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A comment on No one cared about my spreadsheets. Parent comment

Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by csours on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @08:17PM (#30368388)
People who can run every day are much healthier than people who can't run every day. People who continue to be able to run every day beyond middle age are exceptionally healthy compared to their peers. It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect.

Between that and running injuries, car/bike accidents, skin cancer, etc, it probably wouldn't be tooo hard to show that running is not worth it.

Mind you, I'm NOT MAKING THAT ARGUMENT, I'm just saying it's probably easier to do than you imagine.

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Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by librarianscott on Thursday February 17, 2022 @12:17AM (#30369769)
Um, there actually are peer-reviewed studies which address things like running and health. For example, "The Influence of Running on Lower Limb Cartilage: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis," Sports Medicine (2022) 52:55–74 [1]

One conclusion is "Results suggest that cartilage recovers well from a single running bout and adapts to repeated exposure. Given that moderate evidence indicates that running does not lead to new lesions, future trials should focus on clinical populations, such as those with osteoarthritis."

My understanding is the evidence for walking is much stronger than running given the assumption that an "active lifestyle" is a goal, rather than just living longer.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01533-7

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Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by isitmadeofglass on Thursday February 17, 2022 @02:34PM (#30377587)
> It's really hard to disentangle the cause from the effect.

I have to laugh. No it’s not. It’s not like healthy people just from the fact that they are healthy have some odd quirk of occasionally randomly tripping into a 30min run without any say in the matter.

Regular running causes an improvement in health.

Improved health does not cause regular running.

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Re:No one cared about my spreadsheets by epgui on Thursday February 17, 2022 @02:55PM (#30377851)
I'm a life scientist: it's true that physical exercise has a causal effect on positive health outcomes. However, if you believe demonstrating cause is simple, you don't know enough about science or statistics. It's extremely difficult.
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