercise really could be the best medicine.
Most of these chronic diseases are preventable (and treatable) with diet and exercise.
The health of the nation has reached crisis levels (2).
l Obesity will cost the NHS £45 BILLION by 2050 l Childhood cancers and heart disease will increase dramatically (1/3 children clinically obese)
l The NHS spends £1million an hour on diabetes care (10% of its annual budget), £9 billion per year
l Falls among the elderly cost the NHS £1.7 billion per year l Physical Inactivity costs the NHS £1.5 million per year
This could bankrupt the NHS.
It’s estimated that more people will die in the next 15 years from chronic diseases than were lost in both world wars (1) .
Experts agree that lack of physical activity has an astonishing breadth of harmful health effects and that exercise has a powerful effect on both treatment and prevention of chronic disease and obesity, as well as premature death.
According to Dr Bob Sallis, the American author of Exercise is Medicine and Dr William Bird (MBE) who runs Intelligent Health and is director of the Physical Activity Alliance, physical inactivity is THE major public health problem of our time.
As well as a linear relationship between physical activity and health status they report the greatest improvement is when the least-fit become physically active.