Translator: Aari Lemmik
Reviewer: Denise RQ I really love physical activity,
exercise, and sports. Here you can see some holiday snaps
of me on the snowboard, and below would be my absolute
favorite sport, beach volleyball. For me, playing beach volley
on weekends is like a little holiday. I just love it. It's fun, you meet great people, and also, of course, as we all know, you get a lot of health benefits
out of being physically active. But I think a lot of people,
when it comes to the health benefits, mainly think of physical activity as a means to lose weight
and for weight maintenance when in fact, there is so much more. Even from just going for a walk,
you get so many benefits: it can reduce high blood pressure,
it can reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers,
risk of dementia, and it also boosts your immune system. Last but not least, people
who are physically active live longer. So when I finished high school, I decided I'm going to turn my hobby,
exercise, into my profession. So I studied exercise science
with a goal to work an exercise for rehab. Here you have a photo of my previous life
in which I worked in exercise for rehab, we were doing some stretching. But I thought, instead of helping
people with health conditions, it would be more efficient,
and I could reach a lot more people if I help preventing health conditions;
or as this cover here says: an ounce of prevention
is worth of a pound of a cure. There really seems to be
a lot that needs to be done because, as this cover says: this really seems to be
the shape of thinks to come. Maybe this image is closer to the truth,
because in the last image, the person is just sitting
in front of the computer, and that's what most of us do
most of the time these days. I can say that while I'm doing research, and I'm also working
in front of a computer most of the day, at least I have a sit-stand there so I can also stand
in front of the computer and not sit the whole time. But the question is how much physical activity do we need
to get these health benefits, and what intensity should it be? Maybe the message
on this gravestone is a bit too simple. Let's look what this doctor
has to say to his patient: [What fits your busy schedule better:] [30 minutes of physical activity per day,
or being dead 24 hours per day?] It's maybe a bit blunt what he says,
but there is some truth in that. So let's look at the recommendations, the guidelines
of the World Health Organization. For adults, that is. I should first point out they differentiate between moderate
activity and vigorous physical activity. Examples of moderate activity
would be these two images, just walking a dog
or going for a casual bike ride, something that noticeably
increases your heart rate but doesn't make you sweat. Vigorous activity would be
something more intense that makes you sweat, puff, and pant and on a scale from 1-10 of exertion,
would be about a 7 or an 8. The World Health Organization recommends
that adults should accumulate at least 150 minutes
of moderate activity per week - only 2.5 hours, not a lot - or alternatively, 75 minutes
of vigorous activity, or the equivalent combinations of the two. And when they say equivalent, they mean that one minute
of vigorous activity counts as much as two minutes
of moderate activity because the energy expenditure
is about twice as high. So basically, these recommendations,
these amounts of activity are based on the activity
energy expenditure. However, some studies have found
that vigorous activity is more efficient in inducing cardiorespiratory fitness
than moderate activity, independent of the activity
energy expenditure. And other studies have found
that this cardiorespiratory fitness is a better predictor of mortality
than physical activity. So we thought that it might be that vigorous activity has health benefits
beyond just the higher energy expenditure. We examined this with data
from Australia from The 45 and Up Study which is the largest cohort study
ever conducted in the Southern Hemisphere in the state of New South Wales with more than a quarter million adults
aged 45 and older who were asked a lot of questions
including about their physical activity, where we doubled the minutes in line with the guidelines
for vigorous activity, we excluded those adults
that were older than 75 because our main outcome of interest
was preventable early death. In over six and a half years of follow up, more than 7,000 participants passed away. And here is what we found:
I have two slides with the main findings. On this slide you can see depending on how much
physical activity people did what was their risk of early death. And the left column here is 0
for those who didn't do any activity. When we compare, we can see
that those who did at least some activity, but less than the recommended 2.5 hours, had a huge risk reduction
for early death, of 34%. And those who did meet
the activity guidelines of 2.5 hours had a risk reduction to almost half. And those who achieved twice
the recommended amount, had a risk reduction of 54%. So huge differences! This slide looks at
whether this energy expenditure came just from moderate activity, which is our reference category
here on the left, so people who did do activity
but only moderate activity, which was more than half of our sample, and we compared it with those who did some
but less than 30% as vigorous activity, and those who did more than 30%
of their energy expenditure through vigorous activity. Here we can see
we get an additional risk reduction of 9% compared with those who didn't do
any vigorous activity for with those who did some; and a 13% risk reduction for those
who did quite a lot of vigorous activity. When we think of the risk reduction that we saw for those
who did any activity - even if it's just moderate activity -
which was huge, then we can think of this as the cake, and the additional benefits
from some vigorous activity would be the icing on top of that cake. Our findings, actually, are not in line
with those physical activity guidelines, because we found, as we had
prophesied at the beginning, that vigorous activity has health benefits
beyond just the higher energy expenditure. So, a media release was issued
by James Cook University, and we were blown away
by how much our article was covered in the media around the world. We got into The London Times,
The New York Times, The Japan Times, Forbes Magazine,
and The Cairns Post, so only really prestigious media outlets. (Laugher) This one is a Brazilian news website, you can see, the instructor looks like
as if he's almost naked there, and he definitely is very vigorous. Talking about nudity, I have to say the pinnacle
of our media coverage - I'm really proud to announce that - was when we heard from
the media department, we've gone into the Playboy Magazine. (Applause) (Laughter) Thank you! And the media department told us
that through playboy.com alone, we reached more than 28 million people, I mean, 28 million men. (Laugher) And altogether, I couldn't believe it, they said that just the websites alone
that featured our article had more than 1.1 billion unique visitors, so the message really got out,
which was fantastic. However, unfortunately,
some of the media reported things that we really didn't find in our study. "Forget gentle exercise - you need
to get hot and sweaty to live longer." That's not what we found. As I said, even just moderate activity gives you huge benefits
when it comes to longevity. So there was a bit of
miscommunication there, unfortunately. Another anecdote about the media coverage
was when I had some radio interviews, and in one of these live radio interviews
this women asked me, "So can you give us
some examples of vigorous activity?" and I gave some examples,
and then she asked me, "What about horizontal folk dancing?" And I remember, I was sitting there
with the phone, thinking, "Hmm, English is not my mother tongue, I haven't come across
this expression before, but I guess I know what she means," and I said, "Oh, well, absolutely; sex can be very vigorous
depending on position and other factors," but it was a morning show on the radio so I didn't want to go
into details too much. (Laughter) So what are the implications of our study? First of all, we would say
that our findings indicate that vigorous activity has benefits
beyond just the higher energy expenditure, and that future physical activity
guidelines should continue to say that moderate activity is great for us,
but should maybe point out more, the additional benefits
we can all get out of vigorous activity. And for all of you,
the take home message would be, if you're not doing any physical activity, it would be great if you could start
doing some activity, even if it's just moderate activity
like going for a brisk walk; and for those of you,
who are already pretty active, but just doing moderate activity, it would be great, you could get
an additional benefit out of it, if you also did at least
a little bit of vigorous activity, even if it's just 20-30 minutes
per week, which isn't much. Thank you. (Applause)
