Official: walking makes you live forever.

OK, not quite, but evidence coming out of Cambridge strongly suggests that even light exercise of just 20 minutes daily (which in most people's currency is the equivalent of walking one mile) has a significant effect on longevity. Perhaps more accurately we might say it restores the years which a lifetime of sloth and inactivity would have subtracted. This is certainly good news for me as I try to walk more like 10 miles a week, and throw in a bit of ascent in for good measure.


Interestingly, this evidence comes only a couple of weeks after research from Harvard was published suggesting that with a few notable exceptions such as smoking, most fatal illnesses are randomly distributed across the population and not genetically pre-determined. This certainly accords with my observations over a lifetime of practising medicine, which suggested to me that the random fickle finger of fate seemed to point at people with little rhyme or reason. Take my second wife Sue for example, who was as thin as a pencil, vegetarian and took plenty of exercise but nonetheless succumbed to an unusually virulent form of breast cancer at just forty-five years of age.


Way back in the seventies I remember talking to an experienced consultant physician about the best way to live a long time and he responded:
"It's all about diet and exercise really. That and a bit of luck."
Forty years on and you still can't fault those words...