If physical exercise is so good then why is it that when I read about an athlete they only lived up until their 50s or 60s while politicians like Henry kissingers and Strom Thurmond lived up until 100? I feel like the largest factor in deciding the length of your life is genetics and not if you're physically active or if you eat healthy. We've seen chain smokers who have smoked cigarettes and drank wine since their teens and survived in their hundreds.
i often wonder this. it intuitively makes sense of course that being athletic all your life would help but it doesn't seem like pro athletes live longer than anyone else, and a lot of the centenarians you see getting interviewed have led totally normal lives. saw one a few months ago who said she drinks a dr pepper every single day. i'm sure there's a limit though, obviously being an obese couch potato can't be good for your longevity
>>17017351It's a problem with moderation. To become a top level athlete in the modern age you need to exercise an absurdly excessive amount to the point that you wear out your joints and strain your heart. Even worse is the medical cheating that's commonplace in pretty much very sport at a high level, such as blood doping and steroids that will fuck your shit up in the longterm. A lot of sports also cause horrible long term problems specific to the sport, such as repeated head trauma from football/soccer or joint problems with gymnastics. To use an analogy, most people would be more healthy if they drank more water, but if someone tries to drink 20 gallons of water every day that would not result in them being more healthy.
>>17017351I imagine people have measured correlations between exercise and longevity. These go through the slop machine and become the "truth" that exercise makes you live longer. Realistically though, such a correlation is meaningless unless you can account for confounding factors and other limitations, which you can't, although they might pretend to a little bit. For example there is the simple fact that if you're healthy, you are more likely to want to exercise, because you will have more energy. If you're unhealthy, you will feel bad and be less likely to exercise (on average). That is just the beginning. In most cases, there is no way to empirically justify these kinds of statistical "truths". Correlation does not imply causation. However I still believe rationally that light to moderate exercise is beneficial.
>>17017364>>17017351You guys are framing this the wrong way, exercise might not have a direct benefit on your lifespan, but exercising IS necessary for the release of many chemicals in your body. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is an example, which improves learning and can cause new brain cells to be formed in the (in the hippocampus only). Since memory is encoded onto multiple brain cells, making a new one through cell division causes parts of several old memories to be copied, and you might even be able to recall MORE about it later as you exercise more and more. I was able to recall almost all of my childhood between ages 5-12, by taking lion's mane mushroom and getting 1 hour of exercise per day.Exercise also releases myokines which act on the muscle cells causing them to increase the number of mitochondria (50-100% increase after 6 weeks https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9462916/)grow supplemental capillaries to better supply the tissue with oxygen, and also the muscle tissue starts storing energy nearby as glycogen to power itself for even longer. When you walk or run, your leg muscles pump blood back up to your heart with each step, because the veins run alongside and get squeezed by the muscle contractions, it actually reduces the workload of the heart and enables it to reach its prime functioning.
