Am I the only one that isn't even 1% surprised by this? Nearly every person I know that is over 40 years of age does next to no exercise, and eats and drinks too much.
Our genes weren't made to sit around, browse the internet and open the fridge door every 45 minutes. Eventually our genes might change but we'll probably need the old ones, when /if West Civ collapses.
my parents just retired. they are ~70. they think exercise is walking outside for 2-3 miles. they sit and watch tv and don't move much beyond going out to restaurants daily. Their nutritional knowledge is limited, and sometimes flat out wrong/contradictory. They think they are eating healthy when they order the salad loaded with bread and drenched with dressing.
Exactly, and especially and the advanced age of his parents, any active should beat no activity.
My grandparents (85ish) do the same, they go on walks and occasionally bike rides together. Not very far, around 5km. But it beats just sitting around doing nothing!
Same for me (actually, most of the people I know are focused on running, but I guess it could be applied to nearly all sports).
The closer I get to my forties, the more important it is to take care of my body. Basically, you just realize that your body is not what it used to be, and you have either the choice to do something to stay/get back in shape (more sports, a better diet), or let it go (which is, unfortunately, the first step to health complications).
There is also a strong bias regarding to whom you hang with then. Being "seriously" involved in any sport means that you are going to dedicate a significant part of your free time to training, and therefore, will spent much more time with your fellow sportsmates than "regular" friends.
Here's some conjecture: The people that were driven to be healthy in the past were about as healthy as the health-obsessed people today. And the people in the past who didn't care defaulted into a lifestyle and eating habits that, based on what was marketed and available to them, left them looking and being average from a weight and health context.
Now, they've similarly "defaulted" into the lifestyle and eating habits that are available to them, but those are worse for their health.
I am 50 now and I definitely feel that my body can't endure hard training that well anymore and little injuries just keep accumulating. I am now doing a relatively mild yoga routine every morning and I feel I can maintain that for a long time.
I always wonder how the people over 40 training for a triathlon do in the long run. Do they accumulate more and more problems until they can't do it anymore? How do they handle injuries that don't allow them to run anymore?
The great thing about triathlon training is that if you have a minor running injury you can just stop running for a few weeks to let it heal and focus on swimming, cycling, and resistance training instead. It's totally possible to endure hard training until you're >80.
This person is an outlier. That's not normal. I used to do kickboxing and yes, there were a few fighters who did great in their 40s but most after a few years had massive injuries that prevented them from continuing. I myself have a bad knee and a bad shoulder so I can't run, cycle or swim without pain.
Used to teach yoga classes. During seminars you could see older famous teachers do amazing stuff. I thought yoga is is really healthy until I found out that a lot of them had hip and knee replacements and often lived in painkillers.
I believe most people simply can't do high intensity stuff from a certain age on or have to be very selective.
Sure there are some outliers and there's obviously survivorship bias but if you check the results from any large endurance race you'll find many older age group athletes with finishing times not far off the overall winners. You really can't compare endurance sports with high impact, full contact sports like kickboxing.
But "blood pressure rise with age" is almost certainly due to atherosclerosis. And atherosclerosis seems to be primarily caused due to inflammation, which destroys the artery walls, which in turn kickstarts the immunity system to come and "repair" them by patching them up with cholesterol and calcium. Then there is less room for blood to pass through the arteries = higher blood pressure. The calcium/cholesterol plaques breaking apart = heart attack.
There's also this new theory that the stuff that acts as protection for your artery walls is destroyed by high glucose in the blood/high-carb meals.
In response to the obesity & diabetes epidemic, the BBC sent kids to live and train with seniors in the USA. The before and after interviews are quite telling.
Losing to seniors really changed the kid's perceptions of and expectations for aging.
What a joke. "Scientific" studies like this are hugely damaging to the public's understanding of science and their health choices. Terrible for science as well, considering the vast majority of scientists don't even actually know what a P-value is, they cannot reliably judge garbage like this.
I think there’s a difference between drinking and drunkenness. Southern Europeans tend to imbibe at meal times so their overall intake might be higher. However they don’t have a culture of getting smashed on the weekends. Northern Europeans do however so in the aggregate it may all just wash out.
There’s generally a lot more physical activity in Europe because public transit is good and vehicle ownership is expensive and inconvenient.
Their salt intake is probably similar. But the link between salt and hypertension may not be as strong as once thought, especially among individuals with low salt sensitivity. I have mild hypertension myself that is correlated with weight rather than salt intake.
But the main point is the given definition of a Western lifestyle isn’t descriptive of the lifestyles of a vast number of Westerners.
I really don't think high amounts of salt is a big deal, unless you almost never eat foods with potassium, too. But even then high levels of salt is probably a bigger issue for people who already have border-line high blood pressure due to atherosclerosis, and then eating a lot of salt pushes them over the limit. It's also much easier for doctors to say "eat less salt" than to say "eat more potassium-rich foods", even if they know that the two need to be in balanced.
When doing a 5-day fasting recently I purposefully tried to consume significant amounts of salt because I felt like I was lacking in electrolytes. I could barely maintain my blood pressure around 10.5/6. Normally, it's around 11.5-12/7.
This is a nice video discussing some studies that show that high levels of salt is significantly better if it comes with high levels of potassium compared to low levels of salt but even lower levels of potassium (by ratio):
Yup, good science shows that potassium is far more important than people seem to generally realize but people have been so busy demonizing salt for so long that it's sunk into the collective consciousness of all those people who don't care to keep up on the good quality science being done in the area of nutrition lately. (There's a lot of crappy "studies" being done in this area which are unfortunately diluting the facts). Potassium is also the link between high vegetable intake and proven health benefits, not necessarily the vegetables themselves and you can get that potassium in other ways without having to eat like a cow every day.
Ironically, when going to less stressful place, many westerners dislike the slow pace of life, which probably increase their blood pressure for a little while. I'm in the caribean right now, and things are weird, slow, transient.. but there's a very very gentle side to it. People are way calmer, they smile, they let you pass in front of them. Not everybody, but it's easy to see the difference to most European city. We're running nowhere there.
[unsurprisingly] I saw many 90yo persons there with good health. Walking with family to rituals. Good memory, good spirit. These people often lived in tiny houses with not much. Something to think about.
I noticed much of the same thing on the big island, Hawaii.
I grew up in a slow, small town so the pace and friendly nature felt more natural to me than living in the city does (don’t smile too much or be too engaging if that’s not your station or people will treat you with suspicion at first).
At the same time (in and around Kona) I constantly saw people excercizing. And everybody seems to hangout outside regularly. And they get up with the sun because it tends to set pretty sharply after 12 hours.
> And they get up with the sun because it tends to set pretty sharply after 12 hours.
exactly, tropical sun makes you rise early too, which is quite nice. We're really animals tied to sun cycles etc.
Also being around nature makes you lock in its rhythm too. Rain, insects, animals.. it's such a different feeling I can't really describe it. It has no meaning, just tree waving, rivers flowing but you feel happy moving along.
I can't say I could live all year long on an island, because I was born and raised near Paris so.. if pains me a little not to see it. But I know I feel very different on this island.
Wow, I'm a bit shocked! I was just in Kona, and healthy food (even just basic produce) was really expensive. I had thought to myself that must take a toll.
I missed the farmer's markets while I was there. Did you happen to hit any of those?
I didn't find food too bad except for certain items that aren't common on the Island. Then again I'm from Canada and we have to ship a lot up from Mexico in the winter if it hasn't been frozen.
Is it possible that expensive food keeps people from eating too much? Overeating can have a bigger negative impact on lifespan than the type of food that you eat. Almost any food can be healthy in moderation.
It's true that avocado, papaya, pineapple, and other classically tropical fruits were very cheap. However I found carrots, onions, green onions, garlic, etc were quite expensive at the KTA.
But, I was only a visitor- did not bargain-hunt- and I am only an anecdote of one.
Chinese medicine, for instance, consider onions and garlic generally unhealthy, not something to be consumed all the time or even as part of almost any dish depending on the western cuisine.
Can you share more? I feel like in my quest to learn more about authentic Chinese cuisine onions, scallions and garlic all are incredibly common ingredients.
He's referring to buddhist cuisine. Buddhist philosophy states that pungent herbs or spices alert your senses and fog your brain, preventing mindfulness.
From the wiki:
>In addition to the ban on garlic practically all Mahayana monastics in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan specifically avoid eating strong-smelling plants, traditionally asafoetida, shallot, mountain leek and Allium chinense, which together with garlic are referred to as wǔ hūn (五荤, or 'Five Acrid and Strong-smelling Vegetables') or wǔ xīn (五辛 or 'Five Spices') as they tend to excite senses. This is based on teachings found in the Brahamajala Sutra, the Surangama Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra (chapter eight). In modern times this rule is often interpreted to include other vegetables of the onion genus, as well as coriander. The origins of this additional restriction is from the Indic region and can still be found among some believers of Hinduism and Jainism. Some Taoists also have this additional restriction but the list of restricted plants differs from the Buddhist list.
I actually learned this from Chef's Table S3E01 which is a great intro to Buddhist Cuisine if you're interested in learning more. It seems ironic that the five "pungent" herbs are avoided but fermented vegetables are not.
My grandmother's land is actually used to grow carrots. I don't know how hard nor how good they are though. I think most things can be grown there so you can have a local but still varied diet.
Once upon a time, I had a boss who cut a lake house vacation short because she was bored and wanted to come back to work. She spent the rest of the week in a frightening turbo mode, almost as if she were trying to cram all the work she didn't do the first three days of the week into the last two days.
I gather that people who are addicted to stimulants also become anxious if they start to sober up.
Interestingly, this gets into the territory of the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running, prospective cohort study of cardiovascular disease risk.
The data are mixed. One analysis, for example, showed that "Type A behavior" was not correlated with CVD[1]. Another showed that increased tension was associated with heart disease[2]. You can find plenty of other papers on the subject as well.
Job-related stress is a particularly interesting aspect of this. Conceptually, it makes sense that demanding work would increase cortisol levels and lead to CVD, but a number of studies don't bear this out after correcting for smoking, exercise, and so on. However, one could argue that job-stress leads to higher rates of smoking, drinking, etc., which makes the interpretation harder. It may also be that stress at work is not the only factor, and that the combination of high stress plus low control over one's work is substantially worse than one or the other alone.[3]
It is a bit unsatisfying to not have a clear answer, but I think the issue is more nuanced than I would have assumed.
Are you sure you are not just looking at things from the perspective of being on holidays? The violent crime rate on a lot of Caribbean islands is horrendous.
I don't deny problems, but I'm up north, near the volcano, here life is extremely different. Now in large cities (closer to western lifestyle :p) things are sour..
It's the dairy in our diets. Baby-calf growth hormone is what we're consuming. It's a liquid specifically designed to make small cows get big really fast. It should never have been introduced into human food.
eh, yes western life style. But no mention of the much higher consumption of animal products in the west - and the link between saturated fat and high blood pressure?
Because there isn't any proof of such a link? High blood pressure goes hand in hand with low potassium intake and many people don't eat enough potassium rich foods.
People keep trying to push their anti meat morality by finding all sorts of made up reasons why its an issue but good science is firmly unable to prove all those myriad of made up fear mongering links.
I keep trying to get my semi-retired parents to change their lifestyle, but unfortunately they keep getting blood tests which say their cholesterol and blood pressure and such are perfect. It is all the more frustrating because my dad smoked for about thirty-five years, and according to his veins it's as though he never smoked at all. I am thinking of asking the doctor if he can fudge the results.
In all seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's due to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the past few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you.
Another advantage is that they both worked for themselves; they never had bosses making them do excruciatingly stupid things for years on end.
>I keep trying to get my semi-retired parents to change their lifestyle, but unfortunately they keep getting blood tests which say their cholesterol and blood pressure and such are perfect.
So, you'd rather they got worse results?
>It is all the more frustrating because my dad smoked for about thirty-five years, and according to his veins it's as though he never smoked at all. I am thinking of asking the doctor if he can fudge the results. In all seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's due to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the past few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you.
Sounds very unlikely, and there really haven't been "more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you". At best a few ho-hum studies recycled by countless news outlets and websites. Coffee is not so miracle food (actually there are no such "superfoods"), and tons of people have smoked AND drank lots of coffee and still had bad health.
That said, some of the longer living populations in the Blue Zones smoke just fine and had for all their lives -- stress free, better foods, and regular walking is more important.
E.g. according to this a sedentary lifestyle is worse than smoking + diabetes + heart disease for your survival stats:
82 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadWestern lifestyles with all the salt, non-exercise and alcohol is still double.
I am not surprised.
My grandparents (85ish) do the same, they go on walks and occasionally bike rides together. Not very far, around 5km. But it beats just sitting around doing nothing!
The closer I get to my forties, the more important it is to take care of my body. Basically, you just realize that your body is not what it used to be, and you have either the choice to do something to stay/get back in shape (more sports, a better diet), or let it go (which is, unfortunately, the first step to health complications).
There is also a strong bias regarding to whom you hang with then. Being "seriously" involved in any sport means that you are going to dedicate a significant part of your free time to training, and therefore, will spent much more time with your fellow sportsmates than "regular" friends.
It's bi-modal isn't it?
Half of people are fatter than ever, the other half are fitnesses obsessed. There's not as much moderation in the middle as there sued to be.
Now, they've similarly "defaulted" into the lifestyle and eating habits that are available to them, but those are worse for their health.
I always wonder how the people over 40 training for a triathlon do in the long run. Do they accumulate more and more problems until they can't do it anymore? How do they handle injuries that don't allow them to run anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Buder#Triathlon_career
Used to teach yoga classes. During seminars you could see older famous teachers do amazing stuff. I thought yoga is is really healthy until I found out that a lot of them had hip and knee replacements and often lived in painkillers.
I believe most people simply can't do high intensity stuff from a certain age on or have to be very selective.
But "blood pressure rise with age" is almost certainly due to atherosclerosis. And atherosclerosis seems to be primarily caused due to inflammation, which destroys the artery walls, which in turn kickstarts the immunity system to come and "repair" them by patching them up with cholesterol and calcium. Then there is less room for blood to pass through the arteries = higher blood pressure. The calcium/cholesterol plaques breaking apart = heart attack.
There's also this new theory that the stuff that acts as protection for your artery walls is destroyed by high glucose in the blood/high-carb meals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkTuBaWN5sg
Some of my geriatric relatives are ridiculously healthy, by choice. Two of them were part of this program:
"Are you Fitter than a Pensioner?" [2010]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00txmm3
In response to the obesity & diabetes epidemic, the BBC sent kids to live and train with seniors in the USA. The before and after interviews are quite telling.
Losing to seniors really changed the kid's perceptions of and expectations for aging.
> the study is very small – only 11 Yekwana individuals over the age of 40 took part in the research
[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/book/
Four sentences in.
http://www.who.int/gho/alcohol/en/
There’s generally a lot more physical activity in Europe because public transit is good and vehicle ownership is expensive and inconvenient.
Their salt intake is probably similar. But the link between salt and hypertension may not be as strong as once thought, especially among individuals with low salt sensitivity. I have mild hypertension myself that is correlated with weight rather than salt intake.
But the main point is the given definition of a Western lifestyle isn’t descriptive of the lifestyles of a vast number of Westerners.
When doing a 5-day fasting recently I purposefully tried to consume significant amounts of salt because I felt like I was lacking in electrolytes. I could barely maintain my blood pressure around 10.5/6. Normally, it's around 11.5-12/7.
This is a nice video discussing some studies that show that high levels of salt is significantly better if it comes with high levels of potassium compared to low levels of salt but even lower levels of potassium (by ratio):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amJ-ev8Ial8
[unsurprisingly] I saw many 90yo persons there with good health. Walking with family to rituals. Good memory, good spirit. These people often lived in tiny houses with not much. Something to think about.
I grew up in a slow, small town so the pace and friendly nature felt more natural to me than living in the city does (don’t smile too much or be too engaging if that’s not your station or people will treat you with suspicion at first).
At the same time (in and around Kona) I constantly saw people excercizing. And everybody seems to hangout outside regularly. And they get up with the sun because it tends to set pretty sharply after 12 hours.
exactly, tropical sun makes you rise early too, which is quite nice. We're really animals tied to sun cycles etc.
Also being around nature makes you lock in its rhythm too. Rain, insects, animals.. it's such a different feeling I can't really describe it. It has no meaning, just tree waving, rivers flowing but you feel happy moving along.
I can't say I could live all year long on an island, because I was born and raised near Paris so.. if pains me a little not to see it. But I know I feel very different on this island.
Hawaii has the highest life expectancy of any US State, over 81 years vs some other states that are over 5 years less!
I didn't find food too bad except for certain items that aren't common on the Island. Then again I'm from Canada and we have to ship a lot up from Mexico in the winter if it hasn't been frozen.
The Costco in Kona is your friend.
I think what surprised me the most is that imported things with indefinite shelf lives were still quite expensive.
But it's certainly true that I am accustomed to having access to produce & spices that are probably not grown locally in Hawai'i.
But, I was only a visitor- did not bargain-hunt- and I am only an anecdote of one.
From the wiki:
>In addition to the ban on garlic practically all Mahayana monastics in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan specifically avoid eating strong-smelling plants, traditionally asafoetida, shallot, mountain leek and Allium chinense, which together with garlic are referred to as wǔ hūn (五荤, or 'Five Acrid and Strong-smelling Vegetables') or wǔ xīn (五辛 or 'Five Spices') as they tend to excite senses. This is based on teachings found in the Brahamajala Sutra, the Surangama Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra (chapter eight). In modern times this rule is often interpreted to include other vegetables of the onion genus, as well as coriander. The origins of this additional restriction is from the Indic region and can still be found among some believers of Hinduism and Jainism. Some Taoists also have this additional restriction but the list of restricted plants differs from the Buddhist list.
I actually learned this from Chef's Table S3E01 which is a great intro to Buddhist Cuisine if you're interested in learning more. It seems ironic that the five "pungent" herbs are avoided but fermented vegetables are not.
Tropical climate is really strong so much sun and rain.
I gather that people who are addicted to stimulants also become anxious if they start to sober up.
The data are mixed. One analysis, for example, showed that "Type A behavior" was not correlated with CVD[1]. Another showed that increased tension was associated with heart disease[2]. You can find plenty of other papers on the subject as well.
Job-related stress is a particularly interesting aspect of this. Conceptually, it makes sense that demanding work would increase cortisol levels and lead to CVD, but a number of studies don't bear this out after correcting for smoking, exercise, and so on. However, one could argue that job-stress leads to higher rates of smoking, drinking, etc., which makes the interpretation harder. It may also be that stress at work is not the only factor, and that the combination of high stress plus low control over one's work is substantially worse than one or the other alone.[3]
It is a bit unsatisfying to not have a clear answer, but I think the issue is more nuanced than I would have assumed.
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/665654 [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16204425 [3]https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/jaha.117.008073
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pr...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166373/
People keep trying to push their anti meat morality by finding all sorts of made up reasons why its an issue but good science is firmly unable to prove all those myriad of made up fear mongering links.
In all seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's due to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the past few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you.
Another advantage is that they both worked for themselves; they never had bosses making them do excruciatingly stupid things for years on end.
So, you'd rather they got worse results?
>It is all the more frustrating because my dad smoked for about thirty-five years, and according to his veins it's as though he never smoked at all. I am thinking of asking the doctor if he can fudge the results. In all seriousness, it's probably genes, but I've also started to suspect it's due to coffee. They each drink about twelve cups of coffee per day. In the past few years, there have been more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you.
Sounds very unlikely, and there really haven't been "more and more studies suggesting coffee is surprisingly good for you". At best a few ho-hum studies recycled by countless news outlets and websites. Coffee is not so miracle food (actually there are no such "superfoods"), and tons of people have smoked AND drank lots of coffee and still had bad health.
That said, some of the longer living populations in the Blue Zones smoke just fine and had for all their lives -- stress free, better foods, and regular walking is more important.
E.g. according to this a sedentary lifestyle is worse than smoking + diabetes + heart disease for your survival stats:
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/19/health/study-not-exercisi...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144382/