Simply walking is good for our health. This fact is so evident today, however it was not so evident just a hundred years ago. In fact, until the late 1940s, there was no evidence that physical exercise was healthy.
It was Jeremy Morris , a doctor with the British Medical Research Council, who found a relationship between activity levels and the incidence of heart attacks and coronary heart disease.
Not just age
Until then, medicine only considered that it was age and stress that could cause a heart attack. But Morris came up with a way to look into this question in times of economic starvation: Great Britain was still recovering from the war and there was not much funding .
Looking for an inexpensive way to investigate, he turned to the typical London double-decker buses . In all these buses there were always two workers: the driver (always seated) and the conductor (always standing, and they also climbed an average of 600 steps per shift).
Over two years, Morris followed a total of 35,000 drivers and debt collectors, finding that after adjusting for other variables, drivers were twice as likely to have a heart attack as collectors .
Although today there are quintals of scientific literature that reveals all the benefits that underlie physical activity, as Bill Bryson explains in his book The Human Body :
It was the first time anyone had demonstrated a direct and measurable link between exercise and health.