Name: 【TEDx】Run for your life! At a comfortable pace, and not too far: James O'Keefe at TEDxUMKC
Uploaded: 2015-12-08T04:40:00.000Z
Duration: 18 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm a cardiologist, but before that, I was an exercise enthusiast.

Adverbs of degree

I've exercised, I bet, pretty much everyday of my life.

I had two grandfathers who were alcoholics.

But for me, my way of copping with life is exercise.

When I'm nervous, anxious, tired, happy, sad, or whatever,

I exercise, if I have the time, and sometimes even when I don't.

You might have seen me in an airport, waiting for a flight,

running up the down escalator with my backpack on, to kill 20 minutes.

But I always thought that exercise was the best thing for my heart,

and I think that's how I decided, at age 15, I wanted to be a cardiologist.

But now that I am 56 years old, and a lot of decades have gone by,

I've started to have a few warning sings from my heart; a couple years ago

I'm a research cardiologist, and I have a research fellow.

We have been working on this for a couple years,

with the help of some of the brightest cardiologists from around the country,

we came to some startling new insights that seem to emerging about exercise.

This made me think twice about my lifestyle,

and I'm worried that I may have made a lethal mistake.

I hope it's not too late, but let me tell you the story.

So, as I said, I have been exercising for a long time.

But if we go back 2,500 years, there is a guy named Pheidippides

to proclaim the news about a momentous victory over the Persians.

When he arrived at the emperor's throne and said, "Victory is ours,"

Now, you may have heard that story before,

but what you probably didn't know is that Pheidippides was an accomplished runner.

He'd been a Greek herald messenger his whole life.

I bet he was the fittest guy in Athens the day he died.

But now let's go forward two millennia or more.

When the Baby Boomers came of age, another boom happened: the running boom.

If exercise was good for you as anybody could know,

and the ultimate test of running and endurance was a marathon.

There was a physician who became famous back in the mid-70s by boldly proclaiming

that if you could complete a marathon, you were immune to heart attack.

This urban myth actually still holds sway with a lot of physicians.

He is 68 now, but he's been running for 45 years.

As he puts it, if he hasn't run twelve miles in a day,

When I saw him, he came into see me, and I said,

"John, let's do a cardiac scan, a CT scan, simple, little, non-invasive,

Your arteries, I'm sure, will be soft and supple, clean and healthy.

So that's what a normal cardiac scan should look like:

anything over 400 is severe; at 1,800, his arteries are harder than his bones!

That can't be good, and he didn't have any other risk factors to speak of.

So in fact, people do die during marathons, but let's be realistic.

If you look at the latest data, the risk is minuscule:

I've gotten to be friends with a guy named Amdy Burfoot.

and has been a long time editor at large at Runner's World Magazine.

In conversations we've had in recent months, he has challenged me.

"If endurance extreme exercises are so bad, show me the bodies."

He's got a good point; 1 in 100,000 is a pretty low risk.

add years to your life, and even life to your years.

So, could it be shortening your life expectancy?

I'm not worried about dropping into a risk,

I am just trying to do the right thing, I'm a cardiologist,

I'm the business of finding out the ideal diet and lifestyle.

I'm coming to the conclusion that running marathons

and extreme endurance athletics do not fit into that recipe.

So, that being said, let me be clear about this:

there is no single step you can take in your life

to ensure robust health and remarkable longevity

This is a study of over 400,000 Chinese that was just published last year.

We published an editorial along with this afterwards,

but they found vigorous exercise, this is all cause mortality reduction,

the more reduction the better, and this is minutes of daily exercise,

At 45 or 50, you get a point of further plateau,

so further efforts and time do not appear

to convey further improvements in life expectancy.

Down here is light to moderate exercise: walking, housework,

day to day moving around; just get off your seat and move around.

More is better there; it's not quite as beneficial as vigorous exercise,

without getting yourself in trouble if you keep it down.

I think if you look in the world of nature and into our deep past,

you can find the template for ideal health, even in our modern world.

Charles Darwin was wrong about one thing though:

No, in fact it's the survival of the moderately fit, OK?