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Comment by pcurve | Hacker News Reader

Also smaller stature. Large and tall people have more cells, and higher chance of cancer.

Interesting correlation: Eating more meat seems to cause people to grow larger, but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important). You do however need to eat more, you're more likely to get cancer, heart disease, suffer from chronic inflammation, etc.

Interestingly, statistics about growing larger are often used to support more meat eating by meat advocates. There is a lot of talk about protein quality, and the implication is that smaller people are disadvantaged – as though they must be growing less by all measures, not just stature. It isn't so clear that this is true though, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest we shouldn't strive to grow larger (either in stature or in lean mass).

I'm not saying there is a certain truth in there at all. I do find the correlations fascinating though. It defies a lot of what I understood about nutrition for most of my life so it's definitely something I'd like to see more data on. I'm open to a meat-based diet being superior overall (or any tasty diet, really).

How is physical strength unimportant? Stronger people are harder to kill (h/t Rippetoe) and improved strength also helps to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and neck/back pain for those of us at a computer all day.

Speaking as a fellow Starting Strength fan: this is only true in the modern era to the extent that being healthy is better than being unhealthy.

If you look at the top X causes of death in humans, very very few of them could have been avoided "if only the deceased were stronger."

Falling and then breaking bones or getting ill otherwise is a common cause of death, and muscle mass and fitness helps avoid it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5899404/

Although it would help if they were stronger, this isn't the result of them needing to begin a Starting Strength program. My original point was more so that stature and muscle mass might not benefit you beyond a certain point – I don't doubt at all that being fit is still tremendously beneficial.

It's also pure speculation. I read about this stuff for fun and I know just about nothing about anything. Maybe being larger really is a net positive and I just need to be pointed to the right data.

It helps avoid frailty and it allows you to continue exercising well into old age, for two things. It delays the downward spiral of poor fitness and weak bones that eventually does most of us in.

I'm not going to argue this with you. I'm not up for being dragged into a stupid internet fight with a random internet stranger. But this might interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667430

Right, and I think an important distinction here is sheer strength from general physical fitness.

If someone is relatively weak with below average lean mass, lower than average markers of muscular strength, etc. it seems like the consensus is that they are statistically likely to die or get diseases earlier in life. On the other hand, being on the other side of that seems to yield diminishing returns. It’s great to be fit, but being abnormally strong on the other hand doesn’t appear to increase your lifespan proportionally to your strength.

I can't think of much a human can accomplish with exceptional strength that will aid them in normal day to day life (generally speaking). There are exceptions, but those exceptions would apply only to rare circumstances. Sort of like, say you're going to be murdered by some totally jacked guy, hypothetically, and all you have to defend yourself is your bare hands. Okay great, it would be nice to be ridiculously strong. But how often does that happen to you? Or anyone?

Most predators will kill us even if we're ridiculously ripped, so that's not important either. In most cases, intelligence seems a lot more useful for avoiding or navigating these situations.

There's also a lot to be said for having moderate strength in a wide range of motion. That can matter a lot in a much broader variety of situations where physical strength matters, and it's far more realistic to attain and sustain.

Avoiding carpal tunnel doesn't require special levels of strength so much as normal fitness. It requires regular movement and preventing weaknesses. I'm not saying we should all vegetate at a computer, I'm saying that the evidence seems good that being 5% larger/stronger (or whatever the figure was) is not particularly helpful, and instead potentially harmful.

For example, regular yoga will probably resolve most (not all) people's mobility and repetitive stress issues. They will not need to be large or strong for this to work.

My health-obsessed doctor friend told me that muscle mass is a good predictor for health in later life, which was surprising to me (I thought fitness, heart/lung etc was the thing). I wouldn't dismiss it. :)

[relative] Muscle mass has a very strong correlation with healthy habits.

You just don't see a lot of sedentary people with poor nutrition who have a high muscle mass index.

It makes me think of all those reports that claim that having a single glass of wine per day makes you healthier.

It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.

Oh they studied this! It's because if you're the kind of person who can afford a glass of wine every day, you're also the kind of person who can afford health care. In USA at least.

Here's the best source I can find right now:

> The study authors write that “the observed cardiac benefits of alcohol have been hypothesized to be the product of residual confounding because of favorable lifestyle, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that tend to coincide with modest alcohol intake.”

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/health-benefits-alcohol-st...

It's harder to keep muscles as you grow old. More muscles is indication of good metabolism, which correlates with good health (less chance of getting metabolic syndrome etc, somewhat relevant: https://betterbodychemistry.com/obesity/metabolic-syndrome-m...)

Muscle mass in that equation would be relative to stature, so being smaller wouldn’t be a disadvantage in that regard.

In my comment above I didn’t mean to suggest strength is useless or irrelevant so much as that scaling it up by a few percent doesn’t appear to confer meaningful benefits. Someone 5’6” is probably strong enough to do everything someone 6’ can do in every day life, even without modern technology. You can generally scale down what you need to, and for exceptional things, you can likely recruit and partner to solve the problem or apply intelligent solutions.

I’m open to being wrong. Like I was saying, this is just based on correlations I’ve been reading about lately and far from peer reviewed study results.

No man would choose to be 5’6 in America. Anyone under 6’ knows how difficult it is to date, especially online.

Of course. I’m speaking from a biological rather than cultural perspective (as much as you can separate the two, at least). I’m more so interested in what supports longevity as opposed to what supports dating prospects.

I suppose my question is, all other things being equal, would we be healthier if we were of smaller stature? Some data indicate this might be the case, and that’s interesting to me. I suppose my upbringing and culture encourage a “bigger is better” mentality.

A lot of data indicate this could simply be a case of people growing larger because they have access to more food. Genes express, people grow, but the main issue isn’t stature so much as having so much food readily available after they finish growing. Perhaps we eat too much and stature has little to do with it; it’s just a byproduct of access to calorie and protein rich food.

Except body builders tend to not live very long.

Separating the effects of steroids and other growth hormones vs. just having a lot of muscle seems difficult.

My general understanding is that overweight is overweight is overweight, it's hard on your body when excessive, even if it's muscle.

It appears that consuming a lot of protein in and of itself (assuming you’re not yet 65) is correlated with much worse health and mortality outcomes: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/protein...

Humans are the longest living land mammals, beat only by whales. The bowhead whale is estimated to live to 200 years. And it's a huge animal.

African elephants do pretty well too at 55-60 years in the wild, but a fraction of that in captivity.

That's an interesting point. I'm not sure how much genetic overlap we have with whales, but I suspect it's significant. I wonder what allows them to live so long without getting cancer, for example. I can see why they wouldn't get cardiovascular diseases (in humans this seems to be mostly induced by diet and sedentary lifestyle), but it seems likely that there's more to it.

Actually remember reading that a number of studies have linked short stature with heart disease. I’m not up-to-date on the latest research on this. But whether shorter or taller you do the best you can with the factors within your control - nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. Anecdotally two friends’ fathers in elementary school died way prematurely, both quite short of stature.

You forgot the mating benefit. Taller people have better chances to find mates.

Is this true across all cultures?

I have not of any culture where shorter people are more popular but who knows...

That’s also an interesting anticorrelation with how we normally relate metabolism and body size; smalller organisms tend to have faster metabolisms and live shorter lives versus much larger organisms.

Maybe the key is being smaller but also having slower (or rather, “calmer”) metabolic rates.

I believe what you want to be is a small member of a large species. Large dogs live much shorter lives than small dogs. Women tend to live longer than men (height or mass probably isn't the only factor here, but this fits the general pattern so one imagines it helps). Giants -- people well over six feet -- tend to live shorter lives than people of ordinary stature. My grandmother was about five feet with a straight spine. With a curved spine in her early hundreds she was probably less than 4'6", but she was still there. She had about two giant lifetimes. If you stacked her on top of herself you would have one giant (until her ever more flexible spine folded in two).

> but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important).

Tall people get paid more.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

In the people that use meat’s superior satiety to stay lean, you see lower inflammation, IGF-1, insulin … etc. On a purely meat diet with loads of protein, my IGF-1 was 90, a z-score of -1.

> Large and tall people have more cells, and higher chance of cancer.

I've never looked at it like that. Is it true?

sadly data seems to indicate so. :-/

https://www.wcrf.org/why-taller-people-are-at-greater-risk-o...

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/taller-people-mor...

It does appear to be true for humans. Though interestingly there isn't a correlation between species size and cancer risk [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox

Just to clarify:

Across different species, there's no correlation.

Within the same species though, there is correlation.

that conjecture is famously contradicted by elephants, and it's a topic of research why that is.

No it isn't? Elephants develop cancerous cells at the same rate per cell as every other animal, but have better biological methods of destroying them when those cells do turn cancerous.

Is there a citation for that assertion? It's possible elephants induce apoptosis for aberrant non-cancerous cells, for instance, earlier.

super interesting

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