🧠 Lower your risk of 8 diseases

Most people who exercise still end up with heart disease, dementia, or diabetes. And the advice they get is always the same: do more. More steps, more hours, more consistency…

A recent study published in the European Heart Journal in March 2026 suggests that's the wrong lever to pull…

Researchers tracked 96,408 people wearing wrist accelerometers for seven days, then followed them for nearly nine years.

They looked at who developed eight major diseases including dementia, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and chronic respiratory conditions.

The finding: it wasn't how much people moved that drove the biggest reductions in disease risk. It was how hard they moved.

People who made just over 4% of their total movement vigorous, the kind that makes you briefly breathless, had:

🔸 a 63% lower risk of dementia,
🔸 60% lower risk of type 2 diabetes,
🔸 and 46% lower risk of dying from any cause

…compared to people who did zero vigorous activity.

The threshold was low. Even 15 to 20 minutes per week of breathless effort was enough to produce meaningful reductions across every disease measured.

The researchers found that intensity had a much higher preventive effect than total exercise volume. For dementia specifically, vigorous activity intensity accounted for 32.3% of preventable cases, while total volume only accounted for 8.1%.

When your body hits vigorous intensity, it triggers specific biological responses that lower-intensity movement doesn't: your heart pumps more efficiently, inflammation drops, and your brain releases compounds that protect against cognitive decline.

One of those is BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which I've written about before. Higher-intensity movement is one of the most reliable ways to spike it.

Lately when I’m swimming and start getting out of breath, instead of slowing down or stopping, I push harder and keep going.

What YOU can do with this: 

you don't need a gym or a structured training plan. Climbing stairs quickly, walking fast between errands, a brief jog to the corner, anything that pushes you to the edge of comfortable for a minute or two counts. The bar is lower than most people assume, and it pays off across far more than just fitness.

15-20 minutes. That's nothing. Anyone reading this can find that. If even one person starts taking the stairs hard instead of the lift, that's the whole point of writing this.

See you next Sunday. 👋

—Ernest P.
Founder, Enhancing Brain