Twin study on exercise - moderation wins?
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Today's topic, does exercise really reduce mortality? You're basically the risk of dying. I know it's grim, but listen, we have to talk about these things.
Speaker 1:And really the shortcut of this stuff was going to we're leading into this week about moderation or temperance. One of the famous quotes from one of the ancient philosophers that I love is he said that moderation says, Fortify yourself with moderation. So basically defend yourself with moderation as it's an impenetrable fortress or unbreakable fortress or unbreakable defense. If you utilize moderation in your life, you will be able to protect yourself against many of life's extreme behaviours that tend to take people down the wrong path. This is for good things we can label and bad things.
Speaker 1:So you can think about like too much of anything, too much even of a good thing makes it bad, right? If you're always out weekend socially is amazing to start with, then you're doing it all the time, drinking all the time, eating a bit too much is constant, right? It becomes something that become a negative on your life. It saps energy out of you, Mondays become down, down, down. And basically what initially was something good for your social health has become something draining for your mental and physical health.
Speaker 1:So moderation in that would have protected you. Does that make sense? I've done three weekends in a row now of socializing hard. The fourth weekend needs to be me time. They sort of protect you against the kind of continuous stress out of social engagements and eating a bit out and all that, save you money as well.
Speaker 1:So like this is basics we all know deep down but it does help protect you right and when it comes to this study it's very interesting so we want to look at the connection between exercise and longevity and in a 2019 study on maintaining physical activity levels from basically adolescents into middle age reduced the risk of death by any cause as much as thirty six percent okay but the big question is does the choice to exercise lead to better health and longer life or does being healthy make someone more likely to exercise that make sense so this Finnish research team wanted to look into this this is how it worked It was a Finnish twin cohort database of 22,750 same sex twins born before 1958. The youngest twins were 18 at the beginning of the study in 1975 the oldest were 50. Participants were asked detailed questions about their physical activity at three time points 1975, 1981 and 1990. In addition, starting in the 1990s, researchers collected blood samples from above five percent of the twins with a goal of assessing the biological age as well as their rate of aging. I'm to skip a bit for now with the rate of age and biological age but the researchers categorized participants into four classes of long term physical activity patterns.
Speaker 1:Sedentary which was thirteen percent of participants moderate moderately active thirty six percent of participants active thirty eight percent of participants highly active twelve percent right so this is what the study found death rates in each physical activity category were at the 2020 sedentary thirty eight percent moderately active thirty percent active twenty nine percent highly active twenty five percent In raw numbers active participants were sixteen-twenty four percent less likely to die during the follow-up period. But after adjusting for age, sex, education, BMI and smoking and alcohol consumption, the most active twins were just seven percent less likely to die, and even that reduction was mostly from a lower risk of dying between 1990 and 2011. For those who survived 2012 and beyond, the mortality risk was about four to five percent lower for those in the moderate active and active categories compared to sedentary. But for those classified as highly active, the risk of death from any cause is actually four percent higher. Right?
Speaker 1:So what do we take away from this? And I just blitzed you with numbers and I hope it will be winning. But the recommended minimum is one hundred and fifty minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Right? You can do this as like walking, fast walking, jogging, a bit of exercise.
Speaker 1:The Finnish cohort actually they were a bit more active than we are. Most of them were doing more activity than like moderately or we would suggest. And the participants that were classified as moderately active and active represented three quarters of the twins and at a lower risk of mortality from any cause compared to sedentary or highly active. So we know from this that you like control the variables and stuff, you look at it, there's benefits from going from sedentary to moderate to auto active and then the very active tends to go slope down again. And we've seen this in the steps research where the benefits of increasing your steps from like 2,000 a day to 8,000 a day is huge and then from 8,000 a day to 15,000 days slight increase, a slight improvement and then it just levels off.
Speaker 1:I think it's the same for a lot of things. There's a lot of things, I guess. And I think doing some exercise and this again, this is a brilliant news, and I want you all to be motivated from this. And as they looked at genes and everything in this study, by the way, that exercise if you're in a moderate if you're not doing exercise, sorry, and your steps are low, you've never done any weights training, there's something called newbie gains. For the first twelve months you do resistance training, your rate of muscle mass increase is way higher than someone who's a trained person.
Speaker 1:So in the first twelve months, you can do something called what is called body recomposition. You can lose fat, gain muscle at the same time. You can gain a significant amount of muscle and with significant amount of fat, yes, overall your weight will come down, but your total weight loss will seem slower than other people because you're gaining muscle mass. So when we go from a low starting point, it does not necessarily mean you're miles behind people. You've actually got a really clear path to success.
Speaker 1:Looking at the research of decades of research, twin studies, all sorts, we know all you have to do is go from A to B. If you can go from A to B, you're gonna get a huge amount of the health gains, and we've got to think of this in terms of the power laws or the Pareto principle, that 20% of our actions bring us back 80% of results. 20% of roads have 80% of traffic. 20% of people have 80% of the wealth. This Italian economist realized this pattern.
Speaker 1:It's not exactly twenty eighty. It's just the power dynamics. This It's outnumbered in that sense. Know what I mean? So when it comes to your behaviors, this is amazing.
Speaker 1:You're gonna do a few of these key behaviors to a moderate level, and you're gonna get a huge amount of the benefits. And there'll be people you see who yes, they do more workouts than you, yes, maybe they do they can run more miles than you, maybe yes, they do not, but in terms of general health and quality of life, they're not that far ahead in terms of percentage. It may be a tiny percentage, but they have to put a lot more hours in on top so you're doing, you're getting the majority of the gains for the minimal amount of time and effort whilst to get further beyond doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna get more health benefits, we've got to put a lot more hours in to squeeze it out. Does that make sense? So what does this tell us?
Speaker 1:What do we bring us back to? Brings it back to the motivational view that your steps are low, slightly increasing them. Like, listen, go up 500 steps today versus yesterday, a thousand steps more this week versus last week. You can do that. All of you can do this.
Speaker 1:That's gonna bring huge benefits down the line for you. You don't and if you train too much, it seems to have a negative impact on health in general and I think there's a lot of reasons to that. Exercising is a stressor but it's a good stressor so we can get stronger and fit the front end. Too much of it becomes too stressful, plus the stress of life on top, not giving you a chance of body to rest and recover, it starts going down, benefits start being negated, and this is a fact of life and everything, which like I said at the start of the podcast, Epictetus, that good old man back in the day teaching us Roman rich students how to live, said it back in. Fortify yourself in moderation.
Speaker 1:It's an impenetrable fortress. Same with exercise. I mean, listen, if you say to me, hey, Scott. I'm doing, like, nine workouts a week. I'll say, why?
Speaker 1:Genuine. Why are doing nine workouts a week? You don't need to do nine workouts a week. If you do nine workouts a week to get healthy and fitter, you don't need to do nine workouts a week. If you're nine workouts a week because you're an athlete that you want to be an Olympian or you've a competition and you've got and it's a short term thing, okay.
Speaker 1:Or if it's good for your mental health, you say, but at the same time, relying on excessive amounts of something for your mental health doesn't really line up does it? It's like but what if I can't do nine, ten, 12 sessions a week anymore and I can only do three, how are then going to handle that? You mean we can't be reliant on this one stimulus for our mental health even though we know exercise is useful and walking is useful and stuff. We have to basically see this and we have to look at it in this like moderate approach. And I think for everyone here, if you don't, you know, I think it was Paul in the group yesterday mentioning, you know, his weight loss is slow, but it's been the first time since he's trained.
Speaker 1:And it's like, yeah. You've lost fat and you've probably gained a decent amount of muscle. Your scale weight's not gonna be showing huge wins, but you are having massive wins right now for your health. And I think that's what it comes down to. It's realizing, not panicking about these numbers.
Speaker 1:And I want all of you to think as well, like, you are doing more activity now than you were before, trying to lose fat, might be gaining muscle and stuff like that. Don't panic the total scale weight isn't dropping because that's not the goal, if we have the technology to measure actual muscle mass and fat mass every day, like we can measure total weight, we would discard total weight as a unit of measurement because it would be way worse than what we can get. Now you say what about those scales that show body fat percentage and stuff, they're just so unreliable, like, I mean, they might show trends maybe, but to be honest with you, lean body mass, and when we try and split it out into what we're looking at, we're looking at total weight loss, we've got fat loss on one side, fat tissue, and then we've got lean body mass on the other. Lean body mass is split into muscle, is split into organ tissue, connective tissue, glycogen and water. Right?
Speaker 1:Now glycogen and water are strongly linked. Glycogen pulls in water and vice versa. Not vice versa. Sorry. Glycogen pulls in water.
Speaker 1:Mean water would impact glycogen. Does that make sense? Then you've got organ tissue. So organ tissue might come down. Connective tissue and muscle.
Speaker 1:But really what we're trying to look at is like really what we wanna know is we're gonna lose fat and we're gonna lose muscle. We don't necessarily wanna lose organ tissue. It might they might decrease if you're obese a bit when you come down your weight. We don't really wanna lose connective tissue. Do we care about losing a bit of glycogen and water?
Speaker 1:No. So you can see how complicated it gets already. And you try and track these things with these devices, and they're gonna give you crazy readings, and it's gonna make your mind even more like, I don't know you're making me go insane and we don't want go insane because there's enough insane people around but what we want to do is just remind yourself of the facts please maybe play this voice in your head saying my goal is fat loss not weight loss but weight loss I track now because it's something that I can actually track and it's accurate my weight is accurate measurement of you know that unit is accurate and then I have to look at my behaviors. Okay, my weight's not come down much in the last few weeks. Let me look at what I've been doing.
Speaker 1:Have I been training? High protein, my calorie deficit is not too big, I'm hitting my targets. Likely it is, Scott says, probably losing fat, probably maintaining or gaining some muscle, and the total weight's not coming down at that rate. Does that make sense? You have you have to play that next step.
Speaker 1:You have to have the second step. Otherwise, if you're only gonna optimize for total weight loss, really, bugger off and go and do low carb, eat no calories, don't do any training, and just lose maximum weight you can. Say goodbye to muscle, say goodbye to fat at the same time, but a lot of it will be muscle. Basically, you're going be in position where, yeah, great, your scale weight's down, but functionally you're worse. Longer term risk sarcopenia in the future maybe.
Speaker 1:Not going to look your best. You really, ideally, if you're going to admit it, guys. When it comes to the physical side of weight loss you want to look better and looking better doesn't come from losing muscle mass let me tell you that looking better comes from the maintenance of muscle mass or gaining some muscle mass which gives a complete different look to your physique and you don't I don't mean you're gonna look like a bodybuilder or Alice Ossenager. Honestly, when people make that comment, but if I lift weights, I don't want to get bulky, guys try and add muscle. Try and build muscle to that level.
Speaker 1:The chances of you doing it to the levels you're thinking about in your head is slim, it is really really hard, you've got to dedicate pretty much your life to that goal. So trying to add five pounds of muscle is difficult, if you do that it won't turn you into the Hulk but it will improve your physique and how you look and how you function but that's it. More news again on moderation. Moderation's in. One of our members before used to say moderation is sexy I think it is.
Speaker 1:And if you do fortify yourself with it, you'll have a much better go at all this stuff and it'd be more manageable. So have a good day, guys. Enjoy yourself. See you soon.
