The Swedish study lasted 18 months. It involved 120 obese and unfit women between the ages of 30 and 60 with a waist circumference of at least 88 centimetres. The subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, a control group that focused on walking and an intervention group that focused on cycling. The results show that a larger proportion of the women in the intervention group (39%) cycled two kilometres or more per day than the women in the control group (9%). And a positive side-effect was that car-driving dropped by 34 per cent.

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