LAHORE: It’s a nice day, and you’d like to take a run. But your only route is along a busy road, breathing in traffic fumes. Or maybe your doctor has recommended more exercise, but you live in a city and can’t escape the air pollution. Which is worse – not exercising, or breathing in the bad air? Now, a British study has gone a long way towards answering that question. When middle-aged Londoners were forced to walk in either green and lovely Hyde Park, or along traffic-clogged Oxford Street nearby, their hearts and lungs spoke the truth. Breathing in that pollution was bad. “In all participants, irrespective of their disease status, walking in Hyde Park led to an increase in lung function,” the researchers wrote in the Lancet medical journal. And pulse wave velocity – a measure of stiffened arteries – fell in everyone. The benefits lasted a full day. It might seem obvious, but it hasn’t been clear if the drawbacks of air pollution counteract the benefits of exercising. “Our findings suggest that healthy people, as well as those with chronic cardiorespiratory disorders, should minimize walking on streets with high levels of pollution because this curtails or even reverses the cardiorespiratory benefits of exercise,” the researchers wrote. “Instead, walking exercise should be enjoyed in urban green space areas away from high density traffic.” The researchers recruited 120 volunteers, 60 years and older, 80 of whom who had mild heart or lung disease. “They’re the canaries in the coal mine,” said George Thurston, an expert on the health effects of air pollution at the New York University School of Medicine. The volunteers are a little more vulnerable to the effects of pollution than the average healthy person 20 years younger. Participants were randomly assigned by drawing numbered disks at random from a bag to do a two-hour walk either along a commercial street in London (Oxford Street) or in an urban park,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Lancet medical journal. That was important, because other studies trying to tease out the effects of exercise, or pollution, or both, haven’t been able to show whether there is something different about people who choose not to exercise, or those who live in polluted areas. “This very interesting new study gets around that limitation, by getting the participants to do things they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to do as part of their normal activity. That is, it’s a real experiment,” said Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University in Britain, who was not involved in the study. The team measured how much pollution the volunteers breathed in and measured heart and lung function. Even though London is not one of the world’s most notoriously polluted cities, there is a lot of diesel pollution in downtown streets such as Oxford Street, and there is much less in nearby Hyde Park, with its trees, bushes and grassy spaces. Published in Daily Times, December 11th 2017.