Exercise does much more than just burn calories. The calories burned during exercise, unless you’re a professional athlete, make up a very small portion of our total calories burned for the day; what we eat has a much greater influence on our body weight. So why should we bother to exercise? The answer is that burning calories is just one of the many benefits of exercise.

For example, in the chapter titled “Nutritional Excellence, Not Drugs” in my book, The End of Heart Disease, I discuss how exercise is an important component in attaining excellent health: “When you change to a Nutritarian diet-style, cut the salt out of your diet, exercise regularly, and lose weight, you remove inflammation, reduce atherosclerosis, and eliminate the inflammation of the endothelium. In other words, the causes of high blood pressure are eliminated, and the blood vessels begin to heal themselves.”