"Exercise May Be the Single Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known"

Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

News Commentary, News

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Exercise is a conundrum. On the one hand, physical activity is clearly one of the best interventions for preventing physical disease and mental suffering. On the other hand, scientists don't really understand how it works inside the body or what exactly running, jumping, lifting, and squatting do to our tissues and organs. That's finally changing. Euan Ashley, a professor of genomics and cardiovascular medicine and the chair of the Stanford Department of Medicine, is a member of a new research consortium that studies rats and humans to understand the molecular changes induced by exercise. Today we talk about the earliest findings from this new consortium, how exercise might have disparate effects in men versus women, why nature’s most effective cardiovascular intervention also seems to be nature’s most effective mental health intervention, as well as whether it will one day be possible to identify the molecular basis of exercise precisely enough to develop exercise pills that give us the benefits of working out without the sweat. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Euan Ashley Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Tara Palmary. I'm Puck's Senior Political Correspondent and host of,
0:05.3	Somebody's Gotta Win. Brought to you by the Ringer and Spotify. The
0:08.6	2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new
0:14.0	challenger Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really
0:18.0	saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down
0:21.8	with lawmakers, journalists, and political
0:24.0	strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest
0:28.1	levels of power and of course we'll chew overall the hot political gossip as we
0:32.4	head into this historic election.
0:34.1	Be sure to follow, somebody's got a win at Spotify or wherever you get your
0:38.4	podcasts.
0:40.3	Today, why exercise is the single greatest medical intervention ever known, and a look inside a new
0:49.4	mammoth scientific effort to understand why. In 1958, two British researchers Jerry Morris and Margaret
0:58.3	Crawford launched a study in what was then known as the British Medical Journal.
1:03.6	They got wind of an idea that some English jobs came with a remarkably short lifespan.
1:09.2	These weren't jobs filled with obvious danger, like firefighters. They were normal jobs, even boring ones.
1:15.5	Drivers of London's double-decker buses were more likely to die suddenly from heart disease
1:20.8	than train conductors. Government clerks were more likely to die from
1:25.0	rapidly fatal heart attacks than postmen. It seemed to Morrison Crawford that men
1:31.5	in physically inactive jobs had a much higher
1:35.1	incidence of heart disease in middle age than men in active jobs. The researchers
1:40.4	followed bus drivers who sit all day,
	...

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