Going downhill may be good for your health

NEW ORLEANS – If exercise is too much of an uphill battle, you may want to try the downside.

A novel study of hikers in the Alps made the intriguing discovery that different types of exercise had different effects on fats and sugars in the blood.

Going uphill cleared fats from the blood faster, going downhill reduced blood sugar more, and hiking either way lowered bad cholesterol.

Both types of hiking are beneficial, but downhill hiking may help diabetics more than the other, said Dr. Heinz Drexel of the Academic Teaching Hospital of Feldkirch, Austria, who reported the research.

Dr. Gerald Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., said the findings could be applied in the real world: People who work in office buildings, for example, could take the stairs one way and the elevator the other, depending on what their exercise goals were.

The Austrian researchers tested both uphill and downhill forms of exercise at a ski hill on 45 healthy people who normally exercised very little. The participants, who made no dietary changes, took three to five hourlong hikes each week. For two months they hiked uphill and rode the ski lift down. The next two months they took the lift up and hiked down.

The researchers were surprised to find that hiking downhill removed blood sugars and improved glucose tolerance, while uphill hiking mostly improved levels of fats called triglycerides.