There are a lot of old strongmen. Jack Lalanne, off the top of my head for one. People die of old age when their lean body mass gets too low; when they look a

There are a lot of old strongmen. Jack Lalanne, off the top of my head for one. People die of old age when their lean body mass gets too low; when they look all skeletal. It's about that simple. The organs and muscles have wasted away too much and there's no power left. It makes perfect sense that people with more lean body mass will live longer. In contrast, endurance athletes are known to die young. ---- ...the Cooper Clinic in a paper published by Ruiz and co-authors found that cancer deaths are lowest in the strongest group. Jonatan R. Ruiz and his co-authors tested more than 8,000 subjects aged 20 to 80 for muscular strength. They grouped individuals into three categories of strength and found that the age-adjusted risk of cancer was 17.5 per thousand in the weakest group, 11.0 in the middle group, and 10.3 in the strongest group. The weaker groups also had higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, more cardiovascular disease, and more of them had diabetes. (Cancer Epidemiological Biomarkers Prevention 2009;18(5):1468–76).