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For many of us, it's easy to rationalize a second helping of buttery mashed potatoes or a hefty wedge of cake if we follow it up with a brisk walk. But a small study funded by the British Heart Foundation suggests that a long walk before eating a rich meal might be one way to stave off the effects of high-fat foods on blood vessel function.1
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Building on a body of evidence that indicates exercise can reduce postprandial lipid levels by 20% to 25%, the researchers hypothesized that premeal exercise also could soothe the damage wrought by those fats on the blood vessel endothelium, the layer of flat cells that lines the vessel walls.
Endothelial dysfunction and inflammation are central to the progression of plaque formation and have implications for long-term risk of vascular disease.
A group of 10 centrally obese men, with waists measuring more than 100 centimeters (39.4 inches), were compared with 10 lean men, with waists less than 90 centimeters (35.4 inches). On one afternoon, the men walked for 90 minutes on a treadmill before eating a high-fat meal containing 80 grams of fat and 70 grams of carbohydrate. On another day, the men were instructed not to exercise at all before indulging in the feast of whipping cream, fruit, cereal, nuts, and chocolate.
Each man had two oral fat-tolerance tests, with blood drawn when he was fasting and several times during the 8 hours after the high-fat meal. In both groups, exercise lowered fasting and postprandial triglycerides by 25%.
Assessment of microvascular function after each trial showed that endothelium-dependent function was 25% better after exercise than after no exercise in both the obese and the lean men.
"This is likely to be clinically important as endothelial function measures predict future cardiovascular events and do so independently of conventional risk factors," the researchers report.
"All people need to be more physically active, period, every day of the week. Thus, ideally, people should always have been active prior to any meal," says exercise physiologist Robert A. Robergs, PhD, of the University of New Mexico. "However, the 90 minutes of walking was somewhat atypical due to such a long time of continuous exercise."
The study supports recommendations that people at risk for diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and cardiovascular disease who are deemed able to exercise engage in physical activity prior to eating a large meal.
"Such exercise can only provide positive health benefits for improved
dilation of blood vessels, as well as for what I would argue to be more
important reasons, such as caloric expenditure, body-composition improvement
(less fat and more muscle), bone-density maintenance, and cardiovascular
health," Robergs says. "I view this data to be just another reason
to be more active." 
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