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The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

well.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#21

Post by nickff »

lkesteloot wrote: post #19
corin_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or indeed other causes which could create an accidental correlation. The more you eat the fatter you're likely to be, the fatter you are the harder exercise is, the less of it you're likely to do. The more you smoke, the more out of breath you'll get when exercising, the less of it you're likely to do. These are two examples I personally feel contribute to my not getting as much exercise as I did 10 years ago. If I d…

A well-run study should control for weight and smoking. But the undiagnosed cardiovascular disease can't be controlled for. Exercise is much harder for me than for others, for example, and I don't know why.

You can only control for weight and smoking if you have good data, which is to say that at least a significant portion of the weight and smoking behaviours are not causally linked to the exercise behaviour. If the data is not sufficiently diverse, no amount of statistical power will overcome the garbage-in garbage-out nature of regression.

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#22

Post by 31reasons »

melling wrote: post #8
31reasons wrote: post #7

Studies like these always make me think how little we know about human body. I wonder when are we going to stop doing these kind of studies and learn from human body as purely engineering system. By simulating it at a molecular level and understanding it that way. Where are the chips that mimic cells and help create complete simulation of a trillion+ cell system? We need Elon Musk of human body :)

How about simply being able to better monitor/measure changes in the body?

Changes of what? There are millions of parameters that affect each other in a nonlinear fashion due to genetics, environment, diet etc. Getting such data from the living system would be prohibitively invasive, blood tests have their limitations and doesn't provide real-time data.

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#23

Post by pcurve »

benihana wrote: post #11

For me it always comes back to: what are people's long, long term goals. Overall? Is it a longer life? Do you want to live an extra five years? I personally don't think that's a good goal. I'd much rather be in good shape, mobile, healthy and relatively pain free for my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and as far into my 70s as I can manage than to increase my lifespan from 85-90. It's way less about eking out a few more years of…

Having a goal to live longer isn't too different than having a goal to live healthier. Living healthier and living longer go together, and you can't generally cherry pick.

Of course, if you want to reduce probability of premature death or permanent disability by staying away from dangerous activities and places, then that's a different conversation.

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#24

Post by melling »

31reasons wrote: post #22
melling wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about simply being able to better monitor/measure changes in the body?

Changes of what? There are millions of parameters that affect each other in a nonlinear fashion due to genetics, environment, diet etc. Getting such data from the living system would be prohibitively invasive, blood tests have their limitations and doesn't provide real-time data.

I don't know what can be or should be measured. The idea is to develop better techniques for monitoring the body. A future tricorder X-Prize, for instance: http://tricorder.xprize.org

You're telling me what we can do today. I'm asking what we can develop to solve the problem.

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#25

Post by suprgeek »

A very important detail - these are survey studies: "Of course, these studies relied on people’s shaky recall of exercise habits and were not randomized experiments, so can’t prove that any exercise dose caused changes in mortality risk, only that exercise and death risks were associated."

NOT Randomized controlled trials.

So take these with a pinch of salt and then go outside & run for 30 mins every day.

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#26

Post by msabalau »

benihana wrote: post #11

For me it always comes back to: what are people's long, long term goals. Overall? Is it a longer life? Do you want to live an extra five years? I personally don't think that's a good goal. I'd much rather be in good shape, mobile, healthy and relatively pain free for my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and as far into my 70s as I can manage than to increase my lifespan from 85-90. It's way less about eking out a few more years of…

The trend overall in society has been that people are both living longer lives, and also have shorter periods of morbidity at the end of life.

Moderate exercise would seem to be helpful for both length and quality of life.

Have your cake and eat it too!

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#27

Post by derefr »

lkesteloot wrote: post #19
corin_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or indeed other causes which could create an accidental correlation. The more you eat the fatter you're likely to be, the fatter you are the harder exercise is, the less of it you're likely to do. The more you smoke, the more out of breath you'll get when exercising, the less of it you're likely to do. These are two examples I personally feel contribute to my not getting as much exercise as I did 10 years ago. If I d…

A well-run study should control for weight and smoking. But the undiagnosed cardiovascular disease can't be controlled for. Exercise is much harder for me than for others, for example, and I don't know why.

Do your lungs/throat clog up or shut down? It could be asthma, or, more interestingly, subclinical cystic fibrosis. (CF requires a mutation on two genes, and it's very apparent even from childhood when you have the full form; but there are phenotypic differences in people who only have one of the mutations, such as being resistant to some parasites which are blocked by mucosal thickening(!). The implications of the single-mutation variant on health, though, are AFAIK completely unexplored in medical literature.)

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#28

Post by abecedarius »

msabalau wrote: post #26
benihana wrote: post #11

For me it always comes back to: what are people's long, long term goals. Overall? Is it a longer life? Do you want to live an extra five years? I personally don't think that's a good goal. I'd much rather be in good shape, mobile, healthy and relatively pain free for my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and as far into my 70s as I can manage than to increase my lifespan from 85-90. It's way less about eking out a few more years of…

The trend overall in society has been that people are both living longer lives, and also have shorter periods of morbidity at the end of life. Moderate exercise would seem to be helpful for both length and quality of life. Have your cake and eat it too!

"Shorter periods of morbidity" surprises me -- where'd you get that from? (I would've guessed the opposite, from the stories of people kept alive in hospitals unpleasantly long, but I don't have data.)

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#29

Post by toomuchtodo »

niels_olson wrote: post #14
31reasons wrote: post #7

Studies like these always make me think how little we know about human body. I wonder when are we going to stop doing these kind of studies and learn from human body as purely engineering system. By simulating it at a molecular level and understanding it that way. Where are the chips that mimic cells and help create complete simulation of a trillion+ cell system? We need Elon Musk of human body :)

> simulating it at a molecular level It's a work in progress http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/milic1/ Eukaryotic cells are much more complicated though. It has been estimated we have done 1% of the biological experiments necessary to figure out how a human actually works. Anybody want to fund my prostate cancer biomarker discovery project?

> Anybody want to fund my prostate cancer biomarker discovery project?

Only if you'll fund my endometriosis genome study (I need 25k participants) and the resulting CRISPR/Cas9 gene variant protocol trials ;)

Re: The Right Dose of Exercise for a Longer Life

#30

Post by bhaumik »

>The sweet spot for exercise benefits, however, came among those who tripled the recommended level of exercise, working out moderately, mostly by walking, for 450 minutes per week, or a little more than an hour per day. Those people were 39 percent less likely to die prematurely than people who never exercised.
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