Excercise in futility – Why exercise alone won't save us | Hacker News Reader

Excercise in futility – Why exercise alone won't save us

theguardian.com

38 pointspseudolus44 comments

Personal health is a hugely frustrating topic. It is obviously important, but it seems like the knowledge in the space is constantly contradicted and plagued by bad science.

Are eggs bad for you? How about fat? Should I be vegan? Or is meat fine too? What about artificial sweeteners? How much should I exercise? What kind of exercises are important for long term health? Is a standing desk beneficial?

All of these questions have multiple contradictory answers. Why are these questions so hard to answer?

Look for some very fit celebrities who made millions through their looks.

Do what they do.

No problem. I will hire a personal nutritionist, get a magic hormone cocktail, spend more time then I have at the gym, and travel back in time and edit my parents DNA.

Don't forget a blood boy. You gotta have a blood boy.

It's hard to imagine worse advice. Looking good by societal standards and being healthy are probably anti-correlated.

I agree with what you said, if what you meant by "worse" is "better" and by "anti-correlated" you actually meant "correlated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

Except we're no longer in an environment that exerts the same actual selective pressures. This leads to an unhealthy excess, just like it does with many of the other natural urges like the preference for highly processed, high-calorie, sugar-dense foods.

Aha, but that's not true. We're an in environment that exerts more real and perceived selective pressures than ever before, and influenced by orders of magnitude more people than we were even a hundred years ago.

Health and fitness, physically, are indicators that (A) somebody has time to invest in their wellbeing, (B) actively invests that time (C) is more likely to survive illness, injury, etc. (D) is more likely to be successful due to social implications halo effect, yadda yadda.

I'm not going to argue that there aren't maladaptive traits related to health and beauty that pop up all over the place: physical ones like eating disorders, behavioral ones like narcissism.

But, "train regularly -- three to five times a week -- plus eat a high-protein low-processed sugar diet, like celebrities do when they're training for roles" is nowhere close to unhealthy excess. A lot of people just find it very difficult to do.

The thing you're missing is that evolution selects for reproductive fitness of genes. That is a very different quality metric than individual well-being.

"Evolution selects for" sounds a lot more planned than it is.

Reality: Fitness primarily means "these genes survived the winnowing process."

It's a little more complicated in that, for example, you see more mutations of genes (at least in germs) in high stress environments. But genes don't sit around asking each other how we are going to take over the world like little DNA movie criminal masterminds. Instead, the ones that don't die the most "win."

Exactly right. But the point is that what looks good or is socially or sexually attractive is not necessarily healthy. You genes don't care if you're happy or if you feel good. All they "care" about is that you make babies that survive long enough to make babies themselves. (And they "care" about this in the same way that water "cares" about going downhill.)

They hire personal trainers, bust their ass for six months to look good in a scene, and a year later they're on the cover of the national enquirer in a bathing suit looking like shit again. That is exactly what not to do.

A lot of those fit celebrities are heavily geared. It's pretty obvious if you know what to look for. They would never pass a WADA test. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up with serious long-term health problems.

Because how healthy a food is can vary with gut biome and genetics, and those are hard to control for. Exercise is also big on genetics. Isolating with high confidence whether something is good or not requires large, international datasets with people who consistently report exact quantities of everything they eat and do for decades. Since the budget for that is very rare, the best we can do is to run the same study several times on different populations. Often, studies measuring the same thing will vary in methodology, which requires even more studies to control for those.

This attitude reads as analogous to 'we need to study climate change.' Technically true, but 80+% of the subject is well understood:

Mix of plant and animals favoring plants, protein and fats for nutrition, lots of fiber, carbohydrates to make up your energy needs, sugar sparingly. Stay active.

worry about the smaller tricky stuff after you've mastered the basics.

Yeah, this approach is fine for me. I have the time and money to follow it. Just like the problems posed by climate change, we need an exact understand of the problems we are presented with so that we can create good solutions to them.

> Why are these questions so hard to answer?

At a micro level, because collecting accurate data on the best diet or the best workout system is functionally impossible and because a lot of the people who are theoretically researching these questions have a ton of conflicts of interest.

At the macro level, these questions basically are answered: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Exercise regularly with a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training (i.e. lift something and run/bike/swim somewhere).

The problems come when people:

- get overly bogged down in super-specific details of diet and exercise

- get overly invested in finding outliers to the broad guidelines

- think they're going to find some magic bullet combination of these things that will let them live forever

- are unable, due to personal characteristics or societal structures, to easily follow the two big guidelines

All of which I get, and all of which are traps I've fallen into before. But the anecdotal evidence suggests that there are lots of ways to achieve good health, because humans are wildly adaptable creatures, and obsessing over the details is mostly a waste of time unless you're trying to perform a specific physical task at an extremely high level for an extended period of time.

I am on board with the Michael Pollan approach, but it is still extremely unscientific. How can we be expected to survive the challenges brought on by space travel, global warming, or overpopulation if we can't answer the basic question of what the human body needs to thrive? We have to come up with a better answer than "just do/eat what you are evolutionary used to".

I think phrasing these things in terms of yes/no questions to specific "hacks" is part of the problem. People ask questions like "should I drink caffeine" and expect the answer to be as clear cut as if the question was "should I breathe" or "should I drink poison".

Perhaps it'd more illuminating if people instead asked themselves if there's enough variety and moderation in their lifestyle: e.g. "what vegetables did I eat this week that I didn't last week", "what percentage of daily suggested intake did I consume for fats and sugar compared to other food groups this week", "what percentage of my time have I spent on aerobic (e.g. jogging) vs anaerobic (e.g. push ups) vs mental (e.g. chess) vs dexterity (e.g. knitting) vs sedentary (e.g. tv) activities this week", etc.

What you're suggesting is, in effect, that people should keep a food journal, and an activity journal, including a breakdown of food groups, and fats and sugars by weight. That, in turn, requires research for foods that don't come with nutrition labels, tabulating the results, and studying it to see the changes over time.

I suspect anyone willing to do that is probably already healthy, given the amount of effort they're willing to put in.

It doesn't need to be scientifically rigorous. In fact, getting away from the obsession with precision is kinda the whole point.

It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids. Those kinds of realizations are way more actionable and way more likely to make an impact than some dubious diet "hack"

It may seem borderline corny to ask people to eat their brussel sprouts and limit their gaming/tv time, but alas many don't even do that.

> It ought to be easy for someone to realize they are having too many sodas, or playing too much video games if they think in terms of e.g. what diet/activity restrictions they might impose on hypothetical kids.

People often impose poorly chosen parameters on their actual children, so I'm not at all convinced that merely considering what one would impose on abstract hypothetical children will magically get people to correct answers.

I didn't say actual kids, I said _hypothetical_ kids. Even parents whose actual diets consist of pizza, burgers and KFC every week would probably acknowledge that their life choices are made out of convenience, time or budget concerns, not because they believe those to be the pinnacle of health.

Besides, as I mentioned, armchair parenting is just one "trick" to help one brainstorm towards a variety/moderation mindset. Chinese cooking culture - particularly from older generations - is another way to build variety and moderation into a diet. Some people motivate themselves with martial arts (where health, pressure to maintain frequency and balance between aerobic/anaerobic exercise are somewhat secondary compared to the desire to improve technical skill)

> get people to correct answers.

I don't believe there are "correct" answers. Even mundane things like climbing stairs to the bedroom have been shown to improve health. As TFA expands on, it's a question of how one can incorporate more healthy habits into their life. This won't accomplished with repeatedly reaching for the "one weird trick"; there are millions of ways to become more active/healthy... if only people toned down on addictive sedentary activities like social media and the conveniences of pre-made food.

> I suspect anyone willing to do that is probably already healthy,

A fair number of people get healthy by doing that as part of the effort, so, no, not all the people willing to do that are healthy before actually doing it.

> given the amount of effort they're willing to put in.

Willingness to put in effort alone won't make you healthy, alone; effort on healthiness can be, and often is, misdirected.

Also, willingness to put in effort isn't intrinsic and immutable; it can be dependent on being convinced that the ffort is likely to payoff.

I don't use it myself but a lot of people use the MyFitnessPal mobile app as a food journal. It's already programmed with many food types so they don't need nutrition labels. Most users have to rely on a food scale at first to accurately measure portions but they supposedly they get good at eyeballing it after a while.

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/

Modern fitness trackers are pretty good at automatically creating activity journals.

I did exactly this for a few months when losing a bit of weight. You quickly get pretty good at eyeballing portions.

What I did find the most interesting though, was how hard it was to stop. After only 3 months of cutting, it took me over a year to restore a non-obsessive relationship with food. I am comfortable with my weight now, and it was a very useful exercise that I would recommend most try out. You get a valuable understanding of how much work a bar of chocolate or a beer actually is.

Running controlled experiments that can actually draw causal relationships is extremely expensive.

Nobody has figured out how to structure economic incentives to motivate and fund this expensive research.

You basically need to pay large swaths of ppl to change their diet/exercise for years...for the worse.

The diet/exercise habits of large swaths of people are already so bad that you could hardly make them worse. The trouble lies in gathering accurate data about them (did he drink 1 or 2 bottles of Mountain Dew yesterday?), and in controlling for all the confounding factors such as genetics, environmental exposure, etc.

Specifically for exercise, I think there's a viscous cycle where once you become unhealthy, it becomes much harder to exercise. So, it's unclear which direction the causation runs. How can you remove this self-selection bias and prove the direction of the causal relationship without paying healthy people to not exercise?

And then there is the holistic practice where there is no blanket statement, but an answer for just your body

Unfortunately no two holistic practictioners can articulate their method, or come to the same conclusion or repeatable conclusion

No better than a fortune teller reading palms in an alley

Individualized medicine has some merit, and I think we are close to being able to do that, it has the possibility to incorporate some holistic remedy, but at that point it will just be called “a prescription” and the holistic practioners will continue to be on the fringes of science and quackery

I don't think individualized medicine will really bring much benefit in this area until we develop fast, cheap, minimally-invasive sensors to check blood levels of substances such as glucose, hormones, vitamins, etc. That way we'll be able to see in near real time how individual bodies react to different foods and exercises.

At the upper levels of pro sports they're already sort of doing this but it requires taking frequent small blood samples (not fun), specialized test equipment, and manual analysis by experts. We won't see it at the consumer level any time soon.

They’re hard to answer because double blind controlled food studies on humans are impossible ethically. Our frequent animal models, mice and small primates, are not apex predators as we are. Also vegetarians have involved themselves and their bias into dietetics since the inception of the field. When you read, look at the bias and vested interest.

Another huge factor is the profit margin behind processed grains. There’s a massive incentive to get people to eat durable calorie rich processed foods.

You're really shaking the hornets nest with that comment aren't you? lol. Well done. ...well done.

> All of these questions have multiple contradictory answers. Why are these questions so hard to answer?

All of these are phrased as yes/no questions, but the answer is neither binary nor even unidimensional. Which is the problem: people want at least unidimensional value scores and preferably binary good/bad labels as the output of science on health issues, but the underlying facts don't fit that preference. So, the actual science is mangled by charlatans who sell people what they want (sometimes these are also propagandists for people with an interest in shaping belief, but a lot for time it's just people making a buck directly off selling people answers that fit the shape they are looking for, irrespective of the relationship to the facts.)

You can’t outrun a bad diet, but you can outrun a sedentary lifestyle.

Also, the heaviest weight in the gym is the door.

That's deep.

It's true, though: Lifting weights is fairly addictive so getting going is the hardest thing.

The best thing is to live in a nice city and walk five miles a day just getting around.

I recently met a lady in her mid-40s who looked slim and fit. When I complimented her on her wonderful figure, she said that she'd just lost 50 pounds over the past twelve months by walking 4 miles every day.

So I tried it. I freed up time (two hours everyday) that I can dedicate to just walking. I've been walking everyday for two hours for a few weeks now. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks to make the time fly. When the music is good, I even jog a little. I also add a little weight to my backpack each week for added resistance. I do a light stretch before and after the walk - in particular the glute, hamstring, and calf muscles. And I try to be good about drinking enough water during the day.

I've lost between 5-7 pounds of weight and a bunch of fat is no longer there. My back feels much much stronger than it has in a while. My jawline is starting to show.

The best part about the walking is that I can do it everyday. I'm never so sore that I have to take a day's break. Super easy and effective. That said, I do take one day a week off from walking for a yoga class.

I did the same as the author, ditching all my cars (absurd that I had several) and walking to many of my errands. It's been great, though I do have to get my groceries delivered.

> Pes has recently been studying workers in one of the island’s regions of longevity, Seulo (population around 1,000). He discovered one group of women who had spent their working lives seated, but nonetheless reached a great age. They had been working treadles (pedal-powered sewing machines), which meant they had regularly burned sufficient calories to derive the longevity benefits of remaining active. (Lowndes’ Gymnasticon, which works like a treadle, is starting to look a little less ridiculous as a solution for sedentary workers.)

Interesting idea. I tried a walking desk for a while but it damaged my typing performance and I disliked it because it seemed to distract me and cause constant small head movements. Exercise bikes are the wrong form-factor to work with desks, so they are right out. But 'treadles' would be perfect for fitting under a desk (of course) and would provide the constant low-level activity necessary for the health benefits without being a 100% activity like walking (you have to walk) or causing any head movements (since you are still sitting).

Walking desk seems like a terrible idea (how could you type, or read, when in motion plus distracted by trying to keep your balance).

Under desk cycles/bike, elliptical and other such devices are readily available (just search for those terms). You use them when sitting (presumably reading...not sure I could concentrate on writing code while doing that). I have a couple of friends who swear by them and indeed they are both svelte. One I know used to be over 300 lbs and this was one of her tools.

You walk slowly, like 1mph. Many people swear by it. But I recorded typing tests (https://www.gwern.net/Treadmill) and did find it impeded my typing. I also just felt like it was distracting me, and my cat hated it.

> Under desk cycles/bike, elliptical and other such devices are readily available

Interesting.

Anyone recommend a good desk exerciser? Like something with a little resistance you could pedal while you type?

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