People who move a lot live longer!

 

There is a lot of evidence for this statement in the scientific literature.

At this point, the results of Hakim and colleagues from 1998 should be quoted as a representative example.
(Hakim et al.: NEJM 1998, 338: 94 Effects of walking on mortality among nonsmoking retired men)

This study included 707 non-smoking pensioners – aged 69 on average at the start of the observation. An attempt was made to take into account risks arising from various risk factors such as total and HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, alcohol intake and diet.

Despite all the skepticism about such studies, the longer lifespan of those who moved more is obvious. If the pensioners walked less than 1 mile a day, 43% of them had already died after 12 years. If they walked 1 – 2 miles a day, the probability of dying after 12 years was reduced by more than a third to 28%. A further increase in the daily distance traveled to 2 to 8 miles reduced the probability of death to almost 50% compared to the group of pensioners who only traveled 1 mile per day.

In particular, death from cancer was more than twice as high in the group of those who had walked less than 1 mile per day (12.8%) as in those who had walked 2-8 miles per day (5.6%).

Is there even a single drug that could be said to have such a fantastic effect on life expectancy?