Lessons From a Lemur and a Legend – You’ve Got to Move it

My daughter Kate loves the part in the delightful cartoon movie Madagascar 2 when the Lemur character sings “I like to move it, move it!” It’s fun and funny and it makes you want to…well, move it! Which means we all got a life saving advice from a cartoon because if we want to live longer, we’ve got to move it…like hitting the treadmill.But some new research shows you don’t need to jog for the full length of a Dreamworks picture. In fact, you only need to stay on it for 15 minutes. Most exercise physiologists will still say exercising 30 minutes or more a day is the gold standard for fitness and good health, but the new information indicates all it takes is 15 minutes a day -- or 92 minutes a week -- to increase your expected lifespan by three years.

That's the word from researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Department of Epidemiology, who also found that a person's risk of death from any cause decreased by 4 percent for every additional 15 minutes of exercise up to 100 minutes a day.

The bottom line, for a longer healthier life, listen to the lemur…you’ve got to move it, move it!