Should You Exercise to Live Longer?
I’m not a medical professional, but this is what I understand.
Walking for thirty minutes a day is helpful. It promotes health and trims our waists. I’m amazed we can have happier and longer lives from something as simple as a thirty minute daily stroll.
If moderate exercise is good, then is more even better? Are there additional longevity benefits to vigorous and longer workouts?
The textbook answer is yes, more exercise tends to give a longer life. There is a famous study from Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger of Stanford University. It was based on questionnaires sent to almost 17,000 Harvard alumni to asses the effect of exercise on longevity. It was determined more exercise was better.
Dr. Paffenbarger practiced what he preached. According to the New York Times, he changed from a sedentary lifestyle at age 45 to running marathons, and even completing a grueling 100-mile race.
What motivated him?
Here’s the trend from the study as pictured in the Harvard Heart Letter in July 2004:
That answer would settle the matter for most people, but you see, I’m rarely satisfied with these textbook answers. I think textbook answers are for exams and Jeopardy.
The practical question is whether it’s worth it to exercise more. Exercise costs us time now for the promise of time later. If I had to give up 10 hours now for 10 hours at the end of my life, I would definitely not make the trade.
It turns out that’s pretty much the tradeoff we face. In that sense, it is probably not worthwhile to exercise more just to live longer.
Dr. Dean Ornish’s Analysis
This analysis comes from Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease, page 327. Regarding the Paffenbarger study, Ornish writes:
The problem is that over the course of your adult life, you would need to spend about one and a half years running to live one to two years longer.
How does this break down? I’ll paraphrase the subsequent calculations from the book.
To exercise enough, you’ll have to spend about 300 hours a year. Half that time is spent running, and the other half is spent getting to the track or in showering and dressing.
Then, you will need to keep that routine for the 45 years of adult life (ages thirty to seventy-five). All told, you will have to spend 13,500 hours in exercise activities.
How much is that? If you assume a 16 hour waking day, then there are 5,840 waking hours in a year [the book says 7,940 which I don't understand]. That means the time you spend exercising consumes the possible benefit–it’s almost a one for one tradeoff.
Dr. Ornish says exercise more if you really enjoy it, but not because you want to live longer. For most people, walking 30 minutes a day is probably good enough.
So here’s my own, non-medical take on the whole matter:
A Closing Tangent
Seeing people’s reactions is part of the fun of writing. Often, the most off-topic comments are the most entertaining.
On that note, I already anticipate one off-topic remark: “Presh, why is a young and healthy person like you reading a book on reversing heart disease?”
For one, it was recommended to me. I eventually read most books people recommend to me, so it was on my list, and I am ready to tackle it.
But there’s a more important reason. I want to learn about health and nutrition, and I figured a nice place would be to learn about a big killer in America.
Most young people I know are worried about saving for retirement and buying a house. I don’t worry much, but when I do, it’s not about getting money. It’s about not being able to enjoy it. It’d be nice to make good decisions everywhere, but there are priorities. I’d much rather have my broker yelling at me than my doctor. As the old saying goes, health is wealth.
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