"High fitness in middle age reduces the chance of dementia by ninety percent" https://www.ergo-log.com/high-fitness-in-middle-age-reduces-...
The reality that just eating right, sleeping and exercising is still our best health advice is humorous and disheartening.
The simple fact is that if you sabotage your body, you'll have more issues cropping up sooner and with greater severity, and if you keep it strong all that medical advancement actually has an opportunity to help you in the cases where your body can't help itself. It doesn't discredit medical advancement, only reminds us that many people's lifestyles can often be more destructive than we realize.
Others families live into their hundreds without any effort. It would seem the first thing to do is to figure out a way to fix DNA.
In 1986 exercise physiologist Kenneth Cooper published an inventory of the risk factors that might have contributed to Fixx's death.[6] Granted access to his medical records and autopsy, and after interviewing his friends and family, Cooper concluded that Fixx was genetically predisposed—his father died of a heart attack at 43 after a previous one at 35,[7] and Fixx himself had a congenitally enlarged heart—and had an unhealthy life: Fixx was a heavy smoker before beginning running at age 36, had a stressful occupation, had undergone a second divorce, and gained weight up to 214 pounds (97 kg).[8] Medical opinion continues to uphold the link between moderate exercise and longevity.[9]
Your pill would need to do a lot of heavy lifting. I'm no doctor, but your pill would need to deal with mental issues (dementia of all kinds etc) and physical issues, like muscle mass, bone density, flexibility, skin elasticity and lots more.
There are very few, dare I say no, 90 year old that could pass for 70 - what sort of condition would 120 bring? Or 130 etc?
As an expert in one field, used to customers waving their hands telling me "this won't take long for you to do, it's very simple", I feel like your belief in (medical) technology, and what is possible, may be just a touch optimistic.
There are already large mammals - bowhead whales - that can live 200 years. Perhaps we can adopt some of their longevity traits without having to become giant ocean creatures.
The frailty comes from somewhere, like depletion of certain stem cells that produce new tissue.
Technology hasn't really taken us past mid 80s. It seems plausible that it could, but that's based purely on speculation, so it could be false.
We need the proper fuel, substrates, and cofactors to operate well and not do unnecessary damage
Medical technology and AI is not even close to any major improvement in life expectancy, except in much rare cases (heart transplants is one example: they're insignificant in raising overall life expectancy, as they're statistically too rare to matter).
The big majority of the improvement in life expectancy in the 20th century was from low-hanging stuff like running water, sterilization, waste disposal, and basic antibiotics, not from the high-tech transplants, DNA research, fancy drugs and so on.
Fancy drugs save lives. Big time. My Mom had cancer and was treated with Rituximab. She's doing just fine 10 years later. That type of cancer would have been a death sentence 30 years before. There are lots of other anti-cancer drugs like Rituximab, and they save lives every day.
(1) herculean effort to make it confirm to what they have established as politically correct.
(2) improve AI.
Wanna keep it from turning murderbot or paperclip maximizer? Welcome to the arena of politics of correct values. Wanna use it for longevity research? Same.
Some people also would like to make sure it isn't helping stoke antisemitism or genocide, but apparently that's controversial for some reason, so guess it's political.
(And that's before we get to the usual issue that people using "politically correct" as the drive-by aspersion that's so unfortunately common are usually more ideological than those they criticize and very much have their own political correctness they're anxious to impose by any means available to them...)
(2) improve AI.
(3) work out how to do both at the same time.
FTFY
I gather flu vaccine has similar effect size. Nobody knows why. Ask, and people speculate about inflammation.
Having been treated for herpes lately -- valacyclovir, lately -- seems too to have outsize effect. I get all three.
People doing autopsies say brains they examine are very often laced with herpes virus and bacteria, vs. doctrine that insists nothing gets in.
US grants $2B annually to study plaque formation in transgenic mice. Approximately none of it goes for anything of value. When the amyloid boat sinks, a lot of biochemists will need to find something else to do. They would better look early.
Roughly, the sentiment was that I am young and have time to wait for more research, that taking drugs long term will itself likely have consequences. I'm not inclined to disagree there, although the evidence seems quite strong.
I look forward to seeing more funding and scientific effort directed toward other avenues.
I find it American culture and decades of bad city planning to be a greater harm for living healthy than most other sources of not living healthy.
Technology has solved so many problems. It's also created new ones. But we're way better off, there's no question of that.
How is it hypocritical? Opposed to any other times in human history you can’t give up on society and live a peaceful life in a community.
We’re born into it along with all our families and friends. Telling someone to go off and live in the woods is a life of solitude and probably harsh run ins with the law.
There is no choice nowadays and saying “ha but you live in society so you can’t critique it” is a willful ignorance.
Seriously, if you really believe you're better off without technology, you can live that way without going and living in the woods. Saying you're better off without technology from a smartphone is hypocrisy. I double down on that.
Also, you still have to give up all your family and friends and live by strict Christian values. Not everyone’s cup of tea, especially if one happens to be different in some way.
No wonder why these are good for us, because these are our true traits.
Modern medicine, on the other hand, is a few hundred years old at best and generally work as a band-aid rather than solving the root of the problems.
Tissues that aren't stressed naturally atrophy to conserve energy, which saves on food, which is adaptive in evolutionary terms. This has the natural implication that those tissues will reach an equilibrium where they are barely stronger than your most basic needs.
If the only stress you experience is getting off the couch to get some food, just doing that will be a little difficult. Larger, sudden stresses will cause injuries because your tissues won't be adapted to handle them.
Exercise ensures that we mentally and physically exceed our normal stress thresholds, so the remaining stresses of life is less stressful by comparison.
I view exercise as giving your body, and brain, proof that the rebuilding is still needed, and information on where to direct resources.
If you never take a walk, why expect your body to rebuild itself to be good at walking? Eventually it'll lose its capacity because it (correctly) "learns" that isn't important to you.
You should be happy that it's so simple.
I mean, think of it as bodybuilding: there are plenty of good ol' ways of building strength and stimulating hypertrophy on purely natural processes, and that shouldn't be disheartening as compared to, say, injecting yourself with steroids.
RIP everyone that didn't win the normal body lottery though
This is also why lots of mouse longevity research doesn’t translate well to humans. Mice are not a particularly longevity optimized mammal so it means there is more low hanging fruit there.
For us all the low hanging fruit is likely picked.
In university, I had an indoor track I could use, it was fantastic and had plenty of room for families and people exercising.
That said, you don't need to wait to be given those opportunities. Look for every opportunity for unnecessary expenditure of energy - you'll find there are plenty.
Apart from the mental health aspect (lack of agency, no time or space to yourself), you can’t always subject your kids to the weather of the day or they’re uncooperative to the point that the run isn’t feasible. Not to mention the multitude of reasons people can’t run, from disabilities to simply having no safe place to run with a stroller. Smooth sidewalks with space are kind of a luxury.
With a lifestyle and/or restrictions like that, no wonder people get out of shape. We can’t rely on our communities having space and accommodation for kids and so, well, without a family network we’re on our own.
I've found my health is better (physical and mental) in walkable cities than in suburbs, even though I'm not walking.
Sort of.
Physical fitness for good health has 2 components: aerobic fitness and strength. You can improve your aerobic fitness and your upper body strength at home (rings and/or handstand pushups are enough for all but the most advanced strength athletes).
Core/lower body strength is another matter entirely. People tend to quickly progress to 1x body weight squats and deadlifts. And someone who is more advanced will probably be in the 2x-3.5x range. Without access to serious weight, lower body training is usually pretty ineffective, strength wise.
Doesn't matter, 1x or even less is still 100% enough for life expectancy and general health.
You can absolutely get to 2x bw squats from home with nothing but a chair as gear.
That's been my solution.
If you take into account resale value, it'll actually pay itself off much faster - especially if you're willing to wait for good deals.
I think I was able to put together a full set of weights + another set of 45s for less than $1/lb. I'm using a cheap bar and a cheap rack, so the whole thing cost me less than $800.
I estimate that I could sell it all today for $600 for sure, and probably get back all my money if I was willing to wait 1-2 months.
The other big advantage of using a home gym is wait times; I used to go to a commercial gym, where the wait time for a rack was often more than 30 minutes at peak times. As long as you don't need machines (lat pulldown can be very nice), a rack at home can make gym time much more efficient.
You can't.
I assume your parent was confused about notation. You can get 1x body weight squats (that is to say your actual body + 1x your body weight as additional load) by doing one legged squats off of a chair.
I don't understand where I'm wrong about the 2x bw though?
My thesis is that disregarding upper body gains, which can be compensated by other exercises, single leg squats will get you to 1x + 1x bw, which is 2x, with almost no gear at all.
You can also reasonably easily add about 2x15kg in dumbbells which is almost another 0,7x or so, making home training quite powerful.
The disagreement is purely about notation.
In the strength world, people routinely ignore bodyweight when measuring squat intensity - they only list load weight. I suspect that this is, in large part, an effort to be consistent with other barbell exercises like Deadlift (which I mentioned earlier), Press, Bench Press, Row, etc. where including one's body weight wouldn't really make sense.
If a person has more money and the space, they can do the same thing with dumbbells.
It's really not complicated, but people make it so.
[ be sure to a) check for leakages regularly and b) do arm curls well away from electric outlets, just in case ]
It never occurred to him to get a cheap workout app and get active at home. Even after I told him about this option he rather kept complaining.
People are amazingly stupid sometimes...
https://scitechdaily.com/new-pill-replicates-exercise-and-st...
> The Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality in observational studies. There is evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death. The American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association recommend the Mediterranean diet as a healthy dietary pattern that may reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes, respectively.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-does-a-h...
On a macro level if you want to improve your health : Less processed foods, less synthetic materials, less pharmaceuticals, less time sitting and indoors. Less alcohol, less weed, Less involvement from these "professionals" all across the board. Less, less, less. Wow, isn't that weird?
For those who will comment for arguments sake, I would rather you provide examples of the sitting President promoting overall good health practices (read: FREE) rather than his usual gaslighting the public into taking an untested pharmaceutical product.
The people in this thread saying we should have walkable communities are being unrealistic but I'll concede that that what they're saying is better then any idea I have.
Incredible results but I think the specifics are worth using when they’re available.
Also, there is no cause and effect here, though vascular origin dementia as noted seems almost certainly to be reduced by better cardiovascular fitness, as are many other vascular issues. Having said that, vascular and arterial lining damage due to diet appears not to be resolved by exercise, and could very easily be a culprit here as well. Fitness is a great tool for general well-being, but it doesn’t appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness here.
If exercise reduced risk of dementia by 99% would you still feel compelled to point out that it "doesn't appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness"?
Where's your threshold?
We literally have the solution. What you're saying, while it is technically true, seems to be more of an excuse or justification not to exercise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into your comment.
This is something I’ve been digging deep into and discovering a lot of seemingly safe assumptions turn out not to be.
I do expect exercise is a major factor here (perhaps the largest), but I’m acutely aware lately that these things, especially where nutrition could be a significant factor, are rarely ever cut and dry. It’s incredibly complex.
I don’t mean to say people shouldn’t exercise. I should have emphasized that, without a doubt. We know beyond any shadow of doubt that it improves quality of life dramatically for virtually everyone.
Not to be a sourpuss but I believe that a reasonable theory on this is that physical activity, especially activity that uses brain power, causes neuronal development which reroutes function around damage, without necessarily preventing or mitigating damage itself.
I imagine people who are naturally healthier probably more fit and less demented.