Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing' • Hacker News Board

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#51

Post by spodek » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

greysphere wrote: post #3

This sounds like one of the billion things correlated with having less money. https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/03/why-people-cities-walk-...

Geoffrey West, former theoretical physicist now at the Santa Fe Institute, found many scaling laws in biology, cities, businesses, and more. One was that people's walking speed scales with city size.

Fascinating results.

Here's a short article about his book, Scale: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2017/07/11/a-physicist-pr.... He's spoken with TED too: https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_....

Here are my podcast episodes with him, where he describes his findings: http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/geoffrey-west.

(I'm a former physicist too who walks fast at 48.)

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#52

Post by synt4x1k0 » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

ollysb wrote: post #11

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I want to find a doc to prescribe me this and also understands the negatives. Why aren't there more docs doing this kind of stuff? Maybe bc it is not so simple?

The side effects can be pretty nasty. I took it for 6 months and the stomach pain and diarrhoea never went away. Berberine however acts on the same pathways as metformin and doesn’t cause the side effects. As a bonus you don’t need a prescription to take it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5867333/

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#53

Post by TruckingThrow » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

philippeback wrote: post #48

I walk slower because I have smaller legs. Pff, but then I can swim faster than quite a lot of younger people, for longer, and daily. And run. WTF.

>I walk slower

I have bad news for you, friend.

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#54

Post by chvid » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

AssTrolladjer wrote: post #23

This shit will not replicate. Classic p-value hacking, if not total fiction, dreamt up to pad chum buckets. It is junk science to the core. I'd bet one thousand dollars that another researcher could wrangle contradictory data with a diametrically opposed result. This trash infotainment has been selected because it is inconsequential to the point of being astrology. No individual can take this "discovery" and apply it…

Reminds me of the article about "cancer-prone personalities" finally being classified as junk science which just dropped off the hn frontpage.

We really should be more generous with the word bullshit.

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#55

Post by TruckingThrow » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

Donald wrote: post #4

Full article is available at the Journal of the American Medical Association's website: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... An interesting take-away not mentioned in the BBC write-up is that the researchers found significant effects as early as three years old, suggesting causal factors found in early childhood or a genetic origin. Perhaps sedentary behavior early in life has long-lasting…

This is possible but I'd really like to see twin studies to confirm it, with differences in activity levels between the twins as the variable.

I would suspect there is a genetic mechanism at play too, but at this point I'm spitballing.

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#56

Post by gerbilly » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

AssTrolladjer wrote: post #23

This shit will not replicate. Classic p-value hacking, if not total fiction, dreamt up to pad chum buckets. It is junk science to the core. I'd bet one thousand dollars that another researcher could wrangle contradictory data with a diametrically opposed result. This trash infotainment has been selected because it is inconsequential to the point of being astrology. No individual can take this "discovery" and apply it…

Your whole post is just an empty argument from authority.

Who are you and why should we just believe what you are saying any more then the study?

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#57

Post by Scoundreller » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #47

david-gpu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you say the exact same thing about regular exercise? And it has minimal side effects, unlike this medication.

Nope. At least not for me. My blood sugar was too high and rising. I exercised all the time and ate a low carb diet. My blood sugar continued to rise, but the spikes were only while I was sleeping. My doctor gave me a prescription, my blood sugar immediately went down and stayed down, and in four months I had lost 25 pounds. I don't feel hungry all the time (a problem that got a lot worse when I cut down on carbs). I…

> My doctor gave me a prescription

For metformin? Or?

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#58

Post by Scoundreller » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #33

Scoundreller wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventative pharmaceutical treatments are, culturally, a hard sell unless you have some documented risk factor better than "life". But if you can find a provider that specializes in "anti-aging", it might be the first thing they reach for. Just don't buy into too much of what they say :) I would say anti-cholesterol medications were vastly marketed/sold and prescribed to those likely to only benefit a bit. The "Numb…

Except in countries with socialised healthcare.

Even they will develop criteria for when they pay for an intervention or not.

Unfortunately, low-value but worthwhile endeavours often go unfunded or underpromoted because the infrastructure makes it too expensive.

Metformin is cheap and large tracts of the population may benefit from taking it proactively, but once you factor in the cost of MD visits for otherwise healthy people, the public benefit can swing into the negatives.

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#59

Post by PopeDotNinja » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

aiexplorations wrote: post #5

At the risk of sounding like confirmation bias, I have found many relatives and friends to adhere to this kind of simple rule. The more agile and active you in middle age, the better your sleep quality probably is, and both of these are a proxy for how well you will age, apart from genes.

A researcher from the University of California, San Francisco posed this trivia question at a Q&A event on healthspan... At age 65, what single factor most accurately predicts the likelihood you'll live to age 100. The answer was walking speed (faster is better). He said that this has been shown in multiple studies, but they weren't sure why. Sorry, I don't have a source.

Re: Slow walking at 45 'a sign of faster ageing'

#60

Post by Markoff » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

well I walk much slower since I walk with small children and I guess it took its toll on even when I walk alone. what's the point reversing to your regular high speed when later you need to drag with children? it's just easier to get used to lower speed. many people at 45 could still have like 5yo child (2nd) or even younger or was the study done only on childless people?