Newsletter #154: A Fun Way to Boost Your Health ⛹️
Welcome to the latest edition of the humanOS newsletter! So this week, we looked at some studies unveiling the remarkable and frankly under appreciated health effects of playing sports. Not just as a kid, but in adulthood.
Much of the featured research here happens to focus on soccer (aka football, depending on what part of the world you are in), but these findings are probably not highly specific to soccer.
It could probably be generalized to other sports, as well as any activities involving strenuous movement. Exercise doesn’t have to be drudgery - find something that you like and can sustain, and that works up a sweat, and it will pay dividends in your health and performance.
To learn more, scroll down 👇🏼
This Week’s Research Highlights
🏑 Participating in team sports just twice per week can dramatically improve vascular health.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen recruited seventeen postmenopausal women were recruited - nine of whom had hypertension and eight of whom had normal blood pressure. All participants engaged in small-sided floorball games twice weekly (floorball is a type of indoor hockey played with plastic sticks). After ten weeks, the women with hypertension showed decreases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure of 15 and 9 mmHG respectively. This improvement corresponds to a 40% lower risk of death by heart attack, and a 30% reduced risk of coronary artery disease. The women with normal blood pressure also benefited, showing a decrease in systolic blood pressure of 10 mmHG from just two workouts per week.
⚽ Playing soccer is linked to a 7-fold decreased prevalence of type 2 diabetes.
Researchers in Saudi Arabia recruited 378 male soccer players, and compared them to 378 population-based controls who were not involved in any recreational sports activities. Importantly, members of both groups were matched in terms of age, socioeconomic status, smoking, and other characteristics, so that they were relatively similar aside from their athletic activity. Among the controls, the number of individuals with prediabetes was 71 (18.78% of the total) and the number with type 2 diabetes was 89 (23.54%). In contrast, among the soccer players, the prevalence of prediabetes was 30 (7.93%) and type 2 diabetes was just 6 (1.59%)! Furthermore, prevalence of impaired blood sugar control appeared to significantly decrease the longer that the athletes played their sport.
🏃 Soccer participation is linked to loads of compelling health benefits.
Researchers performed a systematic literature review of 41 studies examining the acute and long-term effects of small-sided soccer playing on fitness and various health markers. Each soccer workout typically lasted just 12-20 minutes, and were performed 2-3 times per week for 12-16 weeks in the long-term studies. The benefits were pretty impressive: small-sided soccer games resulted in improvements in VO2max (+7 to 16%), lower systolic (−7.5%) and diastolic (−10.3%) blood pressure, lower fat mass (−2% to −5%) higher bone mineral density (+5% to +13%) and lower LDL cholesterol (−15%). Wow! These effects were observed irrespective of age and gender, and in a variety of different populations.
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Anna Rothschild, Maggie Koerth and Kaleigh Rogers: The Johnson & Johnson pause shows the system is working. Via Podcast-19 from FiveThirtyEight.
- Gordon Lithgow: Alpha-glutarate’s potential to affect healthspan and lifespan. Via STEM-Talk.
Products We Are Enjoying
Zhou Vitamin K2 (MK7) with D3
You may already know that vitamin D plays a role in calcium metabolism, which is why it is so often linked to bone health. But what a lot of people may not realize is that vitamin D appears to work synergistically with vitamin K2, a form of vitamin K that is transported to bone and blood vessel walls, where it helps make sure that calcium is deposited in the right places (i.e., into bones and not into the walls of coronary arteries).
Unfortunately, vitamin K2 is found most abundantly in foods that most people don’t really eat very often (unless you’re an avid consumer of natto and goose liver), so supplementing together is probably a smart bet. This brand is pretty inexpensive, and their products are lab-tested to ensure that you’re actually getting what you paid for.