You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ChristianKl comments on Exercise isn't necessarily good for people - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: NancyLebovitz 08 June 2013 02:32PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 June 2013 03:55:14PM 1 point [-]

As a general rule taking health advice from youtube video's bad.

I would doubt that the 12% adverse responders is a controlled result.

Comment author: John_D 09 June 2013 08:19:45PM 1 point [-]

"I would doubt that the 12% adverse responders is a controlled result."

Exactly, especially when you consider a study that suggests a large portion of the population changes their dietary patterns, usually for the worse, after they begin exercise. So it is possible that the adverse responders began to up their caloric and fatty intake. Hopefully they controlled for change in diet and health at baseline, but considering the rigor of most studies, I doubt it.

Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/does-exercise-make-you-overeat/

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 09 June 2013 09:47:28PM *  0 points [-]

Some of the results from the lecture weren't connected to eating in an obvious way. What was checked was blood pressure, VO2max, muscle growth, and blood sugar/iinsulin.

It's conceivable that the last would be affected by eating more high-glycemic food, and that muscle mass might be negatively affected if exercise was lowering some people's appetites too much.

Actually, the study you cite doesn't mention that some people ate worse food, just more, and it's merely enough that they maintained a stable weight.

Comment author: John_D 09 June 2013 10:27:10PM *  0 points [-]

I didn't say the study mentioned it, I said that dietary patterns can change due to exercise. The link didn't say what they ate or didn't to maintain their weight, and I can imagine that increasing your total calories consumed can't be completely safe even if it is just for weight maintenance. That is why researchers need to control for changes in diet, changes in overall health unrelated to exercise (people do get diseases for various reasons, as I can imagine would be common to a group of previously sedentary participants), etc., to make sure adverse health changes are directly caused by exercise itself.

Of course, without a link to the papers themselves, it is hard to say how properly controlled the experiments were.

If these variables weren't properly accounted for, then overall the data should give cause to concern, but is still inconclusive.