Duh.

Forgive me if I used that single-word intro before, but sometimes it's the only suitable response for the results of certain health-and-fitness studies.So after such a single-word intro, you might be able to imagine the conclusion of a University of Regina in Saskatchewan study designed to determine the characteristics of physically fit kids. Surprise, surprise, the researchers found a link between how physically fit kids between the ages of 9 and 17 are and how often they go outside.Research quite worthy of the "duh" response if you ask me, and so is the quote from lead author Lee Schaefer that most Reuters articles about the research included. Schaefer summarized the study this way: "If we can get students outside more often, they are going to be more active."So why I didn't include this study in last week's column about simple ways to improve fitness? Because "simple" and "obvious" are not synonyms. And because I try to create columns that don't insult your intelligence.So let's continue last week's theme and suggest additional simple ways to improve your health and fitness while also striving to stimulate your thought process.Monitor and minimize your sugar consumptionYeah, yeah, I know this advice sounds as obvious as Schaefer's and that any regular reader of this column knows that consuming more than 10 percent of your total daily caloric intake as sugar makes it so much easier to gain unwanted weight (especially if your diet is also high in fat). But a study from New Zealand suggests that checking the scale is not the best way to determine if you're ingesting too much sugar.Researchers from the University of Otago perused and then pooled all the research done between 1965 and 2013 where the amount of sugar and non-sugar carbohydrates were measured and compared that to the subjects' cholesterol and blood pressure levels. What they found in 49 relevant studies was a correlation between high cholesterol and high blood pressure levels and the amount of sugar consumed.Again, this conclusion might strike you as obvious, but there's a part to it that's not. The correlation was independent of weight gain.In other words, a subject who managed to maintain a normal weight despite frequently satisfying his sweet tooth was just as likely to have high cholesterol and high blood pressure as the subject with the same sweet tooth and gained too much weight because of it.In essence, this study suggests what the food industry has refuted for some time: that the body processes sugar differently than other types of carbohydrates. While sugar's effect on both cholesterol and blood pressure was deemed "relatively modest" by the spokesperson for the researchers, it did increase surprise, surprise when the studies funded by the food industry were eliminated.Recognize the relationship between sugar and fat"Synergism" is the term for when the total effect of the incorporated elements is greater than the sum of their parts. It's why certain foods get paired together, such as corn and lima beans. Eat them together and you receive all the essential amino acids needed to build and maintain muscle.Synergism has an opposite, unfortunately. Sometimes you can pair negative elements and encounter worse than the sum of their parts.Research published this summer in Experimental Physiology found serious negative synergism when rats were fed both too much sugar and too much fat. In other words, an imitation of the typical American diet now mimicked by most of the industrialized world.University of Naples researchers restricted the movements of laboratory rats to mirror the lack of exercise in sedentary adults and then fed them a low-fat diet, a high-fat diet, or a high-fat diet that was also high in fructose. After two weeks, the rats' livers were checked.The rats consuming the high-fat and high-sugar diet had poorer liver function, more of a buildup of fat in the liver, and their livers were not as sensitive to insulin harbinger of the human disease now at an all-time high, type 2 diabetes. Research like this not only helps to explain that occurrence, but also sheds light into how strict adherence to certain low-carb diets (which by their nature need to be high in fat) work for certain overweight individuals.Pay attention to thosefew extra poundsMuch has been written about whether you can be both fit and fat. Like so many elements of health and fitness, this is best determined on a case-by-case basis.Despite that, the general belief has always been that being overweight by 20 pounds or so taxes the heart.By using a new genetic method of testing, however, Swedish researchers found that the taxing takes place well before that. In fact, their research revealed that any increase in your body mass index (BMI) of one unit the equivalent to gaining a few pounds increases your risk of heart failure by 20 percent. The study, published last summer in PLOS Medicine, also confirmed that obesity creates higher insulin values and increased the risk of diabetes.