Transcription
Did we get things wrong about exercise? There's a huge study that released a few months ago looking at the impact that exercise has on cardiovascular disease markers like plaque buildup in our arteries. And they found some extremely counterintuitive results.
That study essentially showed that people that have been lifelong exercises, we're talking about endurance exercise here, specifically like jogging, cycling, things of that nature, had significantly more plaque in their arteries than people who did not exercise lifelong. Now, you've probably been told that exercise is good for you and that it's beneficial to heart health and whatnot. So, it's extremely confusing to suddenly hear, "Well, wait a second. This study shows, this is an associative study, that there's this association between more exercise over a lifetime and more plaque that's built up in the arteries."
Now, I'm not here to be some social media influencer that's going to tell you you've been lied to about exercise. That's not at all what I'm trying to say here. I think the cautious interpretation here is that if you are a person who runs marathons, runs triathlons for long periods of time throughout your life, then there may be, again, keep in mind this is associative, there may be a risk of increased plaque deposition within your arteries.
I'd also like to point out that the control group that they compared against were people that were not sedentary. So, these are people that are active. So, we're not talking about people that are going to have increased risk if they go out jogging, you know, three times a week or whatever. What we're talking about is people who do long duration exercise, many, many hours per week.
On top of that, what the researchers did is that they used a more objective method of measuring exercise as opposed to using like questionnaires and things of that nature. And what they found is that duration was the thing that predicted the plaque, not the intensity of the exercise. So if you're one of these individuals that does a lot of high-intensity interval training, this does not apply to you. If you're a person who also likes to jog for longer durations of time, let's say half an hour, an hour a day, uh then this probably doesn't apply to you either. But what this does apply to is again if you're one of those people that's really obsessed with training for long periods of time uh in that endurance capacity.
In the end, exercise is definitely still a benefit for your heart. And keep in mind that they didn't look at outcome data. They didn't look at the actual cardiovascular disease mortality even though it's certainly concerning to see increases in plaque in your arteries. So the message here, exercise, just don't overdo it. And I would definitely love to see more data on the topic before I get too definitive about.