#21

Let’s assume Warren Buffet lives to 115. What we will never know is if he could have lived to 140 if he hadn’t eaten such a crap diet.

Same with Charlie Munger who never exercised - maybe if he had done some exercise he could have lived another 25 years.

Any 80 year old identical twins on here who would be willing to experiment?..…one exercising with a good diet and the other sedentary and eating only junk.

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#22

If WB reaches 115, we can be quite certain that he was lucky about that his genes and what he did were coincidentally in harmony, and that he therefore would have very likely bitten the dust earlier on any other “more healthy” diet, not later.

#23

Why ask for experiments, when we already know the results. Based on studies in twins. Exercise doesn’t pass the test. Intense exercise perhaps shortens life though - possibly, maybe. The positive effects of exercise on health and longevity is mostly down to reverse causality - those who are already genetically predisposed or healthy enough to exercise, do go ahead and exercise so we see exercising people as healthy whereas people who are unhealthy are incapable of exercising at which point we illogically blame their poor health on the lack of exercise. But twin studies reveal it all. Fully adjusted models show no benefits to exercise, though intense exercise possibly looks to be detrimental.

The associations of long-term physical activity in adulthood with later biological ageing and all-cause mortality – a prospective twin study

“Results: We identified four classes of long-term LTPA: sedentary, moderately active, active and highly active. Although biological ageing was accelerated in sedentary and highly active classes, after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors, the associations mainly attenuated. Physically active classes had a maximum 7% lower risk of total mortality over the sedentary class, but this association was consistent only in the short term. After accounting for familial factors and excluding participants reporting prevalent cardiovascular diseases, LTPA exhibited less favourable associations with mortality. Conclusion: The association between LTPA and lower all-cause mortality may be largely due to genetic confounding and reverse causality.”

Bottom line, Charlie Munger and the 110 year old Vincent Dransfield who never exercised or ate “right” were correct. It doesn’t matter, what matters is genes - and Vincent Dransfield had better genes because he also smoked for 20 years but was still in better shape than Charlie all along.

And when we don’t have twins, we often have the next best thing: a sibling of the same sex. Jack Lalanne, was a fitness exercise and clean veggie diet pioneer, who exercised extensively and ate right all his life. He died at 96 (younger than either Charlie or Vincent). He also had an older brother, Norman Lalanne, who didn’t bother with exercise or diet - he died at 97… so lived a year longer than Jack.

Again, if you like exercising, do it. But don’t count on exercise overriding your genetically driven expiration date. Not having a non-exercising twin (or sibling) however has the advantage of allowing you to maintain the illusion that all that exercising is doing your longevity any good.

What trips people up is the distinction between early mortality and lifespan extension. You might affect the former by lifestyle interventions, but not the latter. For the latter, you need a more powerful intervention - drugs, or (one day) genetic engineering. Exercise is not it.

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#24

I like how this study clearly separates the short term and long term mortality, which is somewhat counterintuitive because one has to survive short term in order to get to the long term at all, of course. It beautifully agrees with what I claimed in my post on many here over-exercising and deluding themselves that this will be good long term rather than aging them early. The right way, at any age and the more so the older, is to exercise rather carefully, putting on new muscle only very slowly, in order to be healthy now and less likely to succumb in the next few years.

The paper writes it somewhere in the middle, that the exercise is to be maintained, or else of little use.

“Being highly active was associated with reduced mortality only in the short term and thus may not have long-term mortality benefits unless activity is maintained continuously.”

Over exercisers at some point cannot maintain and rapidly decay.