Comment by nine_k
5 days ago
> mitochondria, which process energy within cells, showed a significantly decreased capacity to burn both sugar and fat in healthy individuals who get less than the recommended 150 minutes of exercise a week.
150 minutes a week is about than 22 minutes a day. Like 11 minutes twice a day. This looks like a really low effort to rid oneself of the risk of early decline.
I've seen studies like this before. They'll suggest that as little as 15 minutes of exercise significantly improves health in some group they studied. My initial assumption was they added 15 minutes of additional exercise. No, they studied people who did literally nothing. Then had them exercise 15 minutes a day.
As you might guess, their outcomes improved greatly.
This is sadly not a rare type of person. I'm worried my parents fit this description, they drive everywhere and work an office job. I'd guess on average they get 0 minutes of exercise a day.
I think people get this image in their head that someone who doesn't exercise ever is this comically fat unemployed person when in reality it's the average office worker who isn't fitness minded. A good chunk of HN users wouldn't be getting 15 minutes of exercise a day.
Looking at a few friend's health app on their iPhone it's amazing to me to see people who walk less than 2,000 steps a day and don't go to the gym. It's shockingly normal in some places though.
The amount of time in the exercise advice keep getting shorter and shorter. The common advice when I was younger, in the USA, was an hour of exercise. Couldn't get enough people to do it. Then it was 30 minutes. Still couldn't get people to do it. Now the advice has been 15 minutes a day for a while, and we'll still not be able to get people to do it.
The environment and culture needs to be structured such that people get the exercise they need "naturally". The vast majority aren't going to go out of their way for it.
That's a big part of why zoning is so dangerous. In most of the western world (Europe too on average), we pushed down population density so much that your typical destinations are much less likely to be within walking distance, so you don't walk.
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HN is always so sarcastic on this point, but a large part of the population is not getting 15-30 minutes of actual exercise a day.
15 mins of walking or exercise. I did 2 hours of walking 15k steps and it's barely moved my required cardio load to 10 and I need over 200 weekly.
A lot of people who use a car to get around will spend most days doing literally no actual exercise. For someone who lives in a more walkable area, 22 minutes of exercise is just living live normally without actively "exercising".
I walk to the office during warm days, it’s about 30 minutes to get there. I get essentially an hour of walking just by commuting.
If I drive, it takes me 15 minutes (Toronto traffic is horrible). So doesn’t even gain me much in terms of time.
Just sad that temperatures here drop so low I don’t want to walk for half the year lol.
A studied showed that elderly asians have better health outcomes that their western counterparts in part due to their practice of sitting on the floor. The added exertion of standing up from the floor rather than a chair makes a material difference in their health.
Some of the health tests in Japan that elderly people take include a "standing to sitting on the floor and getting back up all unsupported" test. Scores are based on time, effort, emitted sounds (like grunts), hands-on-ground and whatnot. I don't know the specifics, but it is used as a "health measure."
I remember reading somewhere that one of many long life markers is if you can go from sitting on your butt straight into standing without your hands or knees touching the floor.
At least in China they also have a lot of public parks where they all gather for group exercise with all the other elderly people.
And the Bay Area as well :)