Running protected health extremely well….

Today's post: Tuesday, 8-12-2008

A long term study comparing members of an over 50 runners group to a control group of people who didn’t exercise that was done by researchers at Stanford was published yesterday, Monday, 8-11-2008 in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

It made the online health news in Reuters and elsewhere.

Here are some key quotes from the Reuters article.:

“Running reduced the risk not only of heart disease, but of cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, researchers at Stanford University in California found.

"At 19 years, 15 percent of runners had died compared with 34 percent of controls," Dr. Eliza Chakravarty and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Any type of vigorous exercise will likely do the trick, said Stanford's Dr. James Fries, who worked on the study.

"Both common sense and background science support the idea that there is nothing magical about running per se," Fries said in a telephone interview. "It is the regular physical vigorous activity that is important."

The study supports Dr Fries. As they got older fewer of the runners ran for exercise but they kept doing some form of regular vigorous exercise every week if they did so.

This quote is also significant.:

“Most of the volunteers did some exercise, but runners exercised as much as 200 minutes a week, compared to 20 minutes for the non-runners.”

If the volunteers in the control group averaged walking a mile a week, that’s about 100 calories of exercise. And, if the runners ran 8 minute miles, 200 minutes means they burned at least 2500 calories.

I’ve not seen the actual study. But it seems that the control group got well under 500 calories a week of exercise while the runners got over 1,000 calories a week, maybe as much as an average of over 1500 calories a week.

Separate studies of such levels of regular exercise have found similar results.

In addition, two other factors likely helped cause the better health and longevity of the runners, particularly their lower rate of cancer.

Fewer of the runners smoked than did the members of the somewhat similar control group.

And, since running is an outdoor activity, the runners got considerably more sun exposure & therefore much more vitamin D than the control group.

This is also significant since studies reported in the recent online news showed people with high levels of vitamin D also had fewer cancers, had better health, and lower death rates than people who were low in vitamin D.

The good news on vitamin D is that you can take 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 quite inexpensively from supplements to get these effects. The sun exposure may have other health benefits; but it looks as if the vitamin D does the most to protect your health.

In addition, the runners, or as they tended become over time, regular exercisers, had better quality of life than the people in the control group.

Here’s a quote that shows this.:

"Members of the running groups had significantly lower mean disability levels at all time points," they added.

If you haven’t been taking vitamin D, would it still give you health benefits to start now? The evidence I’ve seen suggests the answer is a definite yes.

In this study the researchers decided to check if this was true for people who were already older who hadn’t been exercising and who started running or getting other vigorous, regular exercise.

Here’s a quote on that from the Reuters article.:

The team also set out to answer whether taking up running late in life would benefit, and whether people who stopped exercising began to pay a price as they aged.

Most of the runners have stopped running as they reached their 70s, Fries said. But it was difficult to find people who totally stopped exercising. "Almost all of them did something else. They continued their vigorous exercise," he said.

People who took up exercise when they were older also improved their health, he said.”

In this study, the people in the running group actually had fewer injuries than the people in the control group.

But, people who run for exercise after age 40 instead of doing other kinds of exercise tend to get injured often from overuse injuries.

As I see it, there are two explanations for this paradox.

1. The members of the running group were people who were over 50 years old who were those who had few enough injuries or learned to run injury free well enough to continue running at age 50. People who had more running related injuries or who switched to other kinds of exercise after getting running related injuries were not in the group of runners studied.

2. The injuries the control group had were likely those caused by being older and having weaker bones, weaker muscles, and less agility than the people in the runners group. Any group of people who get enough regular exercise will get fewer such injuries.

Strength training probably prevents these kinds of injuries even better than running does.

To me, the take home message from this is to have a long life free from unnecessary diseases and disability, there are three things it will pay you huge dividends to do.

1. Get at least 1,000 calories a week of some kind of vigorous exercise every week.
(The people in this runners group did.)

2. Take at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.
(The people in this runners group likely averaged a good bit more than that from sun exposure.)

3. Don’t smoke and avoid second hand smoke.
(The people in this runners group were more likely to do this than the control group.)