A new study shows that for some people, exercise may increase your heart risk:
Could exercise actually be bad for some healthy people? A well-known group of researchers, including one who helped write the scientific paper justifying national guidelines that promote exercise for all, say the answer may be a qualified yes.
By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease:blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterolortriglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why….
Dr. Kraus said researchers needed to figure out how to tailor exercise prescriptions to individual needs.
Just like with diet, I have always wondered why people always think more exercise is better. People respond differently to different interventions. Some exercise is good for some people and some diets are good for some people but there are those of us for whom too much exercise and dieting is not such a good thing.
“about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease:blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterolortriglycerides.”
The last word should be split: cholesterol or triglycerides; that maes it 4 measures.
Of course, people who get worse on one measure might yet get better on 2 or 3 of the others, and that’s arguably an overall improvement.
Form the NYT article:
“There are a lot of people out there looking for any excuse not to exercise,” said William Haskell, emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “This might be an excuse for them to say, ‘Oh, I must be one of those 10 percent.’ ”
As I said, being in the 10% is not a good enough reason not to exercise.
Having said that, it seems to me that people like me, looking for excuses, are more likely to be in that 10%.
Look at cats: do they feel a need to exercise? and yet you don’t see a lot of fat cats around, and life expectancy for cats is at least as good as for dogs.
The best excuse I ever heard was, “I’m allergic to exercise. It makes me sweat and breathe hard.”
First off, I’m not going to tell you what to do- I figure how you exercise is your business.
But you’d have to be incredibly dumb to think that what cats do has anything to do with humans. Cats and people have very different physiology.
Wasn’t it the Kellog brothers who had vastly different outlooks on living a healthy life? One ate “healthy” and preached a healthy lifestyle, and lived to the ripe old age of 95. The other ate sugar, and sold sugary cereal, and tragically died at the young age of 95.
Maybe 10% celebrate their exercise with a quart of Baskin-Robbins.
As I get used to a low carb diet, the idea of eating dessert is becoming repellent to me.
However I must admit that, after a couple of hours of cross-country skiing, and carrying the skis up to my flat (5th floor, no elevator), I feel entitled to a couple of beers.
Luckily I have discovered Asahi Super Dry.
This is exactly why 10% of people are actually getting less healthy via exercise. In a metabolic sense, they are financing their additional activity through the consumption of simple carbs and sugars.
There is always a reason not to do exercise
More spin by the fat-acceptance crowd, desperate for that One Weird Magic Trick Discovered By A Mom That Melts Away Pounds.
I haven’t looked at the study at all, but don’t discount the possibility that increased carb intake may have contributed to the unexpected results for some, particularly the insulin levels.
Good thing I exercise out of vanity rather than because I’m a worry bird about health.
Walking, and sprinting, are all that you need. Anything else is a hobby.
Blue collar workers die before desk jockeys. Excersise is mostly useless.
“Walking, and sprinting, are all that you need.”
a beautiful prescription.
imho, I would add that one needs to keep one’s diet simple, down to less than 30 different, specific foods, and trust in their body to learn to compensate.
ridiculous, uninformed, closed minded.
It’s the inflammation.
What worsens the body’s burden from cryptopathic systemic inflammation systematically degrades the health and immune system vitality of the subject person. The sequelae are typically called ‘syndromic disease’ — conditions treated but never cured.
Whether such arises from organismal inhabitants, diet, orthopedics, other trauma, or any opportunistic combination thereof is secondary. A phase state shift in the subject patient’s physiology has become established. An established condition of cryptopathic systemic inflammation creates additional optimized habitat for pathogens and pathogenesis. Our bodies literally begin producing internal habitat for disease under this condition. This (no different than in the creation of malignant cells) is a question of ‘establishment’ … to have an occurrence of inflammation (or differently, an occurrence of a malignant cell) is very different that the establishment of that condition in the physiology of the subject patient.
Do an occasional test for C-reactive protein (CRP type II). Never stop testing your plasma ascorbate levels. Scurvy in the stress of our modern world is becoming commonplace. Our life stresses and diet are more than ever like that of the isolated British sailors long at sea. Should you slip into sub-clinical scurvy, your body cannot effectively heal under that metabolic deficit condition and many of the lifesaving drugs you take will lose precious efficiency, and the inflammation will begin to run rampant.
Cryptopathic, systemic and chronically wounding inflammation has not healed — and the contamination and metabolic disruption that brings.
ten years ago…
I’d look at life expectancy increases and want to ‘pat’ the medical community on the back.
I realize, now, that the increases are more due to technology and societal changes, than any manifest improvement in treatment/therapy/medication.
some random, concrete, examples:
filter out the fact that the rate of smoking has declined from 42% in 1965 to 19% in 2010.
let’s throw in some airbags and better engineering design for cars.
as for medication…
statins. forgetting the other influencing factors, life expectancy from 2000 has increased by 2.2% in 2010. 10 years? 2.2%? statistical noise, at best.
as I get older, I realize that the medical community is still seeing their world as a bunch of shadows on the wall. Stare at them long enough and one can see anything.
I appreciate the article, as it points to the fact that we ‘don’t understand’, in a world where specialized research keeps offerring corrolative anecdotes that pretend just the opposite.
filter out
Also don’t forget to take these “measures related to heart disease” for what they are: less than perfectly correlated indicators of heart disease with numerous confounders.
Another “measure related to heart disease” that get’s “worse” with exercise is enlargement of the left ventricle with heartwall thickening and bradycardia. Of course this condition (known as athletic heart syndrome) is aproblematic (and potentially beneficial under certain circumstances) when it is in fact the result of exercise and there are no contemporaneous conditions that can be negatively influenced by those biological changes.
In reality these imperfect proxies for heart disease going in the wrong direction are not evidence that exercise is a problem (it’s plausible but not likely outside of the extreme), but, rather it is evidence that these proxies for heart disease are imperfect and cannot by themselves on an individual basis be used to determine if exercise is a beneficial or detrimental. It could be that increased exercise is correlated with detrimental changes in diet in a portion of the population. It could also be that increased exercise is correlated with exacerbating otherwise undetected underlying conditions in a portion of the population.
Or it could simply be that these proxies are of no meaningful value on there own at the individual level — that they can be manipulated up or down in a number of ways with no corresponding change in heart disease risk because they are simply a proxy for something that happens on average to be largely correlated with things that do change heart disease risk.
Forest: trees; trees: forest, and all that…
But you can ignore the data. They didn’t measure ultimate clinical outcomes, like death.
Also, meta analyses should not be acted upon clinically. Instead, this should suggest how to set up a better clinical trial.
Remember, these are the same types who think the food pyramid is a good thing.
I need to look at the research a little closer but I can think of a number of things that could have caused those results. Personal observation: I had just completed a 10 mile running work out that included 1 mile warm-up followed by 4 x 1 mile at 5:00 with 1/2 mile recovery jog in between and a 1.5 mile cool down. I drank 32 ounces of Gatorade after the workout. 4 hours later I had to have a blood test for life-insurance purposes. Several of those factors above had spiked and the IC didn’t want to give me best rates because of it. I had to send them research that showed this happened and request a new blood test. I took two days off from training and my blood work this time came back A-okay.
@Conor Not exercising only leads to being fat if you eat too much. Eating less is better all around anyhow. Studies show that animals given a diet consisting of 60% of the calories normally given to them age more slowly and live longer.
Anyway, so fat acceptance has nothing to do with it.
It’s also a meta-study of 6 other studies, which means it’s mostly useless.
It doesn’t tell us the state of the participants before, whether they were athletes or not, what kind of diets they followed, etc, and it doesn’t tell us what rigorous exercises they followed.
Effects can be very different tracking athletes in rigorous exercise versus slobs doing too-rigorous-for-them exercise for the first time.
Dont know the details of the study, but perhaps it is a question of moderation. So 30 minutes of light exercise each day is good, while trying to jog 8 miles each day can cause problems by straining the system too much, and maybe having a heart attack while exercising. It may also be a matter of somebody trying to suddenly do too much exercise too fast. For example, if you haven’t been exerising at all, it might be better to start out with a 5 minute daily walk, and keep adding another 5 minutes every week, instead of immediately trying to jog miles each day.
Did any of the studies check the diets of the exercisers? It is a well known fact that some people start to eat worse/bad foods thinking their exercise regimen “protects” them from the consequences of their food choices. Many studies have demonstrated that people who exercise initially put on weight, not take it off.
Yes, I was going to suggest inflammation as well. Maybe exercise exacerbates that condition.
Jim Fixx was as fit as any runner could be, by outward appearance, yet he had an MI while jogging. Inflammation here?
There may be a dozen reasons for such results, including noise in the data, uncontrolled variables. Out of six measures, if you improve on five and one gets worse, you may still be better off.
All it says to me is there is no magic bullet, you have to still run the tests and look at the results and react to what you see. It’s not rocket surgery.