Apparently, it was the legendary Betis player Rogelio Sosa who famously coined the phrase “running is for cowards.” The phrase, which sums up the entire philosophy of the game where the ball should move, not the players, has become a commonplace in all these humorous criticisms of the sport.

And yet, we have bad news.

What does sport do? For starters, living longer, according to a new study from the Cleveland Clinic. Or, to be precise, higher cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower long-term mortality. And while they are not synonymous, ‘cardiorespiratory fitness’ and ‘exercise’ are closely related. The canonical definition of it is “the body’s ability to sustain a given intensity of exercise over a given period of time”.

More than 100,000 on one tape. To find this out, Mandsager, Harb, Cremer and team embarked on a project that involved following more than 120,000 patients to correlate the results of their treadmill resistance tests with their own mortality rates. And the results were striking: “cardiorespiratory fitness was inversely proportional to all-cause mortality with no upper limit of observed benefit.”

In fact, extreme cardiorespiratory fitness (sometimes associated with elite athletes and the results of their high-level activities) was “associated with lower all-cause mortality rates compared to all other performance groups.”

Temporary numbers, but to be considered. This is interesting because the data indicate that differences between having a high cardiorespiratory fitness and not having it have a greater impact on all-cause mortality than smoking, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. There is no doubt that we are talking about relative risks and the methodology of the study leaves many questions in the air. However, the numbers are significant enough to take them into account.

What are the consequences of all this? Without forgetting that it is a retrospective study; The studies of the Cleveland Clinic, which cannot prove causality, are of great interest. First of all, because cardiorespiratory fitness is somewhat modifiable; It’s something we can all work on and improve on. In essence, if this team is correct, it would be a simple intervention that would affect long-term mortality for most of the population.

The big mess of sports and diet. But we need more research on this topic and other issues related to diet, physical activity and lifestyles. At this point, it is still not possible for us to be so exposed to tendencies and conflicts of interest. Basically, we know that the biggest medical challenge of the coming years is in the field of health promotion.

Image | José Zwaan