Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're talking about the relationship between cancer treatment and exercise.

For years, the standard advice for someone going through cancer treatment has been simple. Just rest. The belief has long

been that the body has to slow down and conserve energy to cope with the intensity of the

treatment. However, recent research is challenging this long-held notion. What if your body

doesn't need to slow down? What if it actually needs to speed up? Today, I'm joined by Dr.

Jessica Scott, whose groundbreaking research is reshaping our understanding of the best

path to recovery for cancer patients. Tell me about what your research has discovered

about exercise and cancer?

Yeah. So with exercise, oncology, it's a fairly new field. Again, 20 years ago, the message was

just rest and take it easy. So one of the first layers of evidence that we looked at was

observational. So this is taking a large number of

patients and asking them, how much exercise do you do? And what we found with that is that if

patients reported doing at least two and a half hours of exercise per week, They have about a 30% reduced risk of developing

cardiovascular disease. So that's a pretty big number, and that suggests that exercise is really

beneficial. So just to make sure I got that right, you're saying that you did this big survey

effectively, and you saw that for patients who were doing

two and a half hours or more exercise a week, there was actually a 30% reduction in cardiovascular

disease, so a really big reduction. Yeah. So that's the first line of evidence showing that is

really important. And we also did a study showing that it's not too late to start exercising.

So typically in an observational study, you ask the exercise question at one time point.

And in a study looking at adult survivors of childhood cancers, we asked the questionnaire

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