Note: I plan to make this kind of post a weekly event. Or possibly bi-weekly then the title will be: Things I Read or Thought About in the Past Fortnight.
The evolutionary anthropologist Herman Ponzter has observed that hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza expend a similar amount of calories per day to modern western humans, even though they are more physically active. Pontzer explains this with the Constrained Energy Hypothesis, which claims that physical activity changes how we expend our calories more than how many calories we expend. For example, if we expend 500 extra calories at the gym, we will compensate by spending 500 less during the rest of the day, perhaps through less fidgeting or heat creation. In many ways this is a good thing, because it means we spend less energy on creating inflammation, or cortisol production in response to stress. He explains these ideas in more detail in his new book Burn, which I look forward to reading.
A new paper finds that high levels of optimism were correlated with 10 to 15% longer life spans, even after taking into account health and social economic status. I will optimistically assume this finding will replicate.
Daniel Lieberman has argued that humans are well-adapted for long distance running, perhaps to allow persistence hunting. Anna Goldfield points out that Neanderthals were probably better at sprinting, squatting and hill climbing than us, because they had shorter lower legs, shorter achilles tendons, and longer toes.
Exercise works pretty well for depression but is underutilized in treatment. A recent paper asks why (maybe politics).
MRI results of the back don’t correlate with back pain as much as you might think, but they do matter. A recent study finds that disc degeneration and herniation in young adults with low back pain predicts disabling low back pain five years later.
Gait is so individual that artificial intelligence can identify individuals based on their walking. That means there is a ton of information in your movement, and machine learning might be able to read it and find clinically relevant patterns. Machine learning has already been used to identify gait patterns related to age, gender, fatigue level, emotional state, lower limb injuries, and diseases like Parkinson’s and MS.
This reminds me that I once saw all-time baseball great Alex Rodriquez at my health club. Before I saw his face and realized who he was, I saw him slowly strutting around and thought “I wonder who that professional athlete is.” Because his gait identified him as an elite athlete. (Or maybe it was his size and shape.)
A new meta-analysis confirms a common finding about early sport specialization: its great if you want to be the best at age 13, and not so great if you want to be the best as an adult. “Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes.”
The power of a body (especially a 13-year old body) to heal is impressive.
Have a good week and let me know what you would like to hear more or less about.
Nr. 8 is very interesting. The evidence in favour of a broad sampling of sports does seem quite overwhelming.
I do wonder about one thing, though: how often in these studies do the authors look beyond Western-ish athletes? To give an example: I work as a table tennis coach in a European country, so naturally we often look towards East Asia which is very dominant, with China as the top dog. Here, from what I gather, the athletic background is quite different. Massive quantity at a young age, starting very early (in Japan often at age 3 or 4), tough competition, and no multi-sport engagements. And they produce top players at an almost alarming rate; the same goes for badminton. I wonder if perhaps there could be an issue of cultural sampling here much like the whole WEIRD-conundrum. Or do the studies about athletic background and sport sampling take this possible confounder into account? Please note I'm only focusing on top and medal-winning performances here - I think the jury might be out on this issue, but not on what promotes health and well-being.
Awesome collection of insights, thank you! I am wondering if you have come across studies on human rocking, ( rocking chairs specifically) it is my latest fascination.