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