Eine Minute Bewegung bringt fünf Minuten mehr Lebenserwartung
Eine Minute Bewegung bringt fünf Minuten mehr Lebenserwartung
Der US-Journalist Derek Thompson macht einen den für mich spannendsten Podcasts namens “Plain English”. Euan Ashley, Stanford-Professor für Gesundheit, war zu Gast und die beiden sprechen über die enormen Vorteile von Bewegung und Sport.
Thompson: And having read your research and your interview with Eric Topol, I think you might be leaving the killer one-liner on the cutting room floor here, which is, and I believe I’m quoting you, “One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life.”
I’m just going to repeat that because it’s astonishing to read and I want you to confirm that it’s true. “One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life.”
So if you do the brief math on this, if I work out for one hour a day, four days a week, for 40 years, under this assumption, I would buy myself an extra four years and nine months of extra life.
Number one, does that calculation feel directionally accurate to you?
And number two, is this equation even true in the first place?
Euan Ashley: Yeah. Directionally accurate, absolutely. Quantitatively, about right. Sounds about right to me. I’d have to double-check your math, but yes. And is it true? Yes. I mean, it is true.
I will make the caveat that almost everything that we have that speaks to the longevity of humans is data from observational trials, which is to say that we take large populations of people, and, in this case, you wanted to make sure it’s the largest population you can.
This data is based on a population of more than half a million people—so that’s pretty big—who were followed for over 10 years. And then we basically—not me. This is not my work. I’m reporting the work of others. But those investigators basically looked at the amount of exercise that was done (it was generally moderate to higher intensity exercise, but a brisk walk plus) and looked at the number of minutes every day that those people exercised and then looked at how long they lived.
And there was a very clear correlation. And when you looked at how much that exercise bought you in terms of extra life, it did indeed map that one minute of exercise at a brisk walking sort of pace would buy you five minutes.
In fact, if you exercised at a higher intensity, you could get seven or eight minutes of extra life. So it is a stunning statistic, and it’s just not really the way we normally think of it.