Exercise doesn’t help you live longer

Exercise is good for you—but it won’t help you live longer.

In fact, the reverse is true: people who live a sedentary life or who exercise a little saw a 7 percent drop in their mortality risk, but strenuous exercisers didn’t live longer.

These surprise findings have been made by researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland who assessed the longevity and activity levels of 22,750 twins born before 1958.  The twins were put into one of four groups depending on their activity levels: sedentary, moderate activity, active and highly active.

After studying the groups for 30 years, the researchers found that those in the sedentary and moderate activity groups saw a modest drop of 7 percent in their mortality risk, but that disappeared in the active and highly active groups.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations for exercise levels also didn’t impact on longevity levels.  The WHO suggests 150 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 to 150 minutes of strenuous exercise, a week, but the participants who met those recommendations weren’t living longer.

Genetics wasn’t a factor. It was common to see one twin in the highly active group and the other living a sedentary life and although both had a genetic profile that raised the risk of heart disease, for example, exercise wasn’t protective.

Exercise did influence biological ageing, at least to an extent.  The researchers found a U-shaped benefit, so that either no exercise or very active exercise affected our biological age, but even then, the researchers suspected the real culprit was smoking and excessive alcohol consumption, which was more prevalent among those who did little exercise.

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