People who move a lot live longer!

Many studies have shown that exercise and longevity are positively related.

There is a lot of evidence for this statement in the scientific literature. The 2008 version of the guidelines of the advisory commission for the US Department of Health and Human Services already contains a comprehensive evaluation of the literature.

What is the significance of the studies cited?

If in double-blind studies, in which neither the subject nor the assessor knows who has received a drug and who has not, for example, it is proven that a substance has a clear positive effect, then the probability that the statement that the substance works is correct is considered to be very high.

However, sport and nutrition cannot be studied in a double-blind manner. The so-called randomized, prospective studies have the greatest significance here.

Most studies in connection with sport and diseases are epidemiological studies, which may well have a bias.

In the study for the US Department of Health and Human Services, an attempt was made to keep the significance as high as possible by using very strict criteria. A distinction was made between strong, moderate, weak and no association.

The presentation in such meta-analyses is usually not very catchy. For this reason, this homepage attempts to illustrate the quintessence of the statements using individual studies as examples.

On this page, the results of Hakim and colleagues from 1998 are cited as representative of others.
(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?