Physical fitness and risk of mental disorders in children and adolescents
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/27/1227062...
I've resolved most of my diabetes type 2 with diet, and nobody should be surprised that this came with improved mental clarity and emotional stability.
This happens a lot in a different context when people talk about AI and try to reduce human intelligence and creativity to just brain function.
But yet putting those facts together leads significant resistance.
The main intervention there is ketogenic dieting. Ketosis is required for brain healing, as a sick brain is an overexcited brain, to the point of toxicity.
Of course, optimal nutrient intake, particularly brain related nutrients (which is most of them, really, but omega-3 fatty acids, and, yes, cholesterol are particularly important).
This is because sadly diet, fitness and weight loss are some of the topics this otherwise very lucid website literally loses its mind over. Another is natality.
I've been a health junky my whole life, very in shape, and I eat well.
Of course that helps my mental health a lot.
However, I still get depressed. I suffer from chronic sleep apnea (it's related to my anatomy, so I can't exercise out of it, it's around 79 AHI). I take zoloft for anxiety and it has helped me to calm down and enjoy my life more.
And finally, I recently got diagnosed with ADHD. I'm fairly high functioning without meds, but with meds I can finally do all the things I've wanted to. My todo list, those things I used to forget or put off, I just do them now.
So yes, take care of yourself, but don't feel bad if it doesn't solve everything. Some of us need extra help, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. I understand you weren't shaming folks, but I really want to share this in case folks think they're broken for needing medication.
And sometimes you need the help from medication to kick-start being more healthy physically, don't be ashamed! We are all different.
We have an overwhelming mountain of evidence that saturated fat intake from animal sources above a certain threshold percent of one's caloric intake causally increases risk of heart disease through well-characterized mechanisms and that reducing one's intake below that threshold causally improves health.
https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/a-basic-guide-to-choles...
Likewise the benefits of a high fiber diet are also overwhelmingly documented, and it's a rare person for whom it isn't beneficial. Your doctor can tell you if you're one of these unlucky people.
You can eat a keto diet that's low in saturated fats from animals and high in fiber, but that's rarely done and most of the health benefits from keto is from the increased rate of adherence to a diet that makes it easier to stay in a caloric deficit.
Often, school sports have minimum GPA requirements. A poor home life increases chances of mental illness and decreases chances that someone will drive you to practice. Will you even maintain the team sport if your teammates never accept you, given whatever mental condition that gives you anxiety or quirks? When can you even consider being active when much of the rest of your life is in shambles? You’re also less likely to have the ability to pay for it, given the correlations between low household income and poor mental health.
Poor mental health just makes everything harder to do, and you see that impact every aspect of life in aggregate.
The paper isn’t public so “controlling for confounders” is all you get, but I doubt they went through all the effort to have deep, revealing conversations about the home life or other nuanced cofounders of each participant.
Why is it that nearly every paper linked on HN, someone is in the comments saying the research didn't go far enough? In this case without even reading the paper?
Nothing in your critique is relevant to the fact that the authors found physical fitness and mental health linked. No, not everyone has equal access to sports. Yes mental health is complicated.
> Why is it that nearly every paper linked on HN, someone is in the comments saying the research didn't go far enough?
Because they usually don't.
And for those who are actually curious, look up "reproducibility crisis" and "publish or perish" to learn more about issues in academia, and ask ChatGPT about why systemic skepticism of scientific research is critical to the process of science.
> In this case without even reading the paper? Nothing in your critique is relevant to the fact that the authors found physical fitness and mental health linked. Nothing in your critique is relevant to the fact that the authors found physical fitness and mental health linked.
Such irony, that you didn't read any part of the preview yourself. If you did, you'd see:
"This study highlights the potential protective role of cardiorespiratory fitness, muscular endurance, and muscular power in preventing the onset of mental disorders. It warrants further investigation of the effectiveness of physical fitness programs as a preventive measure for mental disorders among children and adolescents."
The viability of this correlation, given controls for confounders, changes the significance of the results dramatically. Perhaps you think the point of research is to publish pointless correlations and suggest wild ideas for journalists to turn into clickbait?
For those actually curious: the authors are proposing a causation, and given the absence of any counter, it's a biased conclusion that attempts to increase the significance of the findings for the sake of publishing, at the cost of coming uncomfortably close to declaring a causal relationship. Not a criticism of the authors necessarily, but of the poor incentives plaguing academia. For studies like this to be of higher quality, they become very expensive, so given the lack of discussion regarding confounders in the preview, one should have strong skepticism regarding the actual practical significance of the strength of the causal relationship. Though if the research is of low quality, then it really all was pointless and probably only serves to keep the authors employed. At that point, the paper is only an unsubstantiated suggestion to study something else, so why even bother with the rest of the paper. That being said, having been an athlete for most of my life, I'm a huge proponent of children being given access to sports.
> No, not everyone has equal access to sports. Yes mental health is complicated.
Do you talk to people in real life like this? That's quite upsetting.
What are their parents, siblings, and/or friends doing in their spare time? Are they going out for walks or bike rides? Or are they glued to some media/social media device?
Sure, there are kids who will get physical activity regardless of nearby influences, but many will decide to emulate the behaviour of those around them.
So if a student is out of shape it's because they're in school from 7 to 5, in cram school from 5:30 to 7, doing homework until 9 or 10, and then doing it all over again the next day. But they're also the type that would still be 100% willing and able to squeeze in more physical stuff if told to do so, especially when it's good for your overall performance - which it is.
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Beyond all this, I really don't understand the modern Western trend of rejecting personal (or in this case parental) responsibility for basically anything and everything. It's predictably leading to terrible outcomes in near to every facet of life. Literally any parent in any situation can make their kid go jump rope for 20 minutes a day. It's even fun. Even better, the parent or parents could even do it with their children.
Please tell me this is a shitpost?
That you need to be driven at all to exercise is a huge part of the reason why exercise and fitness rates are so low in our youth. Our grandparents and great grandparents walked miles to go to school five days a week, and we've built our cities such that this is impossible or dangerous. We now live in towns that sprawl endlessly, and most of us forbid our kids to go outside unsupervised, so kids never find each other and play amongst themselves.
And for what? What exactly are we gaining by building our cities and our towns like this? It makes us all unhealthier because we are forced to drive everywhere. It isolates us and our children, who are now lonely on top of being merely physically inactive. We are poorer because we spend so much money on car loans, car insurance, gas, and parking. We are just as likely to die a violent death in the suburbs due to the increase risk of car crashes. We are isolated, poor, unhealthy, and unhappy, and in exchange we get... what exactly?
> The paper isn’t public so “controlling for confounders” is all you get, but I doubt they went through all the effort to have deep, revealing conversations about the home life or other nuanced cofounders of each participant.
The study was conducted in Taiwan which does not suffer from US-style car extremism. "Children cannot go out to play because their parents cannot afford to drive them" is a statement they would consider unthinkably psychotic. Can they not use public transit, or at worst, walk to where all the other neighborhood children are playing unorganized?
No. Growing obesity rates is not an issue unique strictly to America, it's just prevalent there.
> we've built our cities to make walking impossible and dangerous
Kids can and do play in the suburbs. There are parks everywhere. They ride their bikes everywhere. The "fuckcars" angle fails to account for the disparity.
> normalized locking our kids away indoors and shoving an iPad in their face
Now you're getting warmer.
> You are missing the point entirely.
I addressed the argument conveyed to make your "point", and there isn't only a single "point" to be made in discourse. Notwithstanding that if you wanted to make another point, then you'd have made it.
Parents chaperoning their kids every hour of every day _is not normal_ and never has been, except in the US.
I disagree. Stress from a dysfunctional family or timing demands from being required to act as a caretaker, among other things, will decrease the time and energy required to pursue physical activity.
And physical fitness, high enough to stimulate the indicators they measured, involves more than just causally playing outside - though my interpretation of that sets quite a low bar for the physical exertion involved.
This is true and a fair criticism of driving specifically. I noticed the location and do agree the 'driving' remark isn't as applicable to this specific study, but I still put forward the general sentiment regarding both a family's overall ability to support, where needed, and a childs ability to travel to travel if needed. Some kids won't need it, but in the cases where it is needed & they don't have it, it would lower the chances of keeping up with sports. Just one of many possible pathways that would make athletics hard to maintain.
But more generally to your point, while some sports won't require extra effort, it really does depend on the situation, which is why a study like this is so hard to carry out well. In my youth, it would have been more convenient to do lacrosse or soccer on-site, but those didn't work for with me so I picked different sports that had more of a demand for travel.
> Will you even maintain the team sport if your teammates never accept you
Kids are generally pretty accepting, and in a sports setting they spend nearly all of their time focused on playing, as they should be. It would require egregious behavior for an entire team not to "accept" you.
> given whatever mental condition that gives you anxiety or quirks?
No one cares about quirks. They care if you're a dick, or waste everyone's time in the field.
You seem to be particularly hung up on the notion of kids not "accepting" another - there's no reason to believe this. If coaches do their jobs (and they usually do) they foster camaraderie that includes everyone.
I was quiet as a kid, and was never left out in a sports team. The anecdote pissing contest is useless. Show me data.
Your qualification of coaches who do their jobs is exactly the problem. Kids are cruel, and adults are negligent. Not always, but far too often.
I was also the quiet kid who did not attract negative attention, but I saw it then and I see it now.
You're completely ignoring the marginal kids. It's not about obesity, and that's not what I was responding to initially. You used the word "generally", and that's fine. But you're overlooking a significant cohort, and your dismissive attitude is 100% reminiscent of the crappy administrators and coaches who play their roles in the problem.
What sports do you coach? And do you, perchance, also teach 7th grade history? I feel like we might have met before.
Stop projecting.
> Kids are cruel, and adults are negligent. Not always, but far too often.
Broadly, no. This is something that is taught. We don't live in an amoral wasteland, and playing sports is not Lord of the Flies. 99% of the time is spent playing, and not only do parents watch the games, many hang around for practice. I don't know if you've ever witnessed either, but they are not comprised of rounds of piling on one kid. This is not unique to any one sport, it's basically ubiquitous.
> You're completely ignoring the marginal kids.
Their being marginal is one of the points I made, i.e. they don't comprise the bulk of inactive and/or obese kids. And yet I did not ignore them: sports can help troubled kids, another point I made.
If there are those for whom sport participation is inappropriate, that is neither here nor there, it has NO BEARING on what I said. I made no blanket prescription that every kid must/ought be involved, but I'm highly skeptical of notions that large swaths of kids should abstain from sports on the conceit that "some kids might be meanies".
> your dismissive attitude
Your projecting again. Fuck off. Can you keep track of a discussion at all?
Sports can be beneficial for both a) the inactive, and b) those who might exhibit signs of mental disorders. Barring individual cases, it's completely uncontroversial to suggest it's an option that ought to be taken seriously.
> What sports do you coach? And do you, perchance, also teach 7th grade history? I feel like we might have met before.
Seems like you are nowhere near grounded in reality.
You haven't shown me any data like I asked, so there's nothing left to say. Content yourself with your specious anecdotes, believe what you want to believe. You don't care about what's true.
Ha
> No one cares about quirks
Haha
If not in yours, just know that you may be very lucky. But more likely, simply unaware.
I've never been and shall never be a team player. I go my own way. Never did any team sport (I hate them and I hate watching them). My parents never drove me to any practice (OK, OK, one year of judo but that's it).
A crappy skateboard, a used BMX clone, and self-assembled rollerskates go a long way (and in the not so long run cost less money than the fuel to drive to sport).
I'm still fit at 51 and I attribute that to me moving my arse off when I was a kid (and then teenager) and going out to play in the streets and parks every single day with my skate/roller/bicycle.
People should stop looking for excuses. And they should especially stop looking to excuse others.
Others don't like you? Grow a pair. Build a carapace. Learn to wheelie and learn to do kickflips. You'll get the girls.
Team sports are totally overrated (nowadays I still play some tennis).
Stop being depressed.
If I read a study that tells me I may see a 4% chance of improvement if I make significant changes to my lifestyle, the chances that I ignore that study are about 96%.
Guess, when viewed on aggregate a 4-8% improvement would be a valuable improvement.
"Exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Yoga and strength training were well tolerated compared with other treatments. Exercise appeared equally effective for people with and without comorbidities and with different baseline levels of depression."
A.) you have to actually do the exercise, which means the people who don’t may simply not do so because their mental illness is worse or at least different than the ones who do.
2. If you’ve ever read the attempts to quantify various mental illnesses, they’re extremely unscientific and borderline laughable if you’ve ever known a few people who suffer from them. What we call “depression” affects so many people in so many ways that in the future, it’s likely it will become a category of diseases with many different individual names. One of my exes medicated her depression by working, one by calling off work, for example. One would have (and did) do lots of exercise, one did not, and there’d be no way to quantify either on any simple scale.
3.) It’s obviously neither double nor single blind. You can’t not know if you’re exercising, and the researcher can likely tell which are which to a decent degree just by looking at them.
All a meta analysis of a bunch of non-controlled studies really tells you is the prevailing pre-sentiment among the researchers of a topic. Which, really, isn’t nothing (they’re more likely to guess correctly than a random person) but it’s far from an actual controlled study.
And I still stand by that there’s no way you could realistically say this study indicates causation with any certainty. Though that never stops people in the social sciences I guess.
That's a fair statement if the authors actually claimed to have identified a causal relationship. They don't, here's their conclusion:
>> Our research demonstrates that physical fitness, particularly in cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness domains, is associated with the risk of developing mental disorders in youth. Given the increasing incidences and prevalence of these mental disorders in children and adolescents, our study contributes valuable evidence to the burgeoning field of research exploring the connection between physical fitness and mental health. This finding underscores the need for further research into targeted physical fitness programs, which hold significant potential as primary preventive interventions against mental disorders in children and adolescents.
But you may be right because I have experienced this while watching the other kids in my son's sports classes.
My son started going to a gym called "Kidstrong" when he was 3.5 years old. It was basically a bunch of kids following instructions and performing basic calisthenic exercises and beginner gymnastics moves.
However, we had to stop going because there was a kid in the class who simply couldn't get his act together. Maybe he was special needs or maybe that's just the way he was allowed to behave at home. But the coaches spent so much time trying to get that one kid to follow basic instructions that it ended up detracting from the time that my child and the other kids got with the coaches. It came to the point where my wife and I (along with a number of other parents) realized that we were paying $25 per 45 minute session for our children to sit and watch the coaches spend 20 minutes trying to corral this one kid who couldn't behave.
So we put my son into BJJ instead. And we're experiencing something very similar. There are two other kids in his class that simply can't follow instructions or chose not too. Fortunately this is a locally owned gym so we spoke to the owner about our concerns and he spoke to the kids' parents. The kids have been behaving better lately, but they still serve as a huge distraction.
As a result, I picked up sports I could do on my own, such as lifting weights, biking, swimming, and running. Individual sports such as golf and tennis followed naturally.
I would have otherwise been a complete shut-in. Although I do have a lack of executive function, I make sure to get exercise as often as I can. Classes at the local gym are a godsend - I don't need to prep, plan ahead, or anything. I just need to show up at the right time and the thinking has been done for me.
I'm thankful I got the opportunity to do all the physical activities I did. Helped that my siblings were all big athletes and most kids in my neighborhood were too.
Kids today don't have that, and I feel for them.
I suspect many kids are so disheartened by these early experiences that they are much less likely to make the transition as you did. Personally, it took many years of adulthood before I figured out that physical activity was actually super beneficial and not just the games that bullies play. By high school, I refused to participate in PE and just took Fs.
Maybe schools should start kids out with individual activities instead of team sports?
good for you but yes, you had people in your family who were athletes and apparently did not dissuade you further. lots of kids are not really that lucky.
You're projecting. Most coaches just want kids to work hard and have fun. They really couldn't care less about winning. If you need absolute proof, there are many sports such as swimming and track where every additional kid adds points to your team total such that having more kids is always more advantageous to the coach(es).
Track is not a good example, at least in my case. Our coaches spent ZERO time with those of us who weren't obviously going to be breaking any records, and whenever we lost a match, made us do so much extra work it was almost impossible to climb stairs the next day. I couldn't get any support from any of them, which I still consider highly unfair, since if I had support maybe I could have figured out a method to improve, but on my own... I just quit.
From my experience in multiple sports, most coaches just want to win. Finding one who cares more about the kids than the score is an absolute blessing, they're so rare.
so no I'm not projecting. Kids who don't "look/act right" are ignored and discarded by sports and in my direct experience as a parent this has hardly changed at all.
Some of my children are naturally good at soccer and some aren't. Doesn't matter. I don't play favorites with them or any other kids on my soccer team.
I started coaching soccer for my kids, because one of my more naturally-gifted children had a horrible coach. Even though she played my kid more, I hated her favoritism and I hated her lack of sportsmanship.
That's it -- I started coaching.
My team is probably never going to win the league, because the best players _still_ get sub'd out on my teams. I don't care.
Be the change you wish to see.
in our town we've met some coaches like you and a lot of others who are not like you. sports are still 90% a popularity contest in my current observation (read my comment later in this thread)
based on the abstract, Physical weakness/unhealthiness is positively correlate to mental disorders. not the opposite.
From a pedantic perspective, the title doesn’t imply the positivity/negativity of the correlation, just that there is a relationship to be elaborated upon in the article.