"Scientists researching possible candidates for treating Alzheimer's disease found exercise outperformed all tested drugs for the ability to reverse dysregulated gene expression."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-22179-z
Modern medical tech and practices are keeping us alive healthier and longer. Being disheartened by the fact you still need to eat right, sleep, etc. is like being disheartened that you still need to do regular maintenance on your car and treat it well.
The simple fact is that if you sabotage your body, you'll have more issues cropping up sooner and with greater severity, and if you keep it strong all that medical advancement actually has an opportunity to help you in the cases where your body can't help itself. It doesn't discredit medical advancement, only reminds us that many people's lifestyles can often be more destructive than we realize.
The thing with eating and sleeping right etc is that we know the limits of it: it can keep you alive into your 90's at best, and more realistically into your 80's. Technology on the other hand is completely uncapped. A pill that keeps a degenerate bum alive into the 80's might be really hard to achieve, but the kicker is that once you do, it's just another step or two to keeping him alive until 200.
Isn’t genetics more important? There are families where everyone dies young - look at the guy who popularized jogging. All the men in his family die young. He tried to beat it be exercising, eating healthy, etc. Still died young. Same age as his father.
Others families live into their hundreds without any effort. It would seem the first thing to do is to figure out a way to fix DNA.
In 1986 exercise physiologist Kenneth Cooper published an inventory of the risk factors that might have contributed to Fixx's death.[6] Granted access to his medical records and autopsy, and after interviewing his friends and family, Cooper concluded that Fixx was genetically predisposed—his father died of a heart attack at 43 after a previous one at 35,[7] and Fixx himself had a congenitally enlarged heart—and had an unhealthy life: Fixx was a heavy smoker before beginning running at age 36, had a stressful occupation, had undergone a second divorce, and gained weight up to 214 pounds (97 kg).[8] Medical opinion continues to uphold the link between moderate exercise and longevity.[9]
Not to state the obvious, but old people are really, well, old (and frail).
Your pill would need to do a lot of heavy lifting. I'm no doctor, but your pill would need to deal with mental issues (dementia of all kinds etc) and physical issues, like muscle mass, bone density, flexibility, skin elasticity and lots more.
There are very few, dare I say no, 90 year old that could pass for 70 - what sort of condition would 120 bring? Or 130 etc?
As an expert in one field, used to customers waving their hands telling me "this won't take long for you to do, it's very simple", I feel like your belief in (medical) technology, and what is possible, may be just a touch optimistic.
Presumably some sort of cellular rejuvenation - perhaps a way of gradually replacing senescent cells with healthy cells and/or of activating telomerase without causing cancer - would have beneficial effects across your entire body.
There are already large mammals - bowhead whales - that can live 200 years. Perhaps we can adopt some of their longevity traits without having to become giant ocean creatures.
Quality of life is a thing that a bunch of people miss though. If you're active in your middle ages then you're going to be able to do so much more as an 80 year old. You can also play it risky and be super shitty to your body in your 40s because you can afford to but then the next 40 years will suck. And doctors won't let you just die. They'll keep you alive as long as possible. Staying alive isn't the hard part.
Or taking the car example in another direction, it's like being disheartened that you can't put diesel in your car that takes regular unleaded gasoline
We need the proper fuel, substrates, and cofactors to operate well and not do unnecessary damage
>I hate this because I want to believe technology and AI and will result in modern medicine where everyone has long healthy lives.
Medical technology and AI is not even close to any major improvement in life expectancy, except in much rare cases (heart transplants is one example: they're insignificant in raising overall life expectancy, as they're statistically too rare to matter).
The big majority of the improvement in life expectancy in the 20th century was from low-hanging stuff like running water, sterilization, waste disposal, and basic antibiotics, not from the high-tech transplants, DNA research, fancy drugs and so on.
Fancy drugs save lives. Big time. My Mom had cancer and was treated with Rituximab. She's doing just fine 10 years later. That type of cancer would have been a death sentence 30 years before. There are lots of other anti-cancer drugs like Rituximab, and they save lives every day.
Despite these advances, life expectancy in the US is declining. If you google for something like ‘life expectancy change if cancer cured’ you’ll find that estimates of the effect on life expectancy of curing heart disease and cancer don’t exceed more than several years each. And looking into the far future, even if all disease is cured, and aging eliminated, life expectancy only increases to around 1000.
Wanna keep it from turning murderbot or paperclip maximizer? Welcome to the arena of politics of correct values. Wanna use it for longevity research? Same.
Some people also would like to make sure it isn't helping stoke antisemitism or genocide, but apparently that's controversial for some reason, so guess it's political.
(And that's before we get to the usual issue that people using "politically correct" as the drive-by aspersion that's so unfortunately common are usually more ideological than those they criticize and very much have their own political correctness they're anxious to impose by any means available to them...)
Having been vaccinated for Tdap recently very reliably predicts a 40% lower risk of dementia.
I gather flu vaccine has similar effect size. Nobody knows why. Ask, and people speculate about inflammation.
Having been treated for herpes lately -- valacyclovir, lately -- seems too to have outsize effect. I get all three.
People doing autopsies say brains they examine are very often laced with herpes virus and bacteria, vs. doctrine that insists nothing gets in.
US grants $2B annually to study plaque formation in transgenic mice. Approximately none of it goes for anything of value. When the amyloid boat sinks, a lot of biochemists will need to find something else to do. They would better look early.
I'm young (early 30s) but have a strong family history of late onset Alzheimers (my father, and both of my mother's parents).
I also get cold sores on occasion. I've brought this -- and the HSV-Alzheimers connection -- up to my doctor and a nurse, but neither had heard of the connection before (but I directed them to [0]), or thought it was worth pursuing anything like valacyclovir.
Roughly, the sentiment was that I am young and have time to wait for more research, that taking drugs long term will itself likely have consequences.
I'm not inclined to disagree there, although the evidence seems quite strong.
I look forward to seeing more funding and scientific effort directed toward other avenues.
> Says the guy hypocritically from his smartphone.
How is it hypocritical? Opposed to any other times in human history you can’t give up on society and live a peaceful life in a community.
We’re born into it along with all our families and friends. Telling someone to go off and live in the woods is a life of solitude and probably harsh run ins with the law.
There is no choice nowadays and saying “ha but you live in society so you can’t critique it” is a willful ignorance.
Seriously, if you really believe you're better off without technology, you can live that way without going and living in the woods. Saying you're better off without technology from a smartphone is hypocrisy. I double down on that.
Because the Amish are a Christian organization that’s been around for over a hundred years.
Also, you still have to give up all your family and friends and live by strict Christian values. Not everyone’s cup of tea, especially if one happens to be different in some way.
Sure, but I'm not recommending anyone join the Amish, just pointing out it is possible to live without a lot of technological informed in your life if you truly believe you'd be better off that way. It would be extremely dumb, but it's possible.
That's not a realistic view though. Technology and AI aren't some magical things that remove the need to have a balanced life. At the end of the day, we are living/breathing animals that depend on the things around us to grow and thrive.
On the other hand it makes so much sense. We're the result of hundreds of millions of evolution on this planet, and we're very optimized for the actions that we can take in nature (e.g. Walk, swim, hunt an animal/grap a fruit, eat, reproduce).
No wonder why these are good for us, because these are our true traits.
Modern medicine, on the other hand, is a few hundred years old at best and generally work as a band-aid rather than solving the root of the problems.
Exercise always seems counterintuitive. After all, things tend to wear out and break when you use them. You don't use the good scissors for most things or they won't be good when you need them. We would be a lot less grumpy if the way to build muscle was to take it easy, and you only needed to exercise if you were overbulking and needed to wear some out. So we want a pill that triggers the regenerative effects of exercise without the actual exercise. Human Growth Hormone without the problems.
Evolution doesn't care if you're grumpy, it only "cares" if you succeeded in reproducing.
Tissues that aren't stressed naturally atrophy to conserve energy, which saves on food, which is adaptive in evolutionary terms. This has the natural implication that those tissues will reach an equilibrium where they are barely stronger than your most basic needs.
If the only stress you experience is getting off the couch to get some food, just doing that will be a little difficult. Larger, sudden stresses will cause injuries because your tissues won't be adapted to handle them.
Exercise ensures that we mentally and physically exceed our normal stress thresholds, so the remaining stresses of life is less stressful by comparison.
Our body is breaking down constantly, but it's also rebuilding itself. It's not an inanimate object which wears down until it breaks.
I view exercise as giving your body, and brain, proof that the rebuilding is still needed, and information on where to direct resources.
If you never take a walk, why expect your body to rebuild itself to be good at walking? Eventually it'll lose its capacity because it (correctly) "learns" that isn't important to you.
I really enjoyed the book "Move your DNA". It talks a lot about the loads you place on your body (even ones you don't think about) and the effects that has. Definitely worth a read.
That should be encouraging, not disheartening. The best methods for keeping healthy just involve easy simple things anyone could do for free everyday. That’s better than any dependence on shitty expensive drugs.
Waaay easier than external AI and technology interventions, which don't even fully exist yet and without side effects.
I mean, think of it as bodybuilding: there are plenty of good ol' ways of building strength and stimulating hypertrophy on purely natural processes, and that shouldn't be disheartening as compared to, say, injecting yourself with steroids.
Humans are a very long lived species already at least when compared to most other large high metabolism mammals. That means evolution already did a lot of optimization for longevity, possibly driven by the high value of grandparents in child rearing and passing on valuable knowledge.
This is also why lots of mouse longevity research doesn’t translate well to humans. Mice are not a particularly longevity optimized mammal so it means there is more low hanging fruit there.
For us all the low hanging fruit is likely picked.
I wish gyms were less expensive, and had places, even a table perhaps, that kids and tweens could use. It would make exercise more accessible for me and my lifestyle.
In university, I had an indoor track I could use, it was fantastic and had plenty of room for families and people exercising.
No, we need cities and towns that are designed around active transport. Exercise should not be a "thing you do", it should just be part of life. If you want to "do exercise" it needs to be in addition to the normal every day base level of exercise everyone gets for free.
That said, you don't need to wait to be given those opportunities. Look for every opportunity for unnecessary expenditure of energy - you'll find there are plenty.
This. When I lived in Europe I was getting 60+ minutes of walking every day just between work and home and lunch and work. In Korea, I get 40+ minutes to and from subway stations. Family in the US will tell me they went for a really good 30 minute walk, and the thought I'm too polite to express is "How is 30 minutes of walking special enough to tell me about?"
Basically Singapore. Unfortunately that country can't be model in any western countries due Chinese inherent concept of devine right to rule (mandate from heaven). The system depends on people believing in a single party in overwhelming majority (>65%) and mandatory voting. Western countries depends on majority of voters being lazy and bot involved and let a small subset of vocal minority to control the government with small margin of winning votes (~55% out of say 60% voters turnout). For a city to be designed around active lifestyle, you need strong and consistent government with good resources to implement. Even some Nordic countries that are well ran compare to say a messy western country like USA, still can't implement the active lifestyle properly and consistently across more than a single election.
This should be in every city. The only way I could reliably exercise when my kids were babies was by running them in a stroller.
Apart from the mental health aspect (lack of agency, no time or space to yourself), you can’t always subject your kids to the weather of the day or they’re uncooperative to the point that the run isn’t feasible. Not to mention the multitude of reasons people can’t run, from disabilities to simply having no safe place to run with a stroller. Smooth sidewalks with space are kind of a luxury.
With a lifestyle and/or restrictions like that, no wonder people get out of shape. We can’t rely on our communities having space and accommodation for kids and so, well, without a family network we’re on our own.
You don’t need a gym, those are just excuses. You can do a lot right at home, and more frequently as you don’t need to go all the way to the gym every time.
Physical fitness for good health has 2 components: aerobic fitness and strength. You can improve your aerobic fitness and your upper body strength at home (rings and/or handstand pushups are enough for all but the most advanced strength athletes).
Core/lower body strength is another matter entirely. People tend to quickly progress to 1x body weight squats and deadlifts. And someone who is more advanced will probably be in the 2x-3.5x range. Without access to serious weight, lower body training is usually pretty ineffective, strength wise.
It's a bit expensive to get started, but a rack and weights will pay for itself in saved gym fees after a couple years, or a few months for 2 people somewhere expensive like SF. We managed to fit one back when my wife and I lived in 1 bedroom apartments.
> a rack and weights will pay for itself in saved gym fees after a couple years
That's been my solution.
If you take into account resale value, it'll actually pay itself off much faster - especially if you're willing to wait for good deals.
I think I was able to put together a full set of weights + another set of 45s for less than $1/lb. I'm using a cheap bar and a cheap rack, so the whole thing cost me less than $800.
I estimate that I could sell it all today for $600 for sure, and probably get back all my money if I was willing to wait 1-2 months.
The other big advantage of using a home gym is wait times; I used to go to a commercial gym, where the wait time for a rack was often more than 30 minutes at peak times. As long as you don't need machines (lat pulldown can be very nice), a rack at home can make gym time much more efficient.
I assume your parent was confused about notation. You can get 1x body weight squats (that is to say your actual body + 1x your body weight as additional load) by doing one legged squats off of a chair.
I don't understand where I'm wrong about the 2x bw though?
My thesis is that disregarding upper body gains, which can be compensated by other exercises, single leg squats will get you to 1x + 1x bw, which is 2x, with almost no gear at all.
You can also reasonably easily add about 2x15kg in dumbbells which is almost another 0,7x or so, making home training quite powerful.
> I don't understand where I'm wrong about the 2x bw though? ... single leg squats will get you to 1x + 1x bw, which is 2x
The disagreement is purely about notation.
In the strength world, people routinely ignore bodyweight when measuring squat intensity - they only list load weight. I suspect that this is, in large part, an effort to be consistent with other barbell exercises like Deadlift (which I mentioned earlier), Press, Bench Press, Row, etc. where including one's body weight wouldn't really make sense.
If you want to go really cheap, buy a kettlebell. When that becomes too easy, buy a heavier one. Unless the goal is actual powerlifting, buying a kettlebell every time you need a heavier one will carry a person a very long ways.
If a person has more money and the space, they can do the same thing with dumbbells.
It's really not complicated, but people make it so.
The big corporate gyms are dirt cheap and typically have onsite daycare for a small fee. My wife and I pay $55 a month for a family membership at LA fitness, and daycare is $5 per visit or $15 extra per month. No indoor track, though.
Planet Fitness is like $10 a month and usually 24/7. I'm sure someone will criticize planet fitness because it doesn't have x,y,z...but I don't think you can get better value for an average person.
More likely people might criticize that Planet Fitness does not exist in every country. Or it might not be close enough to everyone. Where I live the cheapest gym membership is 24€/mo and that gym is shady as hell (really bad reviews everywhere).
> The Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality in observational studies. There is evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death. The American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association recommend the Mediterranean diet as a healthy dietary pattern that may reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes, respectively.
It varies slightly from person to person, but generally “lots of vegetables and minimize highly processed foods. Those are the common denominators of a healthy diet. From there, you can fill in the blanks to suit your tastes and your unique physiological needs by adding your choice of high-quality fats (nuts, seeds, avocados, olive oil, fatty fish), carbohydrates (whole grains, fruit, starchy root vegetables), and plant- or animal-based protein (legumes, soy, fish, lean sustainably raised meat, poultry, eggs, dairy).”
The only thing that is humorous and disheartening is that your outlook is shared by the majority and for this, we are fucked. The inability of large corporations to best what is available to EVERY PERSON, for FREE, is a BLESSING. All these companies do is add layers of complexity or outright push a worse product and rely on changing public opinion or how info is perceived for sales. This is capitalism's kiss of death. Their goal is not healing, their goal is removal of symptoms where you will be held in perpetual subsistence. And we should never let that be forgotten.
On a macro level if you want to improve your health : Less processed foods, less synthetic materials, less pharmaceuticals, less time sitting and indoors. Less alcohol, less weed, Less involvement from these "professionals" all across the board. Less, less, less. Wow, isn't that weird?
For those who will comment for arguments sake, I would rather you provide examples of the sitting President promoting overall good health practices (read: FREE) rather than his usual gaslighting the public into taking an untested pharmaceutical product.
People who obsess over how health care is delivered - Public, Private or whatever - should really take this to heart. The things that really make a difference to populations (as opposed to individuals) - don't over eat, don't smoke, drink moderately, get some exercise, get vaccinated - are pretty much all (except for the last one) outside the purview of doctors, nurses and hospitals. A Dr. will always tell you about those items but they have no chance of getting you to do any of that.
The people in this thread saying we should have walkable communities are being unrealistic but I'll concede that that what they're saying is better then any idea I have.
Not to be pedantic, but the number appears to be (up to) 88%, and the study involved women only.
Incredible results but I think the specifics are worth using when they’re available.
Also, there is no cause and effect here, though vascular origin dementia as noted seems almost certainly to be reduced by better cardiovascular fitness, as are many other vascular issues. Having said that, vascular and arterial lining damage due to diet appears not to be resolved by exercise, and could very easily be a culprit here as well. Fitness is a great tool for general well-being, but it doesn’t appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness here.
If exercise reduced risk of dementia by 99% would you still feel compelled to point out that it "doesn't appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness"?
Where's your threshold?
We literally have the solution. What you're saying, while it is technically true, seems to be more of an excuse or justification not to exercise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into your comment.
I think you are reading into it too much, but I think you also might be missing that fit people may tend to make a LOT of different decisions in life than less fit people.
This is something I’ve been digging deep into and discovering a lot of seemingly safe assumptions turn out not to be.
I do expect exercise is a major factor here (perhaps the largest), but I’m acutely aware lately that these things, especially where nutrition could be a significant factor, are rarely ever cut and dry. It’s incredibly complex.
I don’t mean to say people shouldn’t exercise. I should have emphasized that, without a doubt. We know beyond any shadow of doubt that it improves quality of life dramatically for virtually everyone.
Correlation is not causation. Even if exercise were associated with a 99% risk reduction, it could remain the case that people who are prone to Alzheimer's are less motivated to exercise early in life rather than the exercise preventing Alzheimer's later in life. There are plenty of other good reasons to exercise, we don't have to stretch this one beyond what the data says.
> High fitness in middle age reduces the chance of dementia by ninety percent
Not to be a sourpuss but I believe that a reasonable theory on this is that physical activity, especially activity that uses brain power, causes neuronal development which reroutes function around damage, without necessarily preventing or mitigating damage itself.
Physical surely helps but the theory of cognitive reserve suggests heavy brain use may build up a reserve of extra connections which insulate one somewhat from brain loss. I can't quote selectively as it's a big chunk of text, but here <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reserve>
Rerouting is mitigating. If the end result is lack of dementia, that's what's important. The fact that some percentage of the neurons are damaged is not a problem. The elasticity of the brain is an evolved trait, rerouting is what the brain does to keep working.
"High fitness in middle age reduces the chance of dementia by ninety percent" https://www.ergo-log.com/high-fitness-in-middle-age-reduces-...