Health-and-Fitness online information.

When it comes to public health recommendations for diet and exercise, Americans often receive conflicting messages. Remember the bran craze? After stuffing it into everything that went into our mouths, we learned that bran's role in reducing heart disease risk wasn't quite as dramatic as once suspected.

Now it seems that squeezing in multiple 10-minute spurts of exercise throughout the day may not burn calories as efficiently as doing it all in one shot.

Janet E. Fulton, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, measured the calorie expenditures of 30 active middle-age women over the course of three days. On one day, the women walked briskly for 30 minutes; on the next, the exercise was broken into three 10-minute walks; on the final day, the women didn't exercise at all.

Results indicated that when the women engaged in 30 minutes of continuous walking, their total energy expenditures for the day amounted to 2,181 calories, as opposed to the 2,121 burned when walking in 10-minute intervals. This 60-calorie difference could translate into a significant reduction in weight over time, roughly five pounds per year.

"This small study," Fulton explains, "is merely suggestive, leading to more questions rather than answers." One question that begs further inquiry is how energy expenditures change over longer periods of time; for example, would the results of this study be any different if these same women were tracked over a six-month period, as opposed to just three days?

Still, Fulton touts the benefits of a 10-minute walk. "It all depends on the audience you are trying to reach and the activity level of that audience. You can't get to 30 minutes without first conquering 10."

# posted by Medical Information : 3:36 AM