Falling standards

The keynote opening address at the Be Active conference in Sydney talked about how average levels of physical activity have changed in the last 50 years.

In this post, I am going to be doing rough estimations of caloric expenditure for illustrative purposes only. I am having too much trouble finding the real figures, because researchers typically don't use caloric expenditure in reporting physical activity levels--they use time. One HUGE (and quite likely incorrect assumption) I am going to make is that 500 calories is what's needed to make a significant change in cardiovascular disease risk.

50 years ago, the average daily caloric expenditure of Americans (but we can generalize to the whole Western world) was around 3000.

Today, it is closer to 2000, with many people likely doing less.

So using my assumption: 50 years ago, in order to have a significantly lesser risk of cardiovascular disease than the average person, you would have to burn 3500 calories every day. That's a lot of exercise. That's close to what I do.

Today, to see a significant benefit from the average person, you would only have to burn 2500 calories.

So think about this: by burning 2500 calories, you have a significant benefit compared to the average person today. However, you are still burning less than what the standard used to be. 2500 calories is only slightly more than doing a 30-45 min walk every day.

Additionally, the most recent research is showing that there are benefits in reducing risk of cardiovascular disease when you only burn 2000 calories a day, because the mean population caloric expenditure is sliding lower and closer to only 1500 calories per day. Accompanying this is more people being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. In contrast, death rates are decreasing as treatments are more accessible and better, however health costs are increasing to pay for these treatments.

In summary: as Americans and Australians are getting fatter and less healthy, there is a lower and lower threshold of exercise needed to have a significant health benefit over the average sedentary slob. However, this is lulling people into a false sense of security that walking 3 days a week is being useful for them. Our population is only being sustained by an unnatural and unholy regime of pharmaceuticals.

And what really kills me: researchers in the health profession are promoting these slack standards!