CBS News Canada - Moderate daily exercise can help fend off the common cold, new research suggests.

Older women who walked for a half-hour daily for a year reported half the number of colds as women of similar age who didn’t exercise, U.S. researchers report in the November issue of the American Journal of Medicine.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence that exercise prevents infection, and colds in particular,” said the study’s lead author, Cornelia M. Ulrich, an associate member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Her team’s study is the first randomized clinical trial to look at the impact of moderate physical activity on the actual number of colds contracted, she said.

The study results make sense to David Nieman, a professor of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., and a veteran researcher of the exercise/colds link. In his own research, Nieman found that walkers experienced half the number of days of cold symptoms as non-exercisers. Read the full article