Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

english.tau.ac.il

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 112 posts

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#101

Post by anonporridge »

zagrebian wrote: post #3
boplicity wrote: post #2

Note, this isn't for all types of aerobic activity. They're specifically saying that high-intensity aerobics, such as sprinting, are beneficial. > "Our results indicate that unlike fat-burning exercise, which is relatively moderate, it is a high-intensity aerobic activity that helps in cancer prevention," adds Dr. Gepner. "If the optimal intensity range for burning fat is 65-70% of the maximum pulse rate, sugar burni…

Is a daily 7-minute workout enough? I perform it at a very high intensity (40 jumping jacks, 16 push ups). https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/0...

It's absolutely better than nothing. If that's all you can do, keep doing it.

But it's far less than ideal.

Unfortunately, long, low intensity cardio (zone 2 on the order of 4 hours per week) is also incredibly important for longevity and health. You also ideally should be doing some kind of real strength training (e.g. barbells) for 1-3 hours per week for long term well being. A good maximum strength building program is usually going to require 30-60 minutes 2-3x a week. Muscle mass degradation is one of the most significant factors affecting quality of life in later age. You mitigate this decline by a) maximizing your potential in your youth and b) doing consistent maintenance work in your middle to late age.

Again, something is always going to be better than nothing. Sadly, our current society doesn't really allow for people to get an adequate amount of exercise, at least for many white collar workers with families.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#102

Post by tux3 »

SnowHill9902 wrote: post #93

I’d go as far as to say that the burden of proof is on anybody claiming that exercise is not as fundamental as eating, sleeping or breathing. So this study seems obvious or at least reasonable to me.

The burden of proof is generally on the person standing up and making a claim, no matter how obvious the claim is or which side they're trying to prove.

But even when two people make opposite claims and there's no good consensus either way, trying to assign burden of proof by what seems obvious or reasonable isn't a solution. That just takes you back to two people disagreeing about what is obvious or reasonable, it's just going in circles.

Something you can do instead is put burden of proof on the person deviating from the null hypothesis, because everyone can agree on that. Crucially, the null hypothesis does *not* mean the obvious thing, or the expected thing.

In the case of whether breathing is fundamental and healthy, the null hypothesis is that breathing does absolutely nothing. And of course it's not very hard to reject that one, the null hypothesis is clearly wrong here. If it really is obvious, then you shouldn't have a hard time rejecting it and all is right in the world.

But trying to make a claim that's not so easy to prove, and at the same time trying to escape the burden of proof because it 'seems obvious or at least reasonable' harms your ability to notice when you're wrong. It's dangerous and it's bad epistemology.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#103

Post by pedrosorio »

carl_dr wrote: post #63
nradov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age based equations for maximum heart rate are mostly bullshit. More recent research has shown that there is much less decline in maximum heart rate with age, at least for athletes with a decent level of fitness. And there is a huge amount of natural variation between individuals which is often more significant than age effects. Maximum heart rate is also sport dependent. For an equivalent level of fitness, maximum c…

Yeah, not saying it’s a perfect rule, just making the point that the parent’s 160-170bpm is lower than what I’d expect his max to be, using the rule of thumb a lot of people know. (And for what it’s worth, my max heart rate is the same when cycling or running, within a small margin of error. I’ve never thought to ask anyone if it’s the same for them - I will do now!)

> just making the point that the parent’s 160-170bpm is lower than what I’d expect his max to be

Just want to clarify, I mentioned 160-170 bpm as a regular workout I do where I do not feel anywhere near max (I have seen my heart rate get above 190 while running).

I was replying to this:

> For 80-85% of maximum pulse rate...

> If your lungs are burning and you're about to collapse after 30 seconds of activity the intensity is about right.

And saying that going at 160-170 (above 80-85% according to rule of thumb) for a prolonged period of time, I feel none of those symptoms.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#104

Post by Unity99 »

tux3 wrote: post #102
SnowHill9902 wrote: post #93

I’d go as far as to say that the burden of proof is on anybody claiming that exercise is not as fundamental as eating, sleeping or breathing. So this study seems obvious or at least reasonable to me.

The burden of proof is generally on the person standing up and making a claim, no matter how obvious the claim is or which side they're trying to prove. But even when two people make opposite claims and there's no good consensus either way, trying to assign burden of proof by what seems obvious or reasonable isn't a solution. That just takes you back to two people disagreeing about what is obvious or reasonable, it's…

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can state the null hypothesis arbitrarily: "Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing." "Aerobic exercise does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer" / "A sedentary lifestyle does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer." So, in fact your null hypothesis already has a bias of what you consider the baseline, i.e. yes-cancer or no-cancer. So in essence, you are trying to scientize for the sake of argumentation.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#105

Post by stevenwoo »

ck2 wrote: post #12

I know of so many life-long runners that have gotten or even died from cancer. So not sure what to say otherwise but this paper is wrong and needs to be challanged.

The summary says the human studies used 3000 people over twenty years and the 72 percent less compares the humans who did high intensity exercise versus those who did not - it did not state the rate was zero, it was just significantly less in those who did high intensity exercise.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#106

Post by tux3 »

Unity99 wrote: post #104
tux3 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burden of proof is generally on the person standing up and making a claim, no matter how obvious the claim is or which side they're trying to prove. But even when two people make opposite claims and there's no good consensus either way, trying to assign burden of proof by what seems obvious or reasonable isn't a solution. That just takes you back to two people disagreeing about what is obvious or reasonable, it's…

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can state the null hypothesis arbitrarily: "Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing." "Aerobic exercise does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer" / "A sedentary lifestyle does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer." So, in fact your null hypothesis already has a bias of what you consider the baseline, i.e. yes-cancer or no-c…

>"Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing."

Right, but that's because those two are actually the same! The null hypothesis in this case does not directly say whether breathing is good or bad, instead it's a statement about the correlation of breathing to anything at all.

If the null hypothesis is true, then breathing or not breathing doesn't have any effect. So the null hypothesis is not pro-breathing or anti-breathing, the null hypothesis is that it just doesn't matter either way and doesn't correlate with anything (like the person staying alive)

>"Aerobic exercise does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer" / "A sedentary lifestyle does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer."

With both of those, you can also reformulate them to be a statement about correlation. "What is the correlation between the amount of aerobic exercise that you do and the rate of development of metastatic cancer?"

So the null hypothesis doesn't depend on whether you think exercise is good or bad. That's the subtlety. It just says that everything is neutral and nothing has any effect until proven otherwise.

That doesn't mean the null hypothesis is always what makes sense, or that it's what you should believe in. Obviously breathing keeps you alive, and exercise has a lot of benefits. It's just a way to keep people from disagreeing about what's obvious and who should prove what. The null hypothesis is really dumb, and it only says that anyone who claims they found a real effect, either good or bad, should prove it.

If one person is saying red wine causes cancer, and the other person is saying red wine prevents cancer, then they're both rejecting the null hypothesis, which is that you can't claim red wine correlate with anything until proven otherwise.

And I promise this isn't just for the sake of the argument. There's a real difference between the mindset of trying to claim "X is good" or "X causes cancer" because it seems so obvious that someone else should just prove the opposite instead, and the much more boring idea that if something is actually kind of obvious, then you should be able to measure whether it does anything AT ALL in either direction (good or bad), and force the person actually making the claim to reject the null hypothesis.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#107

Post by Unity99 »

tux3 wrote: post #106
Unity99 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can state the null hypothesis arbitrarily: "Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing." "Aerobic exercise does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer" / "A sedentary lifestyle does not increase the probability of developing metastatic cancer." So, in fact your null hypothesis already has a bias of what you consider the baseline, i.e. yes-cancer or no-c…

>"Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing." Right, but that's because those two are actually the same! The null hypothesis in this case does not directly say whether breathing is good or bad, instead it's a statement about the correlation of breathing to anything at all. If the null hypothesis is true, then breathing or not breathing doesn't have any effect. So the null hypothesis is not pro-breathing o…

Thank you for the explanation.

As I understand it, correlation is not sufficient to prove causation. "Null hypothesis" is one statistical tool, an abstraction over our understanding of the real world.

Consider the case where all of those infected with disease D die, while 99% of those infected with D and treated with T survive. Further consider that T is widely administered. Clearly, the correlation between being infected and dying is very low although with a deeper understanding we know that D in fact causes death.

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#108

Post by eggsmediumrare »

boc wrote: post #49

If anyone is looking for an easy way to get their heart rate up to max + exert themselves at max effort without doing anything too crazy, I highly recommend a C2 rowing machine. Set the program to a 5K (or 2K) and do the first half as a warmup, then go all-out for the second half. You'll easily hit your max heart rate and can try to sustain it for a minute. Doing this only takes 10-20 minutes depending on the length…

Max effort 500m row on a C2 is a special kind of awful

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#109

Post by tux3 »

Unity99 wrote: post #107
tux3 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Breathing does nothing" / "Not breathing does nothing." Right, but that's because those two are actually the same! The null hypothesis in this case does not directly say whether breathing is good or bad, instead it's a statement about the correlation of breathing to anything at all. If the null hypothesis is true, then breathing or not breathing doesn't have any effect. So the null hypothesis is not pro-breathing o…

Thank you for the explanation. As I understand it, correlation is not sufficient to prove causation. "Null hypothesis" is one statistical tool, an abstraction over our understanding of the real world. Consider the case where all of those infected with disease D die, while 99% of those infected with D and treated with T survive. Further consider that T is widely administered. Clearly, the correlation between being inf…

>As I understand it, correlation is not sufficient to prove causation. "Null hypothesis" is one statistical tool, an abstraction over our understanding of the real world.

Absolutely. The only reason we use it is because most of the other alternatives turned out to be not that great in practice, but it has plenty of limitations to keep in mind (like correlation != causation, but also the common p-hacking that happens, etc etc).

>Clearly, the correlation between being infected and dying is very low although with a deeper understanding we know that D in fact causes death.

That's true, although working back from just the people who die and focusing on those, the method is eventually able to unearth the correlation too. With the people who die, we would naturally start to ask why them? Did they do anything differently than the rest of the population? We'd see pretty quickly that there was one huge factor in common, which is that none of them were using T.

I'll admit that's not enough to say just looking at correlations and trying to disprove nulls is going to be enough in every case. I would just say it's a pretty good starting point when people disagree on a fundamental level about what should be obvious, or who should be proving what. It's really kind of dumb, but in practice in the case of people missing something (most deficiencies, like not having enough vitamin B12, or not having enough thyroid hormone) stats do a pretty good job of noticing that all the people dying mysteriously happen to be missing the same thing. (But of course it misses plenty of things too. And where it gets a lot harder is understanding why any of this happens)

Re: Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study

#110

Post by sportslife »

nanomonkey wrote: post #77
mrleinad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would swimming work as well? I can see myself doing some laps really fast that will leave me panting by the poolside after 50 mts.

I wouldn't suggest using swimming to calculate your maximum heart rate, as you have less control over when you breath. Also, you don't want to be out of breath anywhere near water, the potential for passing out and drowning is too great. Just put on your heart rate monitor, get warmed up, and then sprint as fast as you can until you collapse, most easily done by sprinting uphill. Note your maximum heart rate recorded…

Just hill sprints will get you a better read than 220-age, but the reason, I believe, lab test build up heartrate gradually is that you don't want to test the abilities of your leg muscles to sprint and recover. Very well trained athletes will notice that they bounce between different body systems limiting their performance as the move through training periods.
Post reply on HN