You can see this if you just look at the last few hundred years of human history. Humans used to have to engage in hours of labor every day just to survive. If the sun was up you were exercising. Were they so much happier and healthier?

There are people in the world who still have to do that labor. They're not happier or healthier or longer-lived than the western world. In fact, the overall high-level trend appears to be that happiness is correlated with being sedentary.

Correlation doesn't mean causation of course, but as long as articles like this one are going to imply that it does, I might as well point out that I can make the exact same argument in the opposite direction.

> They're not happier or healthier or longer-lived than the western world. In fact, the overall high-level trend appears to be that happiness is correlated with being sedentary.

Source?

This is completely self-evident and not even controversial, but here you go:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Wo...

Agrarian populations spend all their time doing hard labor to earn basic necessities like food, water and shelter. That sucks and they're less happy.

People in western nations live longer and move less. The correlation is pretty obvious.

That chart is not a source for your claim. Not really interested in arguing the point further.

> not all clinical depression is fully treatable by exercise;

We can expand this: exercise is moderately better than nothing to treat depression, unless you use good quality studies in which case we don't know if it's better than nothing or not.

http://www.cochrane.org/CD004366/DEPRESSN_exercise-for-depre...

> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.

[...]

> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.

"why don't you exercise?" is always a valid question tho; unless you are physically incapable of doing so, you should, and you're unquestionably damaging your health if you don't.

Being depressed might prevent you from exercising.

> Being depressed might prevent you from exercising.

Would being depressed prevent you from taking anti-depression medicine? Seeking help from a doctor?

Actually, yes. It's difficult to try and take control of a situation when simply doing all the things necessary to keep being alive is a challenge. Couple that with the social stigma of being diagnosed with mental problems and yes it's completely possible.

true. doesn't mean that you shouldn't. exercise is important for your health in general.