Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one cause of death in the U.S. An easy way to help lower your risk is to get the recommended 150 minutes of physical activity per week. Although these recommendations are well known, more than a quarter of all adults don’t meet this goal.
So, how can you get more heart-healthy exercise? According to research from a study published in Environmental Research and presented at the scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology, living in a walkable neighborhood will do the trick.
Walking Towards Heart Health
The research team from the Netherlands spent 11 years monitoring the Dutch population, analyzing a subset of data from Statistics Netherlands. Researchers focused on adults who were 40 years of age or older at the beginning of the study and who did not have a previous history of CVD. They also only included data from those people who did not move to another neighborhood after the study’s start.
