Blogging In Motion | Medicine in Motion

If you happen to find yourself wandering through a health food store, you’re likely to find many products claiming to be a cure for the common cold. Everything from high dose vitamin C to zinc to herbs that even doctors cannot pronounce. There is no evidence for these products actually working and with good reason. The common cold is caused by more than 200 different viruses, which makes finding a cure of vaccine incredibly elusive. This means that if a person were to find a cure for the common cold they would not only be able to retire to an island, they would be able to purchase the island. While such a cure does not exist, it turns out that a little sweat equity might boost our resistance to the common cold.

The Study

File this away in the “Medicine In Motion is not just a clever title” part of your brain because the research bears out that moderate exercise reduce the occurrence of the common cold. Researchers at Appalachian State University in North Carolina have found that regular exercise, and surprisingly the perception of being fit, are associated with a substantial reduction in upper respiratory tract infection. The study followed 1,002 adults (male & female, 18 to 85) over two 12-week periods; half participated in the fall and half in the winter. Those who said they exercised (details below) at least five days a week had 43% fewer days with upper respiratory tract infection than those who exercised no more than one day a week (4.41 days versus 8.18). Similarly, those who rated themselves as highly fit had 46% fewer days with a respiratory infection than those who reported low fitness (4.89 days versus 8.60). Even when they did get sick, frequent exercisers and the most fit suffered less severe symptoms, by 32% to 41% between high versus low exercisers and perceived fitness.

To determine high exercisers from low, participants were surveyed regarding how many days per week they exercised for at least 20 minutes, leaving them winded and sweaty. They were also asked to rate their physical fitness on a 10-point scale. They were divided into three groups (8-10 high, 6-7 middle, and 1-5 low) based on their response.

While earlier research has been performed, what set this study apart was that validated methods were used to track respiratory infections and related symptoms. The researchers chronicled the effects of the common cold using the Wisconsin Upper Respiratory Symptoms Survey, a reliable and valid daily logging system.

A Double-Edged Sword

While moderate exercise shows benefits to reducing the occurrence of the common cold, too much exercise seems to increase the occurrence. It is well-known that marathon runners often come down with colds or worst in the weeks and sometimes months after the race. This is especially true of ultra-marathoners. In a five year study of 350 athletes in the 160 kilometer Western States Endurance Run, Dr. Nieman found that one out of four runners reported sickness during the 2-week period after the race.

The effect is most certainly paradoxical. Athletes, when compared with their couch potato colleagues, experience higher rate of upper respiratory infections, especially in the few weeks following  intense training and races. In non-athletes, increasing physical activity is associated with a decreased risk of upper respiratory infections.

So stay active, but not too active, if you want to keep a cold a bay. If you’re a marathoner…we wish you good luck and would love to talk with you about ways to stay healthy too!

According to a recent study, 31% of adults prefer to receive communication via text message. With this in mind, have you ever considered how the way you position your body while you look down at your phone may be affecting your health and athletic abilities? Watch this video to learn about how to stretch to avoid “text neck.”

This time of year can be stressful for all of us. Don’t let that stress impact your sleep by grinding your teeth. Watch this video for tips on how to loosen up your jaw before you go to bed.

Barefoot running is all the rage these days – make sure you’re doing it right!

Are you a runner? Then this video is a must-watch for you. To get the most out of your runs, do these simple, quick exercises.

Maybe you’ve heard this from a grandparent or older associate. You’ve just completed a long run, maybe a weight workout, or maybe you’re part of a club team at your local college having just competed in an intense match. Upon hearing about your athletic endeavors, the older individual gives you this line:

I’m getting old; I shouldn’t workout.

Now, never mind that this train of logic is right up there with “I’m getting hungry; I shouldn’t eat,” the day and age of the slow decent into assisted living has passed us by. Now, people are maintaining an exceedingly high level of function deep into their 9th century.

The Long Tail Of Aging

Think about older individuals you’ve known in your life. It seems almost inevitable that you or someone you know had a grandfather or uncle (or grandmother or aunt or parent) who maintained an incredibly high level of physical functioning deep into their 80′s and 90′s. Often we think that this person is special, that they’ve been dealt a genetic “full house” that allows incredibly high function into their later years. This isn’t entirely true; in fact something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 25% percent of how long a person lives is determined by our genes. The rest is determined by our lifestyle and the increased incidence of “ageless athletes” should cause one to take notice. In other words, the long tail model of aging is no longer de rigur.

What is the long tail? Normally, the long tail refers to the sales of a niche item; the less popular but more targeted (think a book about an obscure mountaineer) an item is, the longer it is going to sell but in smaller amounts. Compare this to a really popular item selling explosively at first but fizzling in short order. Aging, as we’ve come to expect it, follows this trend: a person reaches what is considered an “advanced age,” gets sick, fights back but never returns to the previous level of health, continues to survives, gets sick again, and the process repeats. The final years of this person’s life is spent in a state of stunted function, possibly medicated, definitely not living to the fullest.

Compare this to Jack Lalanne, whose recent death was a shock to most everybody but it is exactly how one would have expected such a man to go. Lalanne’s death resembles that of a wild animal (or possibly a house cat, who barely recognizes its own domestication). The animal spends its life functioning at a very high level. It gets sick just a few short days before it dies. It doesn’t spend years in a state of semi-function; it’s still chasing and killing (or grazing and running) right up until it kicks. To wit this is how Lalanne kicked: he maintained an enormously high function right up until pneumonia got him. Take a look at an interview he gave last year, at the age of 95:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkdYrAQJu6g

There’s More Than Jack

It is easy to isolate Jack, to dismiss him as an obsessive but there are others, for instance Clarence Bass, who has maintained less than 10 percent bodyfat for 30+ years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNwgmFsFsOk

Or Art De Vany, who still trains hard and runs fast at the age of 73:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1eyOjgcPSA

What about ladies? They’re even more impressive. Ernestine Shepard is 73 and in phenomenal shape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqev-P-ZPQE

Perhaps the most impressive of all is Olga Kotelko. At 91 years old, she has athletic records that have not been touched by athletes 10 years younger. You can read about her here and take a look at her speech for accepting athlete of the year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwr9LDY6o0Q

She didn’t start until she was 77. It’s never too late.

At Medicine In Motion, we believe that exercise is medicine. If you can’t move with pain-free exuberance, any other intervention will have reduced efficacy. To that end, walking is the most basic form of human movement, to which a lot of other athletic endeavors not would be possible. It also seems to be something taken for granted: picture the number of cars lapping the parking lot at the grocery store to get a close parking spot so as to walk as little as possible. Walking shouldn’t be hard; in fact research is now showing just how much walking as a form of “medicine in motion” can impact our health across our lifespan.

The Hippocampus

NPR recently featured a story about how new research indicates that walking increases the size of the hippocampus. The hippocampus, while being a very small part of our brain, is responsible for the daunting task of encoding information we take in so that we can recall it later. The normal course of aging is for the hippocampus to shrink, foreshadowing memory loss and dementia. These individuals took to the walking program 3 times per week for 40 minutes at a time. The distance over time increased as the exercisers speed increased. At the end of a year, the exercisers hippocampus increased in size by 2%, as measured by before and after MRI. In the control group the hippocampus shrunk by 1.5%.

More On Walking And Health

A similar study covering a larger period of time found a similar result. This time, researchers focused on gray matter volume, also found to reduce as we age. Following 299 cognitively normal Pittsburgh area adults (average age 78), those who walked 72 blocks weekly, which amounts to about 6 miles or less than 1 mile per day, had significantly higher amounts of gray matter 9 years later. The final follow up after year 13 found that 183 of the subjects had normal cognitive functioning, with a final indication that this amount of physical activity decreased the risk for cognitive impairment two-fold.

Evidence From The Longest Lived Cultures

Not a study in the strictest sense, similar conclusions were found and published a book called “Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.” What Dan Buettner, the author, and his team of researches found were 4 (later upgraded to 5) longevity hot spots around the globe: Sardinia, the Greek island of Ikaria, Okinawa, the Costa Rican peninsula of Nicoya, and the California city of Loma Linda. Buettner and his researchers tease out what he calls a “de facto longevity formula” by finding out what these people are all doing similarly in spite of their incredibly varied cultures and locations. While he does narrow it down to 9 traits, the one that is perhaps not surprising (in the context of this blog) is the fact that everyone included lots of low intensity activity, namely walking, in their daily lives. This also sometimes included some manual weed-whacking as evidenced below:

A Final Thought

The take home point from all of this is that it’s not a magic bullet: walking keeps the brain healthy only if it’s part of your daily life. The suggestion here is that you avoid being an efficiency expert and try to find ways to walk more. To follow the car example above, park at the back of the lot and walk up. Chances are you’ll get into the store before those circling the lot and be healthier for it!