Healing Through Exercise: Scientifically Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life (21 page)

That way, the muscles can burn off the excess energy and normalize the glucose level. The immune system starts working better again, probably because exercise increases the number of leucocytes. Though the details of this stress response are not fully understood, its benefits for our health become evident in study after study. Going for a stroll every day keeps rhinitis and sniffles away, for example. Cornelia Ulrich of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues have demonstrated this in a study including overweight and inactive women. Those women who picked up the habit of walking reduced the likelihood of catching a cold by half compared to sedentary women. Ulrich concludes these findings “add a new facet to the growing literature on the health benefits of moderate exercise.”
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Moderate exercise leads also to more relaxed sleep patterns, which further decreases the stress burden. In tests, people allowed only four hours of sleep for several nights appeared to be testy and responded with elevated levels of stress hormones and glucose in their blood. Once these people were allowed extra sleep—10 to 12 hours per night—the stress signs disappeared.

Exercise’s stress-fighting effects amplify each other and prevent us from premature aging. Physical activity reduces the allostatic load, which is connected with a prolonged life expectancy.

MORE HEALTHY DAYS

The steady increase of the average life expectancy is a triumph of civilization. At the same time, health-care experts and even citizens themselves are afraid of this trend. They believe the extended life expectancy could just mean that people are going to have long periods of sickness, and thus they talk about something they call “excess age.” In this view, frail seniors would populate nursery homes and hospitals, and the younger generation would have to take care of them.

It was the physician James Fries of Stanford University who most notably began questioning this grim scenario. In the 1980s he published an essay in the
New England Journal of Medicine
that opened a completely new—and very comforting—view on the fact that we all grow old. If it was possible to push the onset of age-related diseases back, Fries suggested, and if this gain was larger than the time gained by the increased life expectancy, those extra years would be free of disease and full of healthy and happy days. Thus the period of frailty that often precedes a death would not get longer and would occur later. Fries has proposed the term “compression of morbidity” to describe this potential change.

Stay Healthy Longer

Runners stay in good health longer

When Fries published his ideas, many people dismissed them as wishful thinking. Some even thought it was a downright dangerous view, and that Fries’s theory might prevent society from taking measures to deal with an approaching army of sick seniors. By now, many skeptics know better. The compression of morbidity is a valid concept, and we can experience it, if we begin with regular exercise. Fries and his colleagues have shown this in an impressive study
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that compared 538 people who run regularly (most of them members of a running club) to 423 sedentary people, recruited from the employees at Stanford University. The participants were age 50 or older when the study began. The researchers tracked them for 21 years.

According to their findings, regular running dramatically slows down the effects of aging. Elderly runners, now in their 70s and 80s, have fewer disabilities, a longer span of active life, and were half as likely as non-runners to die early deaths. Nineteen years into the study, 34 percent of non-runners had died compared with 15 percent of runners. At the beginning of the study, the runners ran an average of about four hours a week. After 21 years, their running time declined to an average of 76 minutes a week, but they were still seeing health benefits from running. Both study groups became more disabled after 21 years of aging, but for runners the onset of disability was later. “Runners’ initial disability was 16 years later than non-runners,’” Fries says. “By and large, the runners have stayed healthy.”
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The data refer to avid runners. But what about white-collar workers who stop using their bodies by age 30? Is there something like a point of no return, after which the disuse of the body cannot be made up for?

The uplifting answer given by science is: no. Study after study has revealed that even old and habitually sedentary people still can reap the benefits of exercise if they simply put themselves in motion. These late bloomers complain less often about ailments and need fewer medical treatments. Even individuals at ages 70 to 80, who were almost disabled because of lack of exercise, can overcome ailments by systematic training.

James Fries got it right. In our aging societies, regular exercise can push the onset of diseases back to a later point in life, thus multiplying the number of happy and healthy days. Nobody can avoid growing old. But we can do a lot to keep ourselves from growing old in bad shape.

Panacea for Every Day

I
N THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE CANADIAN PROVINCE OF ONTARIO there is a long-lived group of people whose lives involve heavy physical labor. They belong to a Christian denomination whose founders immigrated to America in the eighteenth century from the Alsace region, the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Germany. To this day they talk in a German dialect and call themselves “Amische” or “amische Leit.” They hold the belief that they are in this world, but not of this world, and live like their ancestors did roughly 200 years ago.

While other Amish people in North America, such as those in Pennsylvania, have incrementally adopted certain technologies, like tractors, the approximately 500 Amish of the Ontario settlement refrain to this day from using any new technologies—which has bestowed an enviable vitality upon them.

This was revealed by David Bassett, of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and the anthropologist Gertrude Huntington, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who studied the level of physical activity in this group. “The people stay active when they are much older than 80,” says Huntington.

Usually the Amish from this settlement in Ontario avoid any contact with the surrounding world of the “English.” They are happy that their houses and farms, in a sparsely populated area approximately 40 miles south of the vibrant city of Toronto, are overlooked by the rest of the world. Here, no visitors show up to gawk at them, and no one takes photos when they travel the gravel roads in their horse-drawn buggies.

But in this case 48 women and 53 men decided to make an exception. The Amish agreed to physical examinations and carried battery-powered pedometers in their skirts and waistbands for a week.
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The result: on average, the men took 18,425 steps per day, the women 14,196.

The Amish also kept minutes of their day. Within the weeklong period, the women spent 42 hours on moderate-to-hard physical work and walked for five hours. The men labored for 52 hours and walked for 12 hours. This means that the Amish are six times more active than the average inhabitants of the industrialized world. Just 9 percent of the Amish women, and none of the men, were obese. That makes them much slimmer than their Canadian neighbors (where 15 percent of the population is obese) and the inhabitants of the United States (where 31 percent is obese), despite the fact that, like their German-speaking ancestors, they love to eat substantial meals, with meat, potatoes, gravy, and homemade cakes.

Few would demand to abandon engine power and electricity, which would mean forgoing the use of laundry machines, dishwashers, computers, and cars. And yet we can learn from these Amish people in Ontario. They are so busy with physical activity in their daily life that it wouldn’t occur to them to go to a place called a “gym” to do something for their health. The Amish have succeeded in making physical activity a natural part of their daily chores and work. They are puzzled when they find out that there are people around them who die from insufficient use of their bodies.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GENES?

Although many inhabitants of the industrialized world have integrated physical activity and sports into their daily lives and benefit from an even healthier (because less austere) life than the Amish, millions have yet to discover the healing power of exercise. One reason is that many people simply underestimate the potential of their own bodies. If the good physical condition of healthy people is pointed out to ailing people of the same age, many of them will dismiss this comparison as unfair, saying their healthier peers have always been physically active. But this line of thought ignores the fact that the benefits of physical activity can be reaped by every person who was born healthy. The body is more potent than most people can imagine. There is no medical or biological reason to retire at age 62, 65, or 68 because studies have revealed that people who are aware how important physical activity is stay more or less at the same level of health between age 55 and 75.

To the extent that people misjudge the body’s capability to rejuvenate, they overrate the influence of their genes on physical constitution. There is no question that, aside from the lifestyle, the genetic makeup affects fitness and physiological reserves. Yet it is revealing how experts view this. The sports physician Aloys Berg of the University Hospital in Freiburg, Germany, concludes that “even if there is an unfavorable predisposition, the individual range is large enough so that lifestyle changes can beneficially influence the emergence of risk factors and the onset of chronic diseases.”
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Maria Fiatarone Singh, chair of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of Sydney, puts it this way: “However, at least partial escape from a genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes, stroke, coronary artery disease, hypertension, obesity, and other major scourges of modern civilization is possible with the adoption of realistic doses of physical activity. Much of the typical phenotype of the aged person—a thinning, curved spine, wasted muscles, and bulging abdominal adipose tissue—is more closely related to time spent in a gym than to the passage of years. Furthermore, body composition is still susceptible to change by anabolic stimuli, particularly robust forms of resistance exercise, in the tenth decade of life, despite a lifetime of sedentary behavior.”
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Fiatarone Singh knows what she is talking about. She is the doctor who encouraged people aged 90 and older to do strength training, giving them back their power.

There is no shortage of studies showing the body’s potential for renewal. In a study done in Texas in 1966, doctors examined five young men and documented their fitness levels. Thirty years later the procedure was repeated, and it became evident that years of sedentary living had reduced their fitness. Next, the men, now aged 50 to 51, were subjected to 24 weeks of endurance training of moderate intensity with jogging, walking, bicycle riding—with the result that their decline was fully reversed, and they reached the same level as 30 years before.