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Musings Report 2019-4 1-26-19 Born to Walk: The "Miracle Cure" of Exercise
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Welcome to January's MUS (Margins of the Unfiltered Swamp)
The last Musings of the month is a free-form exploration of the reaches of the fecund swamp that is the source of the blog, Musings and my books.
Thank You, Contributors!
January is when the most stalwart financial supporters of Of Two Minds send in their contributions--thank you, Suzanne S., John K., Guy T. and Daniel E.
Thank you and welcome new subscribers-patrons Damien S., Christopher M. and John F.
Born to Walk: The "Miracle Cure" of Exercise
This week I want to again apply the foundational processes of evolution to our own health, with a focus on the critical role of activity/exercise in our well-being.
The essential role of exercise/fitness is backed up by a large and growing body of evidence. It's now apparent that humans are "born to walk" and need to stay active to be healthy: eating well isn't enough.
While selling "miracle cures" of one kind or another is big business, the real "miracle cure" is activity/exercise. This includes mental acuity/health, as explained in this article:
Brains evolved to need exercise
"Mounting scientific evidence shows that exercise is good not only for our bodies, but for our brains. Yet, exactly why physical activity benefits the brain is not well understood.
Having this underlying understanding of the exercise-brain connection could help researchers come up with ways to enhance the benefits of exercise even further, and to develop effective interventions for age-related cognitive decline or even neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's."
The link between brain health and exercise is visible in studies of dementia and Alzheimer's, which have found that a daily walk reduces the risk of developing these disorders.
The other article worth reading is Humans Evolved to Exercise: Unlike our ape cousins, humans require high levels of physical activity to be healthy-- "Exercise is not optional; it is essential."
This article is behind a paywall but you may be able to find it at your local library. Here are some excerpts:
"Among our primate cousins, we humans are clearly the odd ape out. Somehow humans evolved to require much higher levels of physical activity for our bodies to function normally.
In ecology and evolution, diet is destiny. The foods animals eat do not just shape their teeth and guts but their entire physiology and way of living. Species evolved to eat foods that are abundant and stationary need not roam too far or be too clever to fill up; grass does not hide or run away. Eating foods that are hard to find or capture means more travel, often coupled with increased cognitive sophistication. For instance, fruit-eating spider monkeys in Central and South America have larger brains and travel five times farther every day than the leaf-obsessed howler monkeys that share their forests. Carnivores on the African savanna travel three times farther a day than the herbivores they hunt.
Moreover, hunting and gathering required hominins to work harder for their food. Simply moving up the food chain means food is harder to find; there are a lot more plant calories on the landscape than animal calories. Hunter-gatherers are remarkably active, typically covering nine to 14 kilometers a day on foot—about 12,000 to 18,000 steps.
Although we have long known that exercise is good for us humans, we are only beginning to appreciate the myriad ways our physiology has adapted to the physically active way of life that hunting and gathering demands. Nearly every organ system is implicated, down to the cellular level. Some of the most exciting work in this area has focused on the brain.
Raichlen and his colleagues have shown that our brain has evolved to reward prolonged physical activity, producing endocannabinoids—the so-called runner’s high—in response to aerobic exercise such as jogging. Raichlen and others have even argued that exercise helped to enable the massive expansion of the human brain and that we have evolved to require physical activity for normal brain development. Exercise causes the release of neurotrophic molecules that promote neurogenesis and brain growth, and it is known to improve memory and stave off age-related cognitive decline.
Our metabolic engines have evolved to accommodate increased activity as well. Humans’ maximum sustained power output, our VO2max, is at least four times greater than that of chimpanzees.
But the adaptations to exercise appear to go even deeper, accelerating the rate with which our cells function and burn calories. My work with Ross, Raichlen and others has shown that humans have evolved a faster metabolism, providing fuel for increased physical activity and the other energetically costly traits that set humans apart, including bigger brains.
All of this evidence points toward a new way of thinking about physical activity.
But exercise is not optional; it is essential, and weight loss is probably the one health benefit it largely fails to deliver. Our bodies are evolved to require daily physical activity, and consequently exercise does not make our bodies work more so much as it makes them work better.
Recent advances in metabolomics have shown that exercising muscles release hundreds of signaling molecules into the body, and we are only beginning to learn the full extent of their physiological reach. Endurance exercise reduces chronic inflammation, a serious risk factor for cardiovascular disease. It lowers resting levels of the steroid hormones testosterone, estrogen and progesterone, which helps account for the reduced rate of reproductive cancers among adults who exercise regularly. Exercise may blunt the morning rise in cortisol, the stress hormone. It is known to reduce insulin insensitivity, the immediate mechanism behind type 2 diabetes, and helps to shuttle glucose into muscle glycogen stores instead of fat. Regular exercise improves the effectiveness of our immune system to stave off infection, especially as we age. Even light activity, such as standing instead of sitting, causes muscles to produce enzymes that help to clear fat from circulating blood."
As I've often noted, the modern lifestyle and built environment often conspire against regular exercise. The trick is to make exercise a habit as regular as brushing one's teeth (assuming this is a regular behavior...). How to manage that is highly individualistic; the activity/exercise must be enjoyable enough that it doesn't take a massive application of willpower to make it happen.
As one last bit of evidence at the "miraculous" powers of exercise, here is an email from correspondent J.F. MD on how exercise helps very elderly people who are ill enough to be a hospital:
J.F. MD: "In-hospital exercise avoids deterioration in patients aged 75 - 101 - this challenges the idea that hospitalized patients should be on rest. This is not rehab after hospitalization - it is exercise while patients are acutely ill, in the hospital.
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Excerpt of the research abstract: A moderately challenging exercise program may help elderly patients avoid some of the deterioration associated with acute hospitalization, the authors of a new study write.
In a randomized clinical trial of patients ranging in age from 75 to 101 years, an individualized, multicomponent program consisting of resistance, balance, walking, and gait retraining exercises was associated with significant improvements in functional and cognitive status compared with usual care, Nicolás Martinez-Velilla, MD, PhD, and colleagues explain in an article published online November 12 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The traditional model of hospital care for elderly patients, which emphasizes bed rest, is often associated with significant functional decline even after the initial clinical problem has resolved.
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J.F. MD: The control group, who were treated without exercise, left the hospital less functional than when the came in. The exercise group left the hospital MORE functional than when they were admitted. Also, they had zero adverse effects from exercise, which I found interesting."
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
A Recession Survival Guide 1/25/19
The Ruling Elites Love How Easily We're Distracted and Turned Against Each Other 1/24/19
Gentrified Urban America Will Be Hit Hard by the Recession 1/23/19
Want to Heal the Internet? Ban All Collection of User Data 1/22/19
Two Ways the System Is Rigged: HFT and Oligarchic Inheritance 1/19/19
From Left Field
$3.5 Trillion A Year: Is America's Health Care System The World's Largest Money-Making Scam? -- yes... at least for some of the players...
From Academic to Assembly Line Worker: My Life of Precarity in Middle America -- the risks of pursuing an academic career when tenure is extremely scarce and competitive...
2019: World Economy Is Reaching Growth Limits; Expect Low Oil Prices, Financial Turbulence -- high oil prices, bad; low oil prices--also bad...
At Taxpayers’ Expense, Fed Paid Banks $38.5 Billion in Interest on “Reserves” in 2018. Here’s How
The Staggering Toll of the Russian Revolution--Utopia ends up being a slaughterhouse....
Why is Japan so Bitter About Unstoppable Rise of China? -- this comes across as pretty one-sided; it's clear he has no experience of poverty in rural China, but he reveals aspects of Japan that the Japanese media studiously avoid....
I’m a Chinese American Married to a Jew, But Our Marriage Isn’t Trendy--of course it isn't....
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
LA's Battle for Venice Beach: Homeless Surge Puts Hollywood's Progressive Ideals to the Test --virtue-signaling doesn't actually solve problems--how very inconvenient....
Economic Breakdown Starts In East Asia Due To Collapsed Births & Childbearing Populations-- excellent demographic analysis....
Thinking Outside the Black Box: What the algorithms can’t see may be the most human thing about us
Yanis Varoufakis with Professor Noam Chomsky at New York Public Library, April 16, 2016 (1:43) (via Zeus Y.) --master class in how the global financial-political-power system is broken...
"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." Patrick Henry
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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