I’ve been meaning to review this study for some time now. A few years ago, a cardiologist at the University of Texas by the name of Dr. Ben Levine conducted a study that ought to be on the minds of anybody who is interested in living a longer and healthier life.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues put middle aged adults (around age 50) who were previously sedentary but otherwise healthy on an exercise protocol for two years, and performed various tests on their hearts before and after the study. They found that after two years, the subject’s hearts had effectively reverted back to those of a 30 year old’s. In other words, exercise made these people’s hearts age in reverse by almost twenty years.
In my last blog post, I took the New York Times to task for incorrectly suggesting that new research demonstrates a connection between alcohol consumption and the rise of cancer in younger adults. And then just a few days after I wrote that, a patient asked me my thoughts on the health risks of alcohol. So I thought I’d dedicate a post to the topic.
Let’s start with a simple fact: alcohol is toxic to the human body. There is now a lot of research to suggest that even moderate alcohol consumption may play a role in the development of some cancers and in neurological disease. It’s also well established that alcohol consumption is tied to an increased risk for atrial fibrillation, a common type of heart arrhythmia that can increase the risk of having a stroke. And the longstanding belief that moderate alcohol consumption is protective against cardiovascular disease has not held up under closer scrutiny. No, one glass of red wine per night will not cut your risk for a heart attack, and wine consumption is not the reason that countries like France, Italy, and Greece have lower rates of heart disease than we Americans do.
Add to this the long established fact that heavy alcohol consumption is terrible for the body, and substantially increases the risk for liver, cardiac, and brain disease, and we can reasonably conclude that alcohol is bad for humans. Period, full stop. And looked at purely as a substance examined in isolation, this is a correct conclusion. However…
Recently I watched the documentary “Hack Your Health,” which is available for streaming on Netflix. The film covers the emerging science of the gut microbiome (the population of trillions of bacteria, most either harmless or beneficial to human health) that live inside our GI tracts, and that are increasingly being found to play a role in everything from our tendency to gain weight, to our mood, to our risk for various chronic diseases.
I really wanted to like this film, because I think the gut microbiome is a fascinating and important emerging area in medicine, but the film suffered from some major flaws. Overall, I’d give it two out of five stars.
The photo above is one I took during my recent vacation to Germany. While stopping to tour a beautiful church in a picturesque small Bavarian town, we wandered into the adjacent cemetery and stumbled upon the gravestone of this local legend, who lived (in the 1700s, before modern medical care!) to the ripe old age of 117. I’ve been thinking of Herr Adner lately, because here in 21st century America, things are looking less rosy. After two centuries of unabated progress, in which the health and longevity of Americans slowly but steadily improved, Americans as a whole are getting sicker and dying younger than they were just even a few years ago. In 2019, the average life expectancy in the US was 79; now it’s down to about 76.
