Tag: Health

Strength Training – Live Longer and Better

Regular physical activity promotes general good health, reduces the risk of developing many diseases, and helps you live a longer and healthier life. For many of us, “exercise” means walking, jogging, treadmill work, or other activities that get the heart pumping.

But often overlooked is the value of strength-building exercises. Once you reach your 50s and beyond, strength (or resistance) training is critical to preserving the ability to perform the most ordinary activities of daily living — and to maintaining an active and independent lifestyle.

The average 30-year-old will lose about a quarter of his or her muscle strength by age 70 and half of it by age 90. “Just doing aerobic exercise is not adequate,” says Dr. Robert Schreiber, physician-in-chief at Hebrew SeniorLife and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Unless you are doing strength training, you will become weaker and less functional.”

Want to live longer and better? Do strength training
Harvard Health Publishing

Exercise and Cancer Survival

An exercise programme for colon cancer patients can cut the risk of dying by a third, a major international trial shows.

The researchers said it was “not a large amount” of exercise and any type of workout from swimming to salsa classes counted.

The results could change the way colon cancer is treated around the world.

Scientists are already investigating whether similar exercise regimes could improve survival for people with other diseases, such as breast cancer.

In the trial, the three-year exercise programme started soon after chemotherapy.

The aim was to get people doing at least double the amount of exercise set out in the guidelines for the general population.

That could be three-to-four sessions of brisk walking a week, lasting 45-60 minutes, Prof Coyle says.

People got weekly face-to-face coaching sessions for the first six months, which then dropped to once a month.

The trial, involving 889 patients, put half on the exercise programme. The other half were given leaflets promoting a healthy lifestyle.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed after five years:
80% of people exercising remained cancer-free
compared with 74% in the other group
meaning a 28% reduction in the risk of the cancer coming back, or a new one forming

Meanwhile, eight years after the initial cancer treatment:
10% of people on the exercise programme died
compared with 17% in the group given only health advice
marking a 37% lower risk of death

BBC:
Exercise improves colon cancer survival, major study shows

5 Years Ago – Covid, Reddit on

rwhockey29
I specifically remember being at work listening to sports radio early on into covid and the hosts making a couple jokes and laughing. The next morning they had to report that the NBA had shut down. Pretty stark difference in their tones and a pretty decent summary of how a lot of people had the thought of “haha funny virus….oh fuck.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1kujc0o/5_years_ago_us_deaths_near_100000_an_incalculable/

Not Everything You Like is Bad for You – Coffee and Visceral Fat

Body fat serves all sorts of valuable functions in your body, from storing certain vitamins to keeping you warm. But there’s one type of body fat that’s not-so-friendly for your health: visceral fat. Inside your abdominal cavity, this form of adipose tissue (fat tissue) surrounds critical organs, such as your stomach, liver and intestines. Fortunately, there’s one drink that can help you reduce visceral fat. Java lovers, rejoice! It’s coffee.

Research has linked drinking coffee to reductions in body fat. For instance, a 2025 study of over 45,000 people found that those who drank coffee (an average of 1.7 cups per day) had significantly lower visceral fat than non-coffee drinkers.

https://www.eatingwell.com/best-drink-to-lose-visceral-fat-11721048

Diet and Healthy Aging

Participants were asked to provide regular surveys of their diet, assessing whether they adhered to eight healthy dietary patterns as well as their intake of ultra-processed foods that are high in sodium and saturated fats.

The study found that 9.3% of participants aged healthily, being able to avoid chronic diseases by the time they reached their 70s.

The study used the Alternative Healthy Eating Index score to determine a person’s diet quality. The score graded people based on their high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats, and low consumption of red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, sodium, and refined grains.

Those who scored in the top 20% were 86% more likely to avoid chronic diseases than the rest of the population.

Healthy eating habits in midlife may prevent chronic illness in later years, research finds

Notes on Stretching – How and Why – Malachy McHugh, Ted Ed

Texas Woman Dies After Abortion Denied

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

A Texas Woman Died After the Hospital Said It Would be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage
Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

How to fall back asleep in the middle of the night – Sleep Doctor Tips

Just Show Up – The Value of Uninspired Workouts, Arnold Schwarzenegger on

Swimming – How to Move Legs – Flutter Kick

Laughter Yoga

And then there’s laughter yoga, a movement that now involves 16,000 laughter clubs in 72 countries, offering people the world over a chance to chuckle their way to physical and mental health. To experience laughter yoga for ourselves, Pete and I had stopped by one of the weekly meetings of the Denver Laughter Club. In a downtown Unitarian church, we joined a dozen or so club members being led by two so-called laughter leaders (“Jovial Jeff” and “Crazy Karen”) through a surreal chain of exercises. We began with “greeting laughter,” moving around the room and shaking each other’s hands with a hearty, forced chuckle. Then we carried on extended conversations in nothing but gibberish, and imitated lawn sprinklers while others pretended to run through our spray. Other drills followed—“bumper-car laughter,” “happy pills,” “laughter bombs”—each designed to encourage so much fake laughter that everyone broke down for real. At one point, I passed an imaginary laughter bong to a gray-haired grandmother, from which she took a deep drag and burst out cackling.

“I do feel more energized than I did an hour ago,” admitted Pete when it was over. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d gone through a trial run for living in a loony bin. Still, the regulars, a welcoming and normal-seeming bunch, seemed to be getting a lot out of it. “You don’t need stand-up comedy or movies or plays,” one of them told us. “You can just laugh.”

That’s the point, said Madan Kataria, the doctor who developed laughter yoga in 1995 and is now recognized internationally as the “Guru of Giggling.” When I reached him via Skype in his home base of Mumbai, India, he told me, “Laughter was always conditional and dependent on jokes, comedy, life happenings. For the first time, in laughter yoga, laughter has been disconnected from our daily lives, because there are often not enough reasons to laugh. My discovery was that laughing without reason was enough to give people benefits.”

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny
Peter McGraw, Joel Warner

VO2 Max – Health Indicator

Derek Thompson: Steve, I want to start with you: VO2 max. If you’re a listener who is anywhere proximate to the health and lifespan world, there is a 90 percent chance you have heard the term “VO2 max” in the last year, maybe the last month, possibly the last 15 minutes. This is a health and fitness metric that seems to have exploded into popular consciousness in large part thanks to the bestselling book Outlive by Peter Attia. The New York Times just recently, last week, called VO2 max “the best way to track fitness and longevity.” The best way to track fitness and longevity. Steve, ground-floor level please, what is VO2 max?

Steve Magness: I’ve got to say, as an exercise scientist, it humbles me that this has now come out as the thing when we’ve been able to measure VO2 max since about the 1930s. But anyways, what is VO2 max? Quite simply, it’s the maximum amount of oxygen that we can utilize. So it’s essentially how much oxygen you can breathe in, and then go through your circulatory system, and then utilized by the muscles, and that’s what it is. So the way we measure it is pretty simple. You get put on a treadmill or a bike in an exercise science or a doctor’s lab. They hook you up to a mask. That mask has a tube that runs into a machine or a bag that essentially measures how much oxygen you’re breathing in and out, and then they ramp up the exercise. You start really easy, and then the speed gets faster on the treadmill every one or two minutes, depending on the protocol.

And you keep that going until essentially you cry uncle, which is you are so exhausted that you either fall off the back of the treadmill, which happens with elite athletes, or, more so with regular people, you just scream, hit stop, and just are done. And generally, at the end of the fastest that you’re going on that treadmill, your oxygen consumption is at its highest level, and whatever that number is is your VO2 max. And it’s a surrogate indicator of cardiovascular or aerobic fitness. And the way I like to describe it is it’s the measure of the engine size of the car. So it’s that big number that we use holistically to look at aerobic fitness.
…
Magness: They use the speed that you reached at the end of the treadmill when you called uncle, when you quit. So I think this is really important because we confuse the thing. We say, “Oh. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max.” Vast majority of times in these mortality longevity studies, it’s not. We use that speed, or incline, or watts on the bike, and say, essentially, “How fast can you get until you’re exhausted on this test?” And that is what correlates to mortality, longevity, etc.

Health Fads and Fictions: VO2 Max, Supplement Mania, Sunlight, and Immortality

Strength training boosts longevity, mood and metabolism as it builds muscle : Shots – Health News : NPR

Resistance training does more than help us build strong muscles.

A new study finds women who do strength training exercises two to three days a week are more likely to live longer and have a lower risk of death from heart disease, compared to women who do none.

“We were incredibly impressed by the finding,” says study author Martha Gulati, who is also the director of preventive cardiology at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles.

Of the 400,000 people included in the study, only 1 in 5 women did regular weight training. But those who did, saw tremendous benefits.

“What surprised us the most was the fact that women who do muscle strengthening had a reduction in their cardiovascular mortality by 30%,” Gulati says. “We don’t have many things that reduce mortality in that way.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/11/1236791784/strength-resistance-weight-training-longevity-aging-heart-disease

Tooth Problems and Early Death

Deaths from dental abscesses today are so rare, that it is difficult to fathom that only 200 years ago, this was a leading cause of death. When the London (England) Bills of Mortality began listing the causes of death in the early 1600’s, “teeth” were continually listed as the fifth or sixth leading cause of death. (This does not include the category of “Teething” which was probably erroneously blamed for many children’s deaths. As we examine several historic factors of this period, it is apparent that the number of deaths attributed to “teeth” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was probably fairly accurate, and it was not antibiotics, nor the discovery of asepsis, that brought about the dramatic reduction in these dental mortalities, but two much earlier dental innovations.

J H Clarke
NCBI
The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.