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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."
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.
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I've thought about quitting smoking, but I always figured my lack of exercise would kill me long before the smoking did. Now I have scientific proof that my theory was sound! Thank you, JAMA, for setting my mind at ease!
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.
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The world is an infinitely interesting place that you and I will never have any idea of understanding a fraction of it. If you're bored, that's your problem. Pick something to do and quit being such a pussy.
I don't respond to AC's.
"There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk,"
Spoken like a true statistician. However, the statement is provably false. Rhabdomyolysis in the Crossfit community is a thing. There are levels of exercise that expose you to risk, however extreme they might be. The fact that putting yourself into a "group" that is statistically healthier does not mean you are risk-free. That statement just strikes me as completely moronic, though I didn't RTFA so maybe he qualified it at some point, I don't know.
This is not an argument against fitness. I absolutely believe in being fit and it's obvious that being fit improves and extends life, in general. But to make a blanket statement like ""There is no level of exercise or fitness that exposes you to risk" is just naïve or lazy.
I quit smoking, stopped eating junk food, didn't drink and gave up on promiscuous sex.
Worst 15minutes of my life.
This study does not prove what it purports to prove. Namely, that people who are currently sedentary will live longer and be healthier if they change their habits to get more exercise.
In order to show that, you would need to recruit sedentary people, then create an experimental group and a control group, and randomly assign participants to one group or the other. The control group would simply be monitored. The experimental group would receive an intervention that (ideally) caused them to exercise more. All participants would be tracked until death and then you could see whether the intervention was successful.
The flaw in the current study is the assumption that sedentary habits are the CAUSE of high mortality. But it may simply be that some underlying trait (such as diet or a metabolic disorder) is responsible for both the sedentary habit AND the higher mortality. In other words, maybe healthy people are more likely to go exercise in the first place, because they have more energy and feel good.
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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.
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Did you really check the funding? I saw the study was done by the Cleveland Clinic which is pretty well respected but it wasn't apparent what the funding source was.
The fitter your body, the better it is able to handle strain on your system. That level of fitness is improved by exercise (straining your system), but in degrees. Equally important to improving fitness are adequate rest and recovery along with proper nutrition.
There is of course such a thing as over training which will decrease your fitness. The study didn't measure how much people exercised. It measured how fit they were. The fitter people were, the longer they lived and there did not seem to be a point at which improved fitness didn't improve their chances at a longer life.
The study didn't say that there was no upper limit on how fit a person could be. My guess is that there's a certain level of fitness a person can achieve beyond which it becomes very difficult to become any fitter.
Not sure how serious to take this post but as someone who was once young and now is not, I can say that even people in their 30's have a pretty distorted view of what people in their 50's or older are capable of physically.
Anyway, in the most recent Twin Cities marathon, there were 352 male finishers that were between the ages of 50 and 54. The best overall finish in this group was 44th. That was 44th out of nearly 7500. Those 352 didn't include women or the hundreds of finishers that were over the age of 54.
So you can absolutely run over the age 50. I do.