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According to an account in the biography Trump Revealed by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, President Trump has rationalized his lack of physical exercise by saying he doesn’t want to deplete his body’s finite amount of energy. Here is the account provided in Kranish and Fisher’s biography: Trump’s view that human longevity is similar to a non-rechargeable battery is demonstrably false, but it brings up two separate claims that can be investigated scientifically: 1) Do humans have a finite amount of energy? and 2) Does exercising reduce a person's longevity? Do Humans Have A Finite Amount of Energy? The concept of some sort of overarching life-force or energy, while at odds with contemporary science, is a notion that puts Trump in the company of thinkers ranging from antiquity to the early 19th century. One could argue that his battery metaphor blends neatly the Ancient Chinese concept of a life-sustaining energy known as qi with the medieval European concept of humors— a collection of four substances (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) which were thought to be in balance when a person was healthy, but which in depletion were the cause of health problems and death. From a more modern and scientific perspective, Trump’s finite amount of energy notion is reminiscent of the conclusions made by embryologists Jacques Loeb and J. H. Northrop, who in 1917 demonstrated a relationship between temperature and duration of life in fruit flies. These researchers used that result to argue that longevity was controlled by the presence or absence some unknown substance: While modern science increasingly supports the notion of an upper limit on human lifespan, it universally rejects the notion that a fixed amount of vital energy is the reason for such a limit. During the course of the 20th century, scientists hunted for an elusive single factor limiting the human lifespan. They explored such possibilities as (for example) the cumulative effects of cells unable to replicate, as well as some sort of switch in gene expression later in life. These ideas ultimately gave way to the realization that multiple intertwined and complex systems collectively work to produce the upper limits on aging, as a 2003 review noted: So while a majority of scientists may be open to the idea of a biologically determined limit to human longevity (a finite amount of life, if you will), they would argue it is defined by the accumulation of multiple effects which make it increasingly improbable to survive past a certain age. Few, if any, would argue that this limit comes from an finite, internal energy that has run out, however. Does Exercising Reduce a Person's Longevity? This too, may seem like a question too obvious to even research, but it wasn’t actually until the 1900s that there was hard scientific evidence to suggest a link between longevity and exercise. A landmark 1953 study compared the occurrence of coronary heart disease across occupations of differing levels of physical rigor and found that, counter to Trump’s claims, more physically active professions lived longer lives as a whole: The finding that physically active people tend to live longer is well accepted in the medical community. A 2015 study that included over 600,000 cases concluded that there is both a clear increase in longevity from physical activity, and that it takes an extraordinary amount of exercise to have any negative effect: There are various possible mechanisms for how exercise fits into the complex melange of factors that contribute to aging, but no mainstream theory is based on the depletion of a finite resource: Because there is no quantifiable finite amount of energy that determines a person’s lifespan, and because numerous studies have shown that exercise increases longevity in humans, we rate this claim as false.
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