Interesting new research about exercise and depression.

Welcome to Walking is Fitness.

This is a podcast of action providing a little extra motivation to help you keep that fitness promise you made yourself.

Hi, I'm Dave. I started walking for fitness in 2013.

Still take an intentional fitness walk every single day.

I'm walking right now and I would love to have you join me for the next 10 minutes.

Headline, recent headline in the Wall Street Journal, is exercise the best antidepressant.

Is exercise the best antidepressant?

This is not new research.

There have been quite a few research studies focused on exercise and the impact it has on your mood,

whether it's elevating your mood, whether it's fighting depression or anxiety or stress.

And so these researchers actually, they didn't conduct new research.

They went back and found over a thousand controlled studies that looked at this link between

exercise and depression. And these over 1,000 studies, I think, included more than

120,000 people. So this is a pretty large sample size. This is not some small study. Now,

obviously, some of those studies, some of those thousand studies probably did have a much smaller group and some were probably

pretty significant. And they went in and I find this part fascinating, how you go back in and look at the

results of all these studies and then try to find

commonalities. I don't know that I would have the patience to do that, but I do find a process

fascinating. Anyhow, that's what they did. And these studies looked at a variety of things that

people were doing to fight depression, to fight anxiety.

Medication was one of those things, therapy, of course, and included, for some, was exercise.

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