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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, most of my family members who actively tried to stay healthy died relatively early (< 70 years). Those who didn't usually lived to be at least 85. My grandfather, who never did any type of sports, ate meat every day, who came home after worked and watched TV until bedtime and who drank 1-2 liters of cider per day after retirement died at 92 and was completely healthy up until a few hours before his death.

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> Anecdotally, most of my family members who actively tried to stay healthy died relatively early (< 70 years)

I never tried to stay healthy until after I started having health problems (GI issues, mild concussion, etc). I wonder how many other people do the same and how that affects the statistics. Sort of like how "drink a glass of red wine a day" doesn't correlate to health but rather the money to have red wine handy and the circumstances to drink one and only one glass.

Funnily enough the “ate meat every day” part might be the key. Red meat boosts testosterone and testosterone plays a big role in mens health, especially as they age and experience the natural drop in testosterone levels.

People literally think that eating meat is unhealthy nowadays. While they don't restrain themselves on carbs and sugar whatsoever. Then you wonder why people are so confused and think being healthy is like winning a lottery ticket.

Well, off-the-cuff guessing like this is why nutrition is plagued with superstitions.

You can easily look up what the oldest living populations eat.

> Red meat boosts testosterone

Citation needed?

There's been an explosion of startups doing personalized health measurements. Is there one trying to figure out how to optimize aging for you?

same with my grandfather, drank a lot everyday and died at 82. My other grandfather died at 60 of a sudden heart attack, he was the model of a "good husband, father, community member and, responsible citizen", i sometimes think the stress that is caused by living such a clean life was what killed him.

Exercise doesn't really improve lifespan in rats, beyond enough to not be completely sedentary.

I skimmed the first five articles Google found, they seem to disagree.

All five were less than 40 years old

All of them showed "somewhat less than 10%" longer lives for the rats and spun that same number in varying ways from "almost no difference" to "considerable lifespan extension" depending, I think, on how much the authors hate rats.

All the studies showed dramatically increased healthspans and much lower decline in rat-performance and quality-of-rat-life thru the rat's lifespan. Or rephrased there wasn't much difference in performance between young exercise rats and young non-exercise rats but a huge difference in performance between old exercise rats and old non-exercise rats. Clearly, if I were a rat, and I dodge traps until I'm old, I'd prefer being an exercise rat. I question how well this study transfers to humans as there's obvious staggering difference in performance between young lazy humans and young "gym rats" (LOL at that pun). I would theorize a bored rat running on a wheel is vastly less motivated than a highly motivated human weight lifter or similar gym user, and that should result in much better QoL for old human "gym-rats". Anecdotal evidence seems to strongly confirm...

The studies all seemed to agree that exercise did not increase maximal lifespan very much if at all.

Depending on which side of the axe you'd prefer to grind, the articles seem to summarize to some variation on "some rats that don't exercise die young" vs "rats on average live about five percent longer if they exercise". Aside from the side issue where some studies report 5% as not much different and others report 5% as a dramatic increase depending, as I stated, on how much the author hates rats. It's literally the same shape graph in all five separate studies, its just selecting the conclusion you'd like to describe that graph.

Most of us are more concerned with improving healthspan rather than lifespan. And I think those rat studies are mostly useless. Lab rats live in nice safe flat cages where they don't have to worry about falling down the stairs and breaking a hip. Whereas sarcopenia is a huge risk for elderly humans.

> And I think those rat studies are mostly useless.

There are some studies on dogs without many results. Sedentary is bad, but exercise beyond that doesn't seem to boost lifespan in most (any?) mammals. Maybe humans are different, we are the best endurance runners of all animals and one of the few that cool by sweat.

Re: healthspan there is injury risk from exercise too but if it really prevents hip injuries that well that is a good point. Intense exercise definitely seems to be important for astronauts, but also is sort of just barely getting to the level of sedentary on earth and I think they still lose bone density.

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