Don’t Want Cancer? Start Moving.

As the temperatures continue to fall, the motivation for many of us to get up off the couch and exercise is increasingly a challenge.

It’s our instinct to curl up, stay warm, eat more, sleep more, and move around less.

But if the possibility of breast cancer is a concern because of family history or other reasons, one more study confirms that worry is another reason to up your game. In other words, get outside (or at the very least on a mini trampoline in front of the TV) and start exercising.

Here’s the deal: Doubling the standard weekly recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate intensity (or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity, or a combination of these) could pay significant dividends when it comes to reducing breast cancer risk.

The Alberta, Canada, study of 400 postmenopausal women found that those who ramped up their exercise times lost more weight and more fat, as might be expected.

Even more encouraging, these changes translated into a 5-10 percent lower risk of breast cancer.

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Christine M. Friedenreich of the University of Calgary, the lead researcher on this study,  emphasized strongly the health benefits of doubling the exercise recommendation.

But breast cancer isn’t the only cancer linked to a reduced risk with exercise. The same holds true for prostate cancer.

In a study, published Nov. 17, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center outlined how nearly half of lethal prostate cancer cases in the United States would be prevented if men followed five or more healthy habits. Among those habits, is exercise.

“It’s interesting that vigorous activity had the highest potential impact on prevention of lethal prostate cancer. We calculated the population-attributable risk for American men over 60 and estimated that 34 percent of lethal prostate cancer would be reduced if all men exercised to the point of sweating for at least three hours a week,” lead author Stacey Kenfield, an assistant professor in the urology department at UCSF Medical Center, said in a university news release.

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Exercise doesn’t hurt the rest of us either. The World Health Organization recently came out with recommendations of moderate physical activity to combat the risk of chronic disease. The WHO now recommends two and a half hours of moderate exercise per week for some health benefit and five hours of moderate exercise per week for additional benefit.

There are no recommendations for physical activity levels to combat cancer risk specifically, but the WHO again cites countless studies that point to a correlation between increased physical activity and a lower risk of death from breast, colorectal and prostate cancers.

Backing up the recommendations is another recent study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine: Researchers concluded that current physical activity recommendations from WHO reduce cancer mortality in both the general population and cancer survivors.

The authors of the study concluded, after reviewing 71 studies of physical activity and cancer death risk in the general population or among cancer survivors, that people in the general population who got at least two and half hours of moderate activity like brisk walking, per week, were 13 percent less likely to die from cancer than those with the lowest activity levels.

Perhaps even more significant, researchers found exercise after a cancer diagnosis reduced cancer death risk more than pre-diagnosis exercise. “We infer that physical activity after a cancer diagnosis may result in significant protection among cancer survivors.”