TIL Olympians live 5 years longer on average than the general population
TIL Olympians live 5 years longer on average than the general population
5 years for all that work?
*Injects spaghetti bolognese with extra parmesan*
Injects spaghetti bolognese with extra parmesan
Orally, I presume .... unless otherwise, no wonder you aren't getting that extra five years
Check out Loma Linda where you can get 10 years more than the American average if you change your habits.
Athletes get exercise and probably have a healthier diet, especially at that level. Living longer is not surprising.
Athletes get exercise and probably have a healthier diet
Yes on the exercise, but I'd argue that most athletes pretty much have to consume low-quality, high-calorie food in order to keep up to their caloric needs.
Basically, you can't consume 10,000 calories of healthy food... too much volume, even if you spread that out through the entire day.
So in that sense, the power of exercise is pretty amazing, if it can combat the effects of a poor diet for all those years. Then again, if they are consuming a healthy diet when they are not actively competing/training (i.e. on their off days), they're probably undoing a lot of damage just from that.
There's no such thing as a "healthy food" or "unhealthy food" in absolute terms. It's all dependent on the totality of your diet and everything else going on in your life. You don't use an excavator to clear the table after dinner in your fifth floor apartment because that comes with a whole host of problems, but you would use one to move multiple tons of gravel across a construction site. Saying that exercise combats the effects of a poor diet in this context is like saying that working on a construction site negates the negative effects of using an excavator.
I wonder how much if this is just not being poor.
Like, I suspect you just can't become an Olympic level athlete staying broke. At some point you have to be able to commit and be supported by outside resources.
LMAO...I don't thinks sponsors are into slow walk. If you ever watched it you would be like WTF. And yes this is an Olmpic sport.
It's not really about the sponsors, it's about needing to come from wealth in order to be able to take the time to train, buy the equipment for the sport, make it to the regional/national/internation events to qualify for the team, or even afford to get to games for the event.
You need to be not-poor enough to even get to a level to where sponsors would be interested.
Weird, statistical outliers are statistical outliers...
For 1-2 decades of rigorous exercise and diet, I'd be pretty pissed if I only lived an extra 5 years.
So really, I'm gaining 20 years of hedonistic sloth in exchange for losing 5 years in an old age home!
Mortality rates due to nervous system disorders (eg, Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons’s diseases) and mental illness (eg, dementia, schizophrenia) were not different from the general population.
That's really a shame. Living longer is great, but dying from a slow, degenerative disease is extremely hard on people and their families. It's almost better to just drop dead from a sudden heart attack five years sooner, if you had to pick one or the other.
The last five years don’t seem worth it to me 🤷
Makes sense. I wouldn't think the average person taking on the exceptional training of Olympians would be good for you, but of those with the natural health and talent to try, Olympians are the ones who got that far without injuring themselves, and will therefore likely continue with some safe training with proper technique, and maintaining good health into old age. I'd imagine that benefit outweighs the damage extreme sports and training does to your body.
I'd assume that measuring generally fit people who exercise regularly and eat well, without pursuing the extremism of world class athleticism, would live even longer on average.
I am old. In fact I am so old that things are failing. 5 more years would be a curse.