We know that general lifespan is measured more in total calories than absolute time
So staying sedentary, while not overeating, should result in about a two-fold life-expectancy increase over an athlete that consumes about twice as many calories daily? Abstractly, that makes sense, but empirically we know that the truth is close to the opposite.
From what i remember about caloric restriction research, current empirical data does support the abstract theory, but I did not mean to imply some exact linear relation. From what I remember, exercise has health benefits but nothing near the scale of longevity increase you get from caloric restriction.
My impression is that caloric restriction has a threshold effect—there’s a mechanism that gets invoked when the calories are low enough, though it isn’t a sharp boundary. Is this at all accurate?
This matches what I’ve read—that the body switches into different metabolic modes based on caloric abundance. Entire patterns of gene expression change.
Today we spend almost all of our time in the caloric-abundance high burn mode, and this accelerates metabolic aging.
However, I’m also thinking that caloric burn accelerates some aging processes by itself, but it is quite difficult to dissociate that from everything else—insulin, gene expression, etc etc
Person A = sedentary 60 kg female, eats 1500 kcal/day (which is not calorie restriction, but fairly reasonable for that body weight and activity level)
Person B = 60 kg female marathoner, eats 3000 kcal/day (high, but certainly possible)
Let’s further assume that their diets are compositionally the same, so that B eats the same things as A in the same quantities, just twice as often.
Life expectancy difference? My money is on B to live longer. Yours?
some quick google searching on “athlete lifespan” looks to support my bet:
from this site concerning elite athletes more likely to fit that 2x caloric profile:
What is the life expectancy of world class athletes?
Not so good. The average elite athlete will die by the age of 67. That is considerably lower then the 76 year life expectancy of the average American. Do you want to hear something that is really scary? According to the NFL Players Association, the average life expectancy of an NFL player is 58 years of age.
I can’t really think of a study that would isolate for all the factors, but overall from what i’ve seen exercise is only healthy in moderate amounts, and taken to athletic levels the benefit is overshadowed by the higher caloric entropy.
Remember that heat is chaos, and we measure car lifetimes partly in mileage—so total entropy is a reasonable measure.
I suspect that a lot of the difference is accounted for by injuries, both major and minor. Football players, in particular, take a whole lot of abuse. A regular person exercising carefully at the gym won’t have that problem.
Perhaps, but death from such injuries is extremely rare. I doubt it is any significant contributor to their death rate.
Burning off the calories through exercise is certainly more healthy than getting fat, but from what i’ve seen caloric intake is negatively correlated with lifespan in general.
That’s a good point and could explain why footballers have a lifespan 5 years or so lower than high end athletes and much lower than the general population.
It would be interesting to compare boxers/fighters based on weight class. They take alot of head beating and you can compare for different caloric intakes.
Sumo wrestlers would be another interesting data point—very high caloric intake and no concussions.
I suspect that one would find a significant caloric effect independent of concussions. Most footballers are quite big and have very high caloric intakes.
I’d expect QB’s to live longer than typical linemen.
I cheated a little by mentioning that person B was a runner; I’ve seen those statistics, and they mysteriously don’t apply to runners. Likewise, footballers (both gridiron and the real kind) have very high rates of arthritis, but runners do not. It seems to be a difference between what we were evolved to do and what we can do. Analogous to this discussion? Very likely :-)
One not-so-mysterious difference is muscle mass; long-distance runners don’t develop much, whereas many other athletes do. Muscle is even harder to pump blood through than fat, so an extra 20kg of muscle is harder on the heart than 20kg of fat, which is sometimes cited as the reason that body builders so often have serious cardiac health problems (other reasons include large amounts of protein and cholesterol consumed, but I suspect you don’t buy those explanations).
EDIT: I shouldn’t stress my claim so much. I posted quickly because I’m busy with other things, but post-posting Googling seems to disagree with what I said; I haven’t actually found anything I trust yet, but it does seem that moving from long-distance running to ultra-long-distance running may move athletes back into a risk category.
So staying sedentary, while not overeating, should result in about a two-fold life-expectancy increase over an athlete that consumes about twice as many calories daily? Abstractly, that makes sense, but empirically we know that the truth is close to the opposite.
From what i remember about caloric restriction research, current empirical data does support the abstract theory, but I did not mean to imply some exact linear relation. From what I remember, exercise has health benefits but nothing near the scale of longevity increase you get from caloric restriction.
My impression is that caloric restriction has a threshold effect—there’s a mechanism that gets invoked when the calories are low enough, though it isn’t a sharp boundary. Is this at all accurate?
This matches what I’ve read—that the body switches into different metabolic modes based on caloric abundance. Entire patterns of gene expression change.
Today we spend almost all of our time in the caloric-abundance high burn mode, and this accelerates metabolic aging.
However, I’m also thinking that caloric burn accelerates some aging processes by itself, but it is quite difficult to dissociate that from everything else—insulin, gene expression, etc etc
Would you accept a sub-linear correlation?
Person A = sedentary 60 kg female, eats 1500 kcal/day (which is not calorie restriction, but fairly reasonable for that body weight and activity level)
Person B = 60 kg female marathoner, eats 3000 kcal/day (high, but certainly possible)
Let’s further assume that their diets are compositionally the same, so that B eats the same things as A in the same quantities, just twice as often.
Life expectancy difference? My money is on B to live longer. Yours?
some quick google searching on “athlete lifespan” looks to support my bet:
from this site concerning elite athletes more likely to fit that 2x caloric profile:
similar results for athletes in general
I can’t really think of a study that would isolate for all the factors, but overall from what i’ve seen exercise is only healthy in moderate amounts, and taken to athletic levels the benefit is overshadowed by the higher caloric entropy.
Remember that heat is chaos, and we measure car lifetimes partly in mileage—so total entropy is a reasonable measure.
I suspect that a lot of the difference is accounted for by injuries, both major and minor. Football players, in particular, take a whole lot of abuse. A regular person exercising carefully at the gym won’t have that problem.
Perhaps, but death from such injuries is extremely rare. I doubt it is any significant contributor to their death rate.
Burning off the calories through exercise is certainly more healthy than getting fat, but from what i’ve seen caloric intake is negatively correlated with lifespan in general.
With footballers, there’s reason to think it’s accumulated concussions rather than death from a single injury.
That’s a good point and could explain why footballers have a lifespan 5 years or so lower than high end athletes and much lower than the general population.
It would be interesting to compare boxers/fighters based on weight class. They take alot of head beating and you can compare for different caloric intakes.
Sumo wrestlers would be another interesting data point—very high caloric intake and no concussions.
I suspect that one would find a significant caloric effect independent of concussions. Most footballers are quite big and have very high caloric intakes.
I’d expect QB’s to live longer than typical linemen.
I cheated a little by mentioning that person B was a runner; I’ve seen those statistics, and they mysteriously don’t apply to runners. Likewise, footballers (both gridiron and the real kind) have very high rates of arthritis, but runners do not. It seems to be a difference between what we were evolved to do and what we can do. Analogous to this discussion? Very likely :-)
One not-so-mysterious difference is muscle mass; long-distance runners don’t develop much, whereas many other athletes do. Muscle is even harder to pump blood through than fat, so an extra 20kg of muscle is harder on the heart than 20kg of fat, which is sometimes cited as the reason that body builders so often have serious cardiac health problems (other reasons include large amounts of protein and cholesterol consumed, but I suspect you don’t buy those explanations).
EDIT: I shouldn’t stress my claim so much. I posted quickly because I’m busy with other things, but post-posting Googling seems to disagree with what I said; I haven’t actually found anything I trust yet, but it does seem that moving from long-distance running to ultra-long-distance running may move athletes back into a risk category.
All else being equal and assuming A gets some exercise and is not fully sedentary, yes I’d bet on A.
Of course, the highest lifespan would be for caloric intake well below today’s average.