Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's episode, you're going to discover

whether marijuana use really does weaken your heart and the latest research on how marijuana

could influence your actual fitness levels.

So, last week, news hit the headlines that, according to a recent study, marijuana use is

associated with an almost doubled risk of developing something called stress cardiomyopathy,

which is a potentially fatal weakening of the heart muscle.

Now, interestingly, prior to this most recent study, a 2016 study in rats found that just a minute of exposure to marijuana smoke impairs the heart's inner lining for 90 minutes,

which is even longer than the impairment that occurs from, say, smoking cigarettes.

Now, this is kind of a big deal, especially when you consider that marijuana

is now in the process of being legalized in a significant number of states in the USA. Not only that,

but an estimated 22 million Americans say that they regularly use marijuana. To confuse matters

just slightly, at the same time as these new studies have been coming out,

health experts have been changing their minds on the potential deleterious effects of marijuana.

For example, CNN's chief medical correspondent, Sanjay,

reversed his opinion on medical marijuana and now says that the drug should be fully legal for medical use.

Harvard Health Review recently reported that the health benefits of both medicinal and recreational

use of marijuana include treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy, a variety of psychiatric

disorders like anxiety and substance abuse and schizophrenia and psychosis, and a 1999 U.S.

government-sponsored study by the Institute of Medicine discovered many more beneficial

properties of marijuana in medical conditions like nausea caused by chemotherapy and wasting caused

by AIDS. And since then, a number of studies have been done to show that smoking marijuana

...