Got high cholesterol or high blood pressure? Would you like to lose a few pounds, improve your fitness level and reduce risks of heart attack? If the answers are yes I have some great news for you!

A study reported in Circulation; Journal of the American Heart Association has come up with some remarkable conclusions. Barnard and colleagues studied 11 obese men aged 38 to 72, who voluntarily enrolled in the Pritikin Longevity Center 21-day program. Seven of the men had hypertension defined as a systolic blood pressure reading of over 140 or diastolic reading of over 90.

The exercise consisted of brisk walking on a treadmill for 45-60 minutes per day. By the end of the 3-week program the blood pressure of all seven previously hypertensive men was normal.

Exercise has been known to improve blood pressure but the extent of this progress in such a short period of time surprised the researchers.

Oxidative stress, the technical term for the presence of oxygen free radicals in the blood, was reduced by 28%. This is extremely significant. Free radicals wound cell membranes and damage DNA codes within the cells nucleus. Free radical damage has been shown to be largely responsible for heart disease, stroke, cancer and Alzheimers disease.

Nitric oxide availability also improved by 28%. Nitric oxide helps prevent heart disease and reduces heart attack risk in several ways, including reducing blood pressure. It also prevents cells in the walls of blood vessels from clogging the arteries.

All of these improvements took place even though the participants lost very little weight. This was no surprise to Steven Blair and his colleagues at the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas who in 1995 studied 25,389 men who had check-ups at the clinic.

As suspected Dr. Blair found, as a group, fat men were more likely to get sick and die early than thinner ones. But the story gets more interesting.

Fat men who were also fit lived as long as fit, thin men. And thinner men who were out of shape were nearly three times more likely to die young than fat men who were fit. In other words, once Blair factored in the mens fitness levels, their weight had no bearing on how long they lived.

Blair was intrigued by the findings. It made him think that Americans fret and obsess about something that may be totally irrelevant for some people: how much they weigh.

Blair has long been highly regarded by obesity researchers. But now he is at odds with some of them. After all, hes found that as long as they get in good shape, people who are overweight by 20 or 30 pounds have no increased risk for mortality.

Up to now, most studies linking obesity to ill health did not factor in the subjects fitness level. And that leads to mistaken results, Blair says, because although excess weight is associated with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and colon cancer, those are exactly the problems regular exercise can help to prevent.

Are you ready to give exercise and smart eating a try? As I was chatting with a new exerciser recently she made a very insightful comment. If I dont do it now I wont be able to do it later.