Simple fitness, cancer testing and cravings: The week in Well+Being (2024)

But you don’t have to don spandex and schedule 30 minutes of exercise a day to meet your fitness goals. Fitness can happen throughout your day in surprisingly simple ways.

In fact, gym rats who dutifully exercise every day for 30 minutes only to spend the rest of the day in front of a computer aren’t doing themselves any favors. Studies show that if you exercise but also sit for the rest of the day, it’s almost as if you haven’t worked out at all. So if you have adopted a morning workout routine — keep it up. But make sure you’re engaging in small bursts of movement throughout your day.

Here are some tips for making daily exercise a little easier:

Pick up the pace: Hurrying through chores and moving with gusto just a few times a day is linked to a 40 percent lower risk of premature death in adults. Adding a little intensity to our lives pays big dividends for our health, without requiring extra equipment, instruction, gym memberships or time, writes our Your Move columnist Gretchen Reynolds. “Hurry to the bus stop. Rush up the stairs. Play tag with your kids. Romp with the dog. Vacuum the living room with a little extra zing,” she advises.

Just walk (but forget 10,000 steps): The latest science suggests fewer daily steps may be the sweet spot for many of us, depending on our age, fitness and health goals. In a major review of step research on almost 50,000 adults, researchers found that the optimal number of daily steps is less than 10,000 for many people. In general, the pooled data showed that for men and women younger than age 60, the greatest relative reductions in the risk of dying prematurely begin with 8,000 steps a day. For people older than age 60, the threshold was a little lower. For them, the sweet spot in terms of reduced mortality risk came at between 6,000 and 8,000 steps a day.

Try 2-minute bursts of exercise: Scientists call these short bursts of movement “exercise snacks.” Take a 20-second jaunt up and down the stairs at work. Do some jumping jacks or chair squats at your desk. Make a brisk lap around your office several times a day. In one study, healthy college students rapidly climbed and descended three flights of steps, three times a day — in the morning, at lunchtime and again in late afternoon — almost every day for six weeks. They did not otherwise work out. But after six weeks, they had gained significant amounts of aerobic fitness and leg strength.

Make exercise fun: When you do schedule time for exercise, make sure you pick something you enjoy doing. We’ve got advice for:

When her husband was undergoing cancer treatment, Cindy Perez of Southwest Ranches, Fla., learned about a new blood test that could help find early cancers. The 50-year-old said she felt fine, but her husband urged her to take the test anyway.

To her surprise, the blood test — called Galleri — came back positive. Scans revealed a small tumor in her groin and a diagnosis of mantle cell lymphoma, a rare but aggressive form of cancer. She was treated, and now, two years later, she’s in remission. “For me, the test was a miracle,” she said. “A real big miracle.”

Many experts believe that such tests, which analyze substances in the blood that might indicate cancer, represent a remarkable new chapter in cancer detection. These new cancer-detection blood tests — about 20 are in various stages of development — measure cancer “signals,” which are biological substances shed by cancers such as fragments of tumor DNA.

Some can even identify the organ or tissue involved. The tests may be especially useful in finding “silent” cancers — such as pancreatic or ovarian cancer — which often don’t cause symptoms until the disease is advanced and more difficult to treat.

“It opens up a whole new world,” said Eric Klein, a scientist at the health-care company Grail who developed Galleri, a multi-cancer detection test. “It’s the unmet need we face in cancer.”

To learn more, you’ll want to read our fascinating report from science writer Marlene Cimons.

I know someone who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s in her 40s and totally healthy. Why do people like her get cancer?

Cancer rates among people younger than 50 — called early-onset cancer — have been on the rise worldwide since 1990. Men and women in their 40s represent the largest portion of those diagnoses.

While early-onset cancer rates are rising for many kinds of cancers — including breast, uterine, colorectal and prostate — they’re still relatively infrequent. In 2019, early-onset colorectal cancer occurred at a rate of 5.7 per 100,000 people (up from 3.5 in 1990), and breast cancer occurred at a rate or 13.7 per 100,000 people (up from 9.6 in 1990) worldwide.

This is why asking family members about their health history is crucial — it will affect when your physician recommends you get your first mammography or colonoscopy, and whether you may need more genetic testing. About a quarter of patients with early-onset colorectal cancer, for instance, have a family history that would have warranted screening earlier than age 45 — a missed opportunity to catch or even prevent those cancers early.

To learn more, read the full answer from Trisha S. Pasricha, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. And she’s ready to answer your questions! Use our Ask a Doctor form to submit a question, and we may answer it in a future column.

Here are a few things that brought us joy this week.