10 ms·

Exercise may be the 'most potent medical intervention ever known'

151 points by peutetre 2y ago

kylehotchkiss 2y ago
Sure, it'd also be nice to have a small portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer. Can GLP-1 agonists (intestinal enzyme, so maybe just package it well?) just be added to foods like MSG to achieve this? Like a lactaid but it's a GLP-1 agonists
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  Sure, there’s already oral versions that exist: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6969659/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6969659/ Unsure if it has to be in some stomach-acid resistant packaging or slow release or something though.
- xarope 2y ago
  There are also plenty of ways to have a large portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer, without having to resort to drugs to curb your appetite. Greg Doucette's cookbook shows how you can add "bulky" food that are lower in calories. I'm not a fan of the propensity of artificial sweeteners, but the principles are the important thing. As an aside, I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" (aka let's add GLP-1 agonists to reduce appetite) is a generational thing, or just that in HN we have a bio-hacking mindset? It's quite a contrast to the other article in HN today, "An Unreasonable Amount of Time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098 [edit] typos
  - kylehotchkiss 2y ago
    > I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" American culture. We want maximum results with minimum effort.
- timtas 2y ago
  You can eat as much meat and tropical fats as it takes to satisfy, and you WILL lose weight and regain metabolic health. The catch is, you gotta ditch most of the carbs.
Scoundreller 2y ago
> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors. Yeah, uhhhh, driving a bus in an urban centre built before motor vehicles doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers.
- mhovan 2y ago
  Especially if they open the draw bridge in front of you: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7m8dmkglxo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7m8dmkglxo
  - defrost 2y ago
    It's all relative, from the PoV of the driver it was less stressful than his earlier driving gig: "He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.
- bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
  Unless they randomly assigned jobs, I am quite skeptical. A person with poor cardiovascular health seems unlikely to pursue a job that requires walking all day!
- pjc50 2y ago
  > doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers Some places in the UK are having problems retaining/recruiting drivers because of safety issues: attacks on bus drivers, either by angry passengers or random yobs :( I also remember that London bus drivers had a very high mortality rate right at the start of the pandemic: https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/london-bus-drivers-review/london-bus-driver-review-phase-2-report.pdf https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/lo...
xnx 2y ago
We've been overselling what exercise does for weight loss (almost nothing) and underselling what exercise does for everything else. Even better if you can get your exercise outside.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  What does that even mean? Exercise burns calories much faster than inactivity. Less calories means less fat.
  - pier25 2y ago
    You need a ton of exercise to burn just a couple hundred calories. The saying is you can't outrun a bad diet.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - ch4s3 2y ago
      You can burn nearly 400 calories running for 30 minutes at a relatively moderate pace.
      - olleromam91 2y ago
        And an average human can probably ingest 400 calories in under a minute, with significantly less fatigue.
        ch4s3 2y ago
        Who is arguing otherwise?
        kyriakos 2y ago
        It's still 400 calories deficit regardless
bluSCALE4 2y ago
[flagged]
Herring 2y ago
The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. The economy is all about paying money to make your life easier. We design our cities to require cars. Work schedules and commutes eat into free time. Screen based entertainment displaces more active pastimes, etc. Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades. It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.
- ijidak 2y ago
  That's why I feel GLP-1 meds are the game changer we need. Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy. They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha. And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur. I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.
  - koljghu 2y ago
    Exercise and GLP-1s are very different interventions. To liken them appears fallacious. Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc. You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars. Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
    - aydyn 2y ago
      They are different but two sides of the same coin > Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already. The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on. Calories in calories out as they say.
PaulKeeble 2y ago
Its not even remotely true. A lot of people before the invention of modern medicine did considerable manual labour and yet died at a younger age. Bang for the buck the most effective intervention is definitely vaccines, they are responsible for most of the longevity and the enormous reduction in childhood deaths we see today. Exercise is a mere blip in comparison to the effectiveness of vaccines and worse is a lot of the studies to do with exercise are low and very low quality because they are observational with relatively small effects leaving them prone to bias. That isn't saying exercise doesn't improve health it looks like it does, but compared to other pharmaceutical interventions its not very impressive.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  You are right. But. I know Ivy League educated compsci kids 22-25 with "e/" shit in their social media, working for giant companies whose products you use, who think vaccines should be optional / revoked. None think exercise is bad for you.
- thefz 2y ago
  Yo a 5K run around the neighborhood is nothing like being a slave, or manual labor since being a child.
dukeofdoom 2y ago
I think most people are put off by running. It's just too intense. But if you buy few pieces of equipment like a kayak, a paddle board, a trail bike and rollerblades. And this is all the equipment you need to exercise outdoors in a fun way, for most of the year. And you'll forget you're getting exercise, once you're out in nature. And can actually enjoy it.
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  It's also possible (and fun!) to run with very low intensity. Meaning, at a pace where you can still talk without too much discomfort. Doing a nice 20-30km trail run at this pace is incredibly relaxing.
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
I find that being sedentary can get you stuck in a weird local maxima where your body hurts, but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc) and so people don’t exercise and they protect their body like it is glass. If however, you can do some moderate exercise (swimming worked well for me) you can gradually build up your strength again and all of a sudden your back isn’t killing you anymore and you are able to strain you body much more without being in pain. I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied. Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before. Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.
- tessierashpool9 2y ago
  > but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc) I think that's where I am at right now. I have always been exercising to some extent. But it feels like the older I get the less one kind of exercise focusing on some set of physical and physiological aspects transfers to another set. Meaning, to go biking a lot, doesn't mean you can run. > strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied. Even after years of semi-regular weighted calf raises and yoga I just recently noticed that I could barely do a few hundred rope skips cause of my feet. 15 years ago I remember cardiovascular obstacles and the usual DOMS but I don't remember that my feet hurt. --- Currently my lower back / sciatica is giving me serious issues. I think I got it from some overexertion due to prolonged pelvic motion ... so that's yet another physical department to keep in mind.
  - __turbobrew__ 2y ago
senectus1 2y ago
I've found that how much you do, matters less than how often you do it. Quite often if you get into the habit of doing it often, how much you do increases in is own
codeproject 2y ago
I was always wondering if the exercises are the real panacea. if you look at some of the real successful and effective people, they all have one thing in common. they don't exercise. Look at Henry Kissinger, who is about 400 ibs and 100 years old when he died last year. He wrote a book about aI right before he died. Warren Buffet, now 96 years old, still working and incredibly smart. Donald Trump. again become president twice already. these people are all obese and never exercise.
- thefz 2y ago
  "real successful and effective" =/= healthy.
thefz 2y ago
The amount of denial on this website when this kind of discussion comes is something to be in awe of. For being supposedly a website for smart, or at least above the average intelligence users. No, semaglutide won't do the same for you. Fucking leave the house and move.
j_4 2y ago
Just throwing this out there. I'm a homebody living in a climate where the weather is kind of miserable for half of the year so would rather just execrise at home, and I've gotten fantastic mileage out of resources on the r/bodyweightfitness subreddit. I just have a pull-up bar and some gymnastic rings hanging from it. Been doing something very closely based on the Recommended Routine for almost 10 years now, on and off (mostly off, to be honest). It keeps me sane and healthy, or at least definitely more so if I didn't bother with it. https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
- monsieurgaufre 2y ago
  This is what i did. Created my own routine with the PPL method to supplement running and cycling. Also, embracing the suck helps a lot as well.
tyronehed 2y ago
[dead]
sn9 2y ago
Everyone should work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines for health [0]. Highly recommend the Barbell Medicine podcast for more information. [0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorities-be-to-improve-my-health/ https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
ijidak 2y ago
Interesting point: "It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It's particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk"
rajnathani 2y ago
Insightful observation study: > We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.
timtas 2y ago
No one ever knew this until government TV told us! Thanks! Government TV goes MAHA!

151 points by peutetre 2y ago

Sure, it'd also be nice to have a small portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer. Can GLP-1 agonists (intestinal enzyme, so maybe just package it well?) just be added to foods like MSG to achieve this? Like a lactaid but it's a GLP-1 agonists

Scoundreller 2y ago
Sure, there’s already oral versions that exist: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6969659/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6969659/ Unsure if it has to be in some stomach-acid resistant packaging or slow release or something though.
xarope 2y ago
There are also plenty of ways to have a large portioned meal that tastes good and meets your needs and satisfies your hunger for longer, without having to resort to drugs to curb your appetite. Greg Doucette's cookbook shows how you can add "bulky" food that are lower in calories. I'm not a fan of the propensity of artificial sweeteners, but the principles are the important thing. As an aside, I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" (aka let's add GLP-1 agonists to reduce appetite) is a generational thing, or just that in HN we have a bio-hacking mindset? It's quite a contrast to the other article in HN today, "An Unreasonable Amount of Time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098 [edit] typos
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  > I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" American culture. We want maximum results with minimum effort.
timtas 2y ago
You can eat as much meat and tropical fats as it takes to satisfy, and you WILL lose weight and regain metabolic health. The catch is, you gotta ditch most of the carbs.

Scoundreller 2y ago

> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors. Yeah, uhhhh, driving a bus in an urban centre built before motor vehicles doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers.

mhovan 2y ago
Especially if they open the draw bridge in front of you: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7m8dmkglxo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7m8dmkglxo
- defrost 2y ago
  It's all relative, from the PoV of the driver it was less stressful than his earlier driving gig: "He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.
bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
Unless they randomly assigned jobs, I am quite skeptical. A person with poor cardiovascular health seems unlikely to pursue a job that requires walking all day!
pjc50 2y ago
> doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers Some places in the UK are having problems retaining/recruiting drivers because of safety issues: attacks on bus drivers, either by angry passengers or random yobs :( I also remember that London bus drivers had a very high mortality rate right at the start of the pandemic: https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/london-bus-drivers-review/london-bus-driver-review-phase-2-report.pdf https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/lo...

xnx 2y ago

We've been overselling what exercise does for weight loss (almost nothing) and underselling what exercise does for everything else. Even better if you can get your exercise outside.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dyauspitr 2y ago
What does that even mean? Exercise burns calories much faster than inactivity. Less calories means less fat.
- pier25 2y ago
  You need a ton of exercise to burn just a couple hundred calories. The saying is you can't outrun a bad diet.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    You can burn nearly 400 calories running for 30 minutes at a relatively moderate pace.
    - olleromam91 2y ago
      And an average human can probably ingest 400 calories in under a minute, with significantly less fatigue.
      - ch4s3 2y ago
        Who is arguing otherwise?
      - kyriakos 2y ago
        It's still 400 calories deficit regardless

bluSCALE4 2y ago

[flagged]

Herring 2y ago

The problem with exercise is everything in modern life is set up to discourage it. The economy is all about paying money to make your life easier. We design our cities to require cars. Work schedules and commutes eat into free time. Screen based entertainment displaces more active pastimes, etc. Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades. It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.

ijidak 2y ago
That's why I feel GLP-1 meds are the game changer we need. Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy. They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha. And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur. I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.
- koljghu 2y ago
  Exercise and GLP-1s are very different interventions. To liken them appears fallacious. Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc. You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars. Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
  - aydyn 2y ago
    They are different but two sides of the same coin > Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less. Except in specific cases, this is mostly not true. Food in the modern era is very nutrient dense. This is why vitamin pills are mostly a placebo; you're getting an overabundance of nutrients in your diet already. The first principal component of healthy nutrition is simply _eating less_. Eating less reduces your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, injury when you are older, and on and on. Calories in calories out as they say.

PaulKeeble 2y ago

Its not even remotely true. A lot of people before the invention of modern medicine did considerable manual labour and yet died at a younger age. Bang for the buck the most effective intervention is definitely vaccines, they are responsible for most of the longevity and the enormous reduction in childhood deaths we see today. Exercise is a mere blip in comparison to the effectiveness of vaccines and worse is a lot of the studies to do with exercise are low and very low quality because they are observational with relatively small effects leaving them prone to bias. That isn't saying exercise doesn't improve health it looks like it does, but compared to other pharmaceutical interventions its not very impressive.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
You are right. But. I know Ivy League educated compsci kids 22-25 with "e/" shit in their social media, working for giant companies whose products you use, who think vaccines should be optional / revoked. None think exercise is bad for you.
thefz 2y ago
Yo a 5K run around the neighborhood is nothing like being a slave, or manual labor since being a child.

dukeofdoom 2y ago

I think most people are put off by running. It's just too intense. But if you buy few pieces of equipment like a kayak, a paddle board, a trail bike and rollerblades. And this is all the equipment you need to exercise outdoors in a fun way, for most of the year. And you'll forget you're getting exercise, once you're out in nature. And can actually enjoy it.

karmakurtisaani 2y ago
It's also possible (and fun!) to run with very low intensity. Meaning, at a pace where you can still talk without too much discomfort. Doing a nice 20-30km trail run at this pace is incredibly relaxing.

__turbobrew__ 2y ago

I find that being sedentary can get you stuck in a weird local maxima where your body hurts, but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc) and so people don’t exercise and they protect their body like it is glass. If however, you can do some moderate exercise (swimming worked well for me) you can gradually build up your strength again and all of a sudden your back isn’t killing you anymore and you are able to strain you body much more without being in pain. I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied. Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before. Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.

tessierashpool9 2y ago
> but it hurts even more when exercising (back hurts, RSIs, etc) I think that's where I am at right now. I have always been exercising to some extent. But it feels like the older I get the less one kind of exercise focusing on some set of physical and physiological aspects transfers to another set. Meaning, to go biking a lot, doesn't mean you can run. > strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied. Even after years of semi-regular weighted calf raises and yoga I just recently noticed that I could barely do a few hundred rope skips cause of my feet. 15 years ago I remember cardiovascular obstacles and the usual DOMS but I don't remember that my feet hurt. --- Currently my lower back / sciatica is giving me serious issues. I think I got it from some overexertion due to prolonged pelvic motion ... so that's yet another physical department to keep in mind.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago

senectus1 2y ago

I've found that how much you do, matters less than how often you do it. Quite often if you get into the habit of doing it often, how much you do increases in is own

codeproject 2y ago

I was always wondering if the exercises are the real panacea. if you look at some of the real successful and effective people, they all have one thing in common. they don't exercise. Look at Henry Kissinger, who is about 400 ibs and 100 years old when he died last year. He wrote a book about aI right before he died. Warren Buffet, now 96 years old, still working and incredibly smart. Donald Trump. again become president twice already. these people are all obese and never exercise.

thefz 2y ago
"real successful and effective" =/= healthy.

thefz 2y ago

The amount of denial on this website when this kind of discussion comes is something to be in awe of. For being supposedly a website for smart, or at least above the average intelligence users. No, semaglutide won't do the same for you. Fucking leave the house and move.

j_4 2y ago

Just throwing this out there. I'm a homebody living in a climate where the weather is kind of miserable for half of the year so would rather just execrise at home, and I've gotten fantastic mileage out of resources on the r/bodyweightfitness subreddit. I just have a pull-up bar and some gymnastic rings hanging from it. Been doing something very closely based on the Recommended Routine for almost 10 years now, on and off (mostly off, to be honest). It keeps me sane and healthy, or at least definitely more so if I didn't bother with it. https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...

monsieurgaufre 2y ago
This is what i did. Created my own routine with the PPL method to supplement running and cycling. Also, embracing the suck helps a lot as well.

tyronehed 2y ago

[dead]

sn9 2y ago

Everyone should work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines for health [0]. Highly recommend the Barbell Medicine podcast for more information. [0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorities-be-to-improve-my-health/ https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...

ijidak 2y ago

Interesting point: "It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It's particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk"

rajnathani 2y ago

Insightful observation study: > We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.

timtas 2y ago

No one ever knew this until government TV told us! Thanks! Government TV goes MAHA!