Even for the Overweight, Exercise Helps the Heart TUESDAY, Feb.
7 (HealthDay News) -- Getting and staying physically fit might
help fend off heart disease even if you've put on a few pounds,
new research suggests. "If you would like to reduce the risk of
cardiovascular disease, you want to be cautious about weight
gain but at the same time concerned about maintaining or
improving fitness," said study author Duck-chul Lee, a research
fellow at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia.
Maintaining or improving fitness could somewhat counteract the
increased risk of fat gain, researchers found. On the other
hand, reducing body fat helped make up for the added heart-
disease risk linked with losing fitness. The study is published
in the Feb. 14 issue of the Journal of the American College of
Cardiology. Experts have long known that both fatness and
fitness affect heart-disease risk factors. However, the
researcher say the new study is one of the first to look at how
a change in fitness or fatness (or both) af