Exercise as Preventive Medicine.

Preventing obesity and diabetes, reducing stress, and lowering your blood pressure are among the most obvious boons. Maintaining a fitness regimen can also go a long way toward warding off a stroke. Inactivity can raise your risk for a stroke by as much as 20 percent, research shows, when compared to those who exercise at least four times a week. But the benefits certainly do not end there.

I’ve long promoted the concept that exercise can be viewed therapeutically similar to a “drug” that needs to be taken as prescribed, in appropriate doses. Now other scientists are now starting to recognize the truth of this analogy as well.

In fact, researchers recently suggested that exercise is "the best preventive drug" for many common ailments, from psychiatric disorders to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.4 According to Jordan Metzl, a sports-medicine physician at New York City's Hospital for Special Surgery and author of The Exercise Cure:

"Exercise is the best preventive drug we have, and everybody needs to take that medicine.”

In terms of “dosage,” it’s important to note the changes in recommendations that have taken place over the past few years. While conventional aerobic exercise was long considered the “gold standard” of a good workout, research has refuted such notions.

Instead, high-intensity interval training (which requires but a fraction of the time compared to conventional cardio) has been shown to be far more efficient and effective, compared to longer, slower cardio workouts

from Dr Mercula