Study: Activity (fitness) monitors can help us live longer

From the health and fitness section of the NYT – a good article. Here's a link that's a one paragraph excerpt; hit it for the whole article which takes five minutes to read.

Those men and women who, according to their activity trackers, had exercised moderately for at least 150 minutes per week were about 35 percent less likely to have died prematurely than the men and women who, according to their trackers, had been less active, the researchers found.

OK, here's the next two paragraphs –

Those results, while unstartling, do provide the first, scientifically compelling rationale for owning an activity monitor, says Dr. Timothy Church, a professor of preventive medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote a commentary to accompany the new study. When your monitor prompts you to walk for 30 minutes on most days, he points out, it now has objective proof that doing so may extend your life.

He also expects that additional studies will soon begin to pinpoint precisely how much and what types of exercise might lessen our risks for specific diseases, providing findings that could be subsequently incorporated into our activity trackers. The devices could then tell us whether today’s lunchtime walk will have been sufficient to affect our risk for Type 2 diabetes or whether another stroll around the block might be advisable.