Not Exercising Worse For Your Health Than Smoking, Diabetes and Heart Disease, Study Reveals (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: We've all heard exercise helps you live longer. But a new study [published in the journal JAMA Network Open] goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease. Researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent exercise treadmill testing at Cleveland Clinic between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2014 to measure all-cause mortality relating to the benefits of exercise and fitness. Those with the lowest exercise rate accounted for 12% of the participants. Dr. Wael Jaber, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and senior author of the study, said the other big revelation from the research is that fitness leads to longer life, with no limit to the benefit of aerobic exercise. Researchers have always been concerned that "ultra" exercisers might be at a higher risk of death, but the study found that not to be the case. "There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk," he said. "We can see from the study that the ultra-fit still have lower mortality."

Comments

Worked for me

[MikeDataLink]

I had high blood pressure, borderline blood sugar levels, anxiety, and a big belly.

I started an evening exercise routine, lost 30 lbs. Blood pressure is perfect, blood sugar normal, anxiety gone, and my pants fit again.

Re:Worked for me

[F.Ultra]

I also significantly reduced my calorie intake by cutting junkfood mostly.

Not that it's not great that you exercise but the real answer to you feeling better is what you did here. Weight loss (which mostly comes from calorie restriction and not exercise, however exercise is great for many other things) is THE major indicator for improving health vitals in all studies.

Re:Worked for me

[alvinrod]

I've heard the opposite and that it actually takes pathetically little effort to get a large amount of benefit, as in 15 minutes of brisk walking each day and it's going to have an impact. This has even been previously covered on Slashdot.

If you want to look like Mr. Universe or something like that, obviously you'll need to do a substantial daily workout, but basic health benefits don't require all that much. Just because you don't look like a gym rat doesn't mean that you're completely unhealthy. The minimum amount of exercise might not let you run a marathon in anything approaching a good time, but it will mean you live longer and will probably be happier as well.

Re:Worked for me

[Powercntrl]

Face it, our biology did not develop over tens of thousands of years for sitting around most of the time.

You'd think this would be something they could fix with genetic engineering by looking at feline DNA. Cats are lazy as fuck and seem no worse for it.

What if I don't WANT to have a long life?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Seriously ... what if I don't *want* to have a long life? There are a lot of old people out there who are bored, lonely, and too healthy to have any hope of dying anytime soon. That's a worse fate than having a decent life and then dying before it starts to suck. I'm 47 now, and everything is fantastic -- family, career, home, etc. Ideally, I would like to die at 52, but I'd like to have unlimited 5-year extensions available. I don't want to find myself sitting around at 80 with nothing to do and wishing I was dead. I'd rather *be* dead.

Re:What if I don't WANT to have a long life?

[Misagon]

The point is not to become old.
The point is to be healthy when you have become old.

It is when you have realised that you will never be able to do the things that you want to do that you wish you'd rather be dead.

Yes, but what about booze and drugs?

[petes_PoV]

a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease.

What I need is a list of options. How to balance the things I like with the things that will prolong my life to a reasonable extent (so I can continue enjoying myself).

While it might be nice to live to a grand old age, for most people their ability to be happy in old age is limited by available cash, friends / relatives who still survive (I.e. a support network) and the physical and mental faculties to enable independent thought and movement.

Another important point, not mentioned, is that of diminishing returns, At what point does the extra time required for exercise, including preparation, travel, showering, laundry, etc. take up more of a person's life than it is likely to extend it by? If someone spends an hour at the gym, 4 days a week (plus another hour for travelling, showering, etc) that is 400 hours a year. That is hours taken not from your *life* but from your quality time: after sleeping, chores, work, commuting, etc. That could easily be 25% of all your discretionary leisure time. So over 40 years of working, that amount of exercise would need to extend your life by an additional 10 years just to make up for the "lost" quality time you spent doing it.