Diet, exercise, enough sleep, and a good social support structure are pretty much the keys to good health in general.
The fact that we have so many health issues in western society are because its so easy to neglect these things.
The fact that we have so many health issues in western society are because its so easy to neglect these things.
Exercise (specifically, aerobic type) is the main thing you need. A good exercise regime gives you a lot of leeway in the diet aspect especially if you don't overeat (since your caloric burn will be high enough on the regular to not have to deal with issues like too much carbs). It also helps you sleep as you get tired and can fall asleep easier, and reduces stress levels, which is very important in regards to longevity.
There also have been studies that link brain function deterioration with lack of oxygen, and people with higher VO2max values are at a lower risk of cognitive decline.
Something as simple as cycling to the office instead of taking the car can have extremely positive effects.
As for VO2max, Levitt had a longevity researcher on his podcast who found that a high VO2max (used as a proxy measure) is causally related with higher impacts on 5 year all cause mortality than smoking. In the good direction. As in: being in shape reduces your risk of death more than smoking increases it.
Sauce: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/adding-ten-healthy-years-to...
https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/
His podcast is amazing but can be dense and technical at times. He's evidence based and would probably fit in with the HN crowd.
Then I randomly got really into jiu-jitsu because why not.
The issue is that some people use cycling as their only form of exercise. For bone health you need to mix in other high impact exercises such as running and weightlifting.
If someone had to choose only one thing to do for health, a healthy diet is far more important than exercise.
The ancestor comment saying to do cardio is right. Strength training is also important for health, but for different reasons (motor function, bone density, etc.). The act of strength training also burns some calories, regardless of resultant muscle mass.
Every extra kg of muscle is estimated to contribute 21kcal/day to the RMR. If you put on, say, 15kg of muscle over a few years (quite doable if you are very sedentary and have low muscle mass), that's an extra 300kcal/day. Add in 30 mins of biking a day, and say 100 cal from strength training on average, that's a good 600-700 calories per day!
> and virtually no effort to simply not consume them.
I don't think this is true. The executive function required to manage the dopamine cycle that food generates is incredibly taxing. I honestly think this is a result of our food systems being incredibly optimized to drive purchasing decisions...
Separately, this reminds me that I should eat some veggies.
In the past I've toned my training down due to exhaustion, not from the physical output but from having to constantly be shoving calories down my throat.
The big issue with diets is that people eat too much carbs, and if you aren't burning those carbs for energy, this is where problems happen. Healthy regiment of exercise will help greatly with this, giving you the option to eat tasty foods with carbs and maintain a good weight without any problems.
It gets even worse, when the obese try to outrun a bad diet they not only fail but they often injure themselves in the process.
It always pains me to see obese people out on the trails beating themselves up in an obviously misguided but respectable effort to lose weight.
I’ve always eaten “a little bad” diet. I don’t think I eat too much, and I keep things mostly balanced, but I tend to eat quite late, and carbs and calories was always something I’d just take down without considering totals for a day or week.
Was totally fine when I was walking to work every day, and doing a lot outside.
Early COVID era, with the same diet, I started ticking up in weight, and wasn’t feeling great. Once adding more exercise to my routine I slowly returned to my baseline. Maybe I could be doing better with a better diet, but I was kind of shocked by how much of an effect ~1hr of walking a day had on me.
I'm about to have surgery to remove part of the lung and tumor and my surgeon/oncology team is making me wear a fitbit for three months to study my recovery.
Good luck with the surgery!
The surgery was supposed to be VATs, but the tumor was so large it turned into a general thoracotomy. It's fucking brutal. Easily the hardest thing i've had to do in life so far. But I'll get through it because there's no other choice. Forward. :)
If you're currently doing no exercise, try to walk five minutes at lunch time each day. Just five minutes. And when that's trivial to do, make it 10 minutes. Try to keep increasing this over the year. No rush. Take your time. But try to make it a habit. Even if some days it's back down to just 5 minutes.
If you're walking even just 15 minutes a day when you weren't before, you will be so much better off in ways that will be apparent. You might find that you feel happier, more alert, in a better mood overall. You might sleep a bit better. etc.
I'm not saying that a 15 min walk is a panacea that will cure all ills, but it's a multivitamin that works.
I generally carry a small EDC backpack anyway for convenience and hydration, but having that 10 - 15 lbs on my back also adds a little bit of extra workout to my walks. Sometimes I'll put my backpack inside a bigger backpack with a few gallons of water or a couple 25lb plates added, which starts to feel like moderate intensity squatting or deadlifting (especially when it involves hills or stairs).
We love to make the simplest thing overly ridiculously complicated to the point that people don't even try.
Just start with a walk.
Social support structure doesn’t necessarily mean staying out all night drinking and partying with your friends like a college student. It can also mean spending quality time with your family, neighbors, and acquaintances that you share hobbies and activities with.
I recently ran a 24hr relay. There were absolutely those who drank/partied while they participated. They posted slower times and probably slept less. I didn't sleep as much as usual (because I was waking up to run every 6hrs), but I slept more, didn't party, ran faster than them.
Neither of us was right/wrong in our choices. I would have felt like crap if I had their habits, but maybe it doesn't affect them.
Even proteins, I just learned that unused proteins will be converted to fat.
Also, if you agree that gut microbiome is important, try to eat foods that will be benefitial to them, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiota-accessible_carbohyd... (another thing I discovered recently).
Then there's fasting and autophagy but it's a bit harder (I'm just starting IF and it requires a bit of dedication tbh)
Apparently only the rich deserve things like this, according to US society.
You know, rich folks like Steve Jobs who definitely listen to their doctors and their support networks and definitely don't fall for quacky bullshit that means they die from a totally manageable type of cancer.
We need to return to considering and treating them as the mandatories that they are or else we will continue to experience the cost of neglecting them, just like neglecting Vitamin C results in scurvy.
I think that company owners, share holders, "The Economy" have decided that low earners don't deserve healthy lives; and that many of those low earners have been tricked into agreeing that it's best to live "under foot" and that those things are luxuries.
It would be like cheering a factory on for all the missing arms its employees have, and then having all the factory employees mock the newcommers with two arms trying to protest losing an arm only to have the tenured ones laugh at them and think that's privilege.
We've brainwashed generations of self and systemic harm
* dish washing (do they even have dishes?)
* power usage of stove
* time to clean up
* a singular, large lump of time to go out and buy all those food
* the necessary mental spoons to plan those numerous meals each week
* a refridgerator that works (mine is currently broken, for example)
* a willingness to accept the cost of losing a lot of food when the fridge inevitably breaks
* a refridgerator that works (mine is currently broken, for example)
* a willingness to accept the cost of losing a lot of food when the fridge inevitably breaks
[0] https://extension.purdue.edu/foodlink/includes/pubs/Storing%...
Of course, there were plenty of problems back then, too - I'm not saying it was an idyllic utopia. But in our modern life, it seems like we've just traded one set of problems for another.
I don't know your personal details, but most people who think this way are not actually trying their hardest in each category. Sure, some small percentage is going to face monumental challenges. But look at the data in the US for example. 70% of our deaths are caused by NCDs. Most of that 70% has enough control of these factors to reap their benefits
And yet they don't, so it suggests to me that "it's not that simple". It's better to imagine that people _are_ doing what they can and it's still not enough, so rather than victim blaming, we can discover what's actually going on in these people's lives that's stopping their ability to reach it.
Are they so downtrodden that it's not worth the effort anymore? Are they actually working 2-3 jobs and 100 hours of unexpected time a week so they literally don't have time? Do they live so far away from work because they can't afford to live close such that all their time is spent commuting and they have no extra time anymore?
It's not victim blaming to point out that "can't" isn't reasonable language. Life is hard. Doesn't mean we "can't" have some control over these variables. As I said, there are edge cases that deserve sympathy but they don't represent the bulk of scenarios.
You say this, but you also say, "Most of that 70% has enough control of these factors to reap their benefits"
70% and "most of 70%" are still either a majority or at the very least a plurality; so, I have to strongly disagree that they don't represent the bulk of the scenarios.
Is your argument that most people are lazy and should suck it up and get over it and fix themselves?
Yes most adults are extremely lazy and undisciplined.
If you do not believe this statement, ask the opinion of any medical provider you know.
- Afford to eat healthier foods. Rice, potatoes, bell peppers, onions, lentils, ground beef, pork chops, eggs, are not expensive. Time is a bigger factor but I don't buy the time argument in most cases either. Just need to prioritize.
- Improve their sleep. Most people have terrible sleep habits and there is a load of free information available for anyone who wants to make a positive change.
- Exercise. Walking 30 minutes each day yields most of the available benefit. Strength training is also available for most of the population. A secondhand kettlebell is like 20 dollars. Calisthenics are free. Some gym memberships go as low as 10/month.
>Is your argument that most people are lazy and should suck it up and get over it and fix themselves?
If you want to phrase it that way in order to paint me as the bad guy, then sure. But I would prefer to start with not giving up personal responsibility. Not throwing our hands up and blaming externalities, big food, and big pharma. If someone has that attitude, what hope do they have? Do you not believe in empowering people? If we validate every single persons' victim card, they will eventually believe they have no control over their lives. And that's just not true.
I have been in that place myself for most of my life and for able-bodied people it is possible to get 150 minites of low-intensity excercise a week, more sun, leafy greens, a can of sardines each day, and such low-effort interventions which have a high impact on health and well-being.
My advice to those people would be to start slow and not beat yourself up about having a milkshake and such. It takes time to build habits and good habits tend to cascade and encourage you, especially when you are happier with what you see in the mirror.
Dopamine is easy to get from doom scrolling on your phone, watching Netflix, or playing video games. You don’t even have to leave your chair. Exercise is hard. It requires you to exert yourself and it requires training over time to see tangible results.
Same thing with food. Going through a McDonald’s drive through is easy and the salt, fat, and sugar taste good to most of us. Cracking open a cook book, putting together a shopping list, and going to the grocery store is hard. It requires planning, it requires thought. Then you have to come home and cook the food, which requires even more effort. If you cook something healthy, it won’t be loaded up with all the salt, fat, and sugar that people have become accustomed to.
Getting enough sleep requires discipline and sacrificing time. Time you could be spending doing activities that release dopamine, such as playing video games, or watching videos.
Developing a healthy social support network is difficult too. It’s easy to post things or like things on Facebook or Hacker News. It’s much more difficult to get out there and be part of clubs or doing group activities and meeting and engaging with people in the real world. You have to leave your house. You have to put yourself out there and be a little bit vulnerable. It’s particularly hard if you’re an introvert. Nurturing strong family relationships takes a lot of effort too. You have to be the mean parent that kicks your kids off video games to play board games or go on a nature hike together. It’s a lot easier to let a screen babysit them all day.
I’m only talking about middle and upper class social dynamics of course. I’ve been fortunate enough to never experience poverty or food insecurity. I’m sure it’s not nearly that simple for people in that situation.
That's extended to all facets of life and has bought us a lot of luxury time, which of course has led to a rise in dopamine factory applications, goods, and services to fill that time.
Many people honestly believe "why would i spend time grocery shopping if i can just pay someone else to cook for me?"
There's something to be said for the effort of doing things.
If anything it seems like those on the lower income level would be forced to be outside doing physical activity more than the wealthy.
I have no citation, but I believe most low-income jobs in the US involve:
* standing for long, long hours and not moving (cashiers)
* sitting for long, long hours and not moving (call centers)Modern medicine will provide various interventions to help out such as trying to balance your brain chemistry, lowering obesity, blood pressure, etc. Many of the things prescribed to us today are due to lifestyle choices.
There's a growing corpus of evidence that diet has incredible potential for treating serious brain disorders (when done with a psychiatrist, especially if you're already medicated)[0].
At the end of the day, you are the only person who sets the priorities in your life. If you don't make maintenance of your body and mind a priority, the bill will come later.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61129785-brain-energy
For everyone else, they are mandatory.
Exercise is the easiest. Exercise isn't running and weightlifting, exercise is pushing your body to the limits so that its limits slowly increase over time. For 600lbs people exercise may be standing up and sitting down. For the elderly, like my 92 year old grandmother with COPD, exercise is curling and doing overhead presses with a heavy book while seated. People with cystic fibrosis exercise, and are usually exercise machines because if they stop they die. Patients in iron lungs exercise. The only people who can't exercise are those in hospice care. If you can stand, standing until you cannot stand anymore is exercise. If you can walk, 5 seconds more walking than you did yesterday is exercise. Wheelchair-bound patients with Osteogenesis Imperfecta can (and are highly encouraged to) exercise. Exercise costs $0.00.
If you are so ill that you cannot pick up a 1 lbs dumbbell, putting a rubber band around your fingers and opening and closing your hand is exercise and will have benefits. If you are not acutely dying, you can exercise.
All forms of exercise at all levels for all people has a benefit-- however small, it is a benefit.
Eating right is harder, but is accessible to any able-bodied, homed, person. Able-bodied doesn't mean healthy. Able-bodied means "able to turn on a hotplate and lift a bag of beans."
Social support is the hardest, but is doable for all but the most mentally ill. There are roughly 35,000 social support groups full of people looking for a social support network dotted across the country. Many of them meet online so anyone who can read HN can participate as a first step. I do not believe they are adequate. I do believe that online support groups are an outstanding and effective first step.
Lacking a social support network is often fatal to human beings, and those who lack support need to work extremely hard to obtain one, but it isn't impossible.
There are human being for who exercise, diet, and friends are luxuries.
Someone active on hacker news is PROBABLY not one of them.
I’m looking forward to Incinerate and Telekinesis myself.
Too many people lean on "bad genetics" as a scapegoat for their laziness/poor choices/lack of self-discipline...