The latest news from the research world …

We weren’t thrilled by this study from Indiana University that found that people with neat houses tend to be more physically active. Nearly 1,000 residents of St. Louis between the ages of 49 and 65 had their health evaluated as well as the tidiness of the interior and exterior of their homes. Finding: Those folks who kept up the inside of their homes tended to be in better shape. But was there a chicken-and-egg thing at work here? “If you spend your day dusting, cleaning, doing laundry, you’re active,” said NiCole Keith, one of the researchers. Some people may not be inclined to “take 30 minutes to go for a walk, but they’ll take 30 minutes to clean.”

Learn more here.

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Occasionally, we run across a no-duh study, such as this one out of the University of Alberta, which found that the benefits derived from a “traditional aerobics program” exceed those from a walking program. Of 128 “inactive” guys and gals between the ages of 27 and 65 who were divvied up and enrolled in the aforementioned classes over a six-month period, the sweaty aerobics types “showed significantly greater reductions in”:

• Systolic blood pressure (that’s the top number in your blood pressure reading, which represents the maximum pressure exerted when the heart contracts).
• Rating of perceived exertion (your RPE represents how hard you’re working).
• Ventilatory threshold (point at which respiration becomes more difficult during progressively harder exercise).
• Peak VO2 (measure of how much oxygen your body can take in and use).

Also not surprisingly, the “adherence rate” for walkers (92 percent) was higher than for the aerobics people (77 percent). Moral: Work harder, reap more benefits but also run the risk of getting burned out and quitting.

Learn more here.

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Worried that stress is stressing your cells and making them age faster? A study from the University of California San Francisco finds that as little as 14 minutes a day of vigorous physical activity can keep the shoelace tips of your DNA from coming apart and letting your genes unravel. That’s a lay interpretation, those “shoelace tips” being the “telomeres,” or ends of your DNA that can become frazzled by stress. Exercise hard and those telomeres stay the same length, keeping your genes and chromosomes stable.

Learn more here.