Exercise is Medicine

Hello.

My name is Camilla scaf and I'm going to be presenting on exercise as medicine.

You may have heard the expression sitting is the new smoking.

Well, there's a reason why

Back in 2002 smoking killed 4.2 million people.

Then 10 years later

in 2012 in activity were actually surpassing the smoking

Instead of killing 5.1 million that smoking was responsible for in activity

was responsible for 5.3 million in there in terms of bad death.

And then a little bit later in 2-2018,

we had more in activity that was already killing

almost twice as much as smoking as we can see

here on the chart being responsible for up to 218% of deaths for women and 16% for men.

Pretty incredible, isn't it?

So how big is this problem of in activity

studies have shown in numerous evidence that in activity is a big problem.

Study with adults from 122 countries and adolescents from 105

countries showed that worldwide 31% of adults are physically inactive.

For example, in Southeast Asia 17% and all the way to the US43%.

That's really, really high.

About 80% of adolescents

reported less than 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity activity per day

in activity raises with age higher in women and

is also increased in high income countries like Australia.

For example, boys are more active than girls.

We also know

that

the walk. The walk

is really important.

A peer reviewed study

showed

that the people living in developed countries were

60-70% less active than 100 years ago.

This means that our great grandparents walked about 16 km more than what we do today,

on average, on any given day.

What about here? In Australia? Down under,

We can see that is in the Australia Institute of Health Welfare reported in 2022.

That said that 27% of the adults aged between 18 and 64 years

Didn't do the recommended 21 minutes per day activity,

which is about 150 minutes per week.

This is encouraging, as in 2018,

the data reported that 55% of adults as it didn't move enough,

so it's a slight improvement.

However, it is still alarming that in 2012,

the same report discovered that 98% of young people aged between 13 and 17

years didn't get enough physical activity in the week prior to being surveyed,

But why exercise?

We know that long long ago,

in the fourth century before, christ,

Hippocrates already said that Italy alone will not keep a man well.

He must also take exercise for food and exercise work together to produce health.

And then another couple of centuries later, we have

gellin, which is a follower of Hippocrates

that came up with the Six laws of health

and right in the middle of that there's motion,

exercise and rest.

And today I wanted to rest a little bit on that rex?

S exercise portion of the Six laws of health.

And we wanted to demonstrate how in the last years we

in the last century exercise not only became a medicine,

but also it has the an activity issue has become

a pandemic in our society and all around the world,

but why the wonder drug is rediscovered.

We can see the very interest increasing in terms of pursue of longevity.

After a few studies like the skiers in feeling, study the elite athletes,

study the blue zones,

adventist health study and the 10,000 steps Studies all

of these articles and research showed that people there,

we're actively exercising like athletes or that are doing that as a lifestyle,

but on a long term they were all benefited with living longer.

The studies were showing that people were living like the skiers in feeling for

For more years than

the average participants.

And also this longevity and people could live up to 10

years more if they were actively exercising against their peers.

We can also see the chronic disease pandemic.

We know that around the world,

the top killers are associated with non communicative

diseases or so called the chronic diseases.

And we know today from research that sedentary ism is the very

primary cause of these chronic diseases and therefore a big responsible for

early deaths.

We also see that there is a pursuer of pleasure and

social connections especially after covid where people are feeling lonely.

But we can see here from the Copenhagen City Heart study that people that exercise

together in groups,

they got more benefits even than the people they were exercising alone.

So definitely there is a lot of advantage of having

peer support and exercising with other people for accountability,

but also for the pleasure of being connected socially.

Exercise prevents disease.

The cooper center longitudinal study can show us

that association with between midlife fitness

and chronic disease outcomes were positive.

So people that were actively exercising as part of their lifestyle,

they were less likely than contracting diseases on this study,

we can see that they reviewed more than 18,000

participants and they were followed up for 26 years.

The incidents of chronic diseases in the highest

quintile of fitness was only 15.6% in men

And 11.4% in women versus the 28.2% in men and 18%

in women in the lowest quintile of fitness level.

We can also see from this study

that exercise being shown as a primary prevention to 35 chronic diseases

which leads to exercising being great for mobility, compression.

As we know today, as people age, they are producing free radicals,

they are becoming more vulnerable to acquire chronic diseases which

in this expression. Now, people in the X.

The research field they're calling morbidity compression when you're just

exposure to all different kinds of diseases of age.

But exercise apparently is actually related to compress this mobility.

So you're actually not exposed to doing or

being exposed to all of those chronic diseases

at once or at least showing that you would have less likely to contract them.

So aging better

and aging well.

We can also see

that exercise is great for disease treatment and management.

For example diabetes which is one of the biggest

growing issues in Australia and all around the world.

According to current research,

we could see in these meta analysis in that in type

two diabetes when people using the exercise they were exercise regularly,

it showed reduction of sugar levels in the blood

independent of their weight

and also resistance type of exercise

like

weightlifting for example

to also regulate glucose levels.

It also helped to reduce the risk of

heart disease which is highest amongst diabetic people patients

definitely a big improvement on diabetes not only preventing but arresting and

helping people to go into remission.

What about cancer?

There are many studies but I wanted to highlight one that just

came um last year in 22,021 where the systematic review looking at many

different studies around this area of exercise and cancer concluded the long term

physical activity has been associated with cancer prevention by changing the D.

N. A. Expression.

But what is holding us back with all of these benefits

that exercise a very simple solution that is accessible to everyone.

Well,

Brett and his team have done a beautiful work

on putting together um some of the issues that

we would have today existing tools to access to

assess policy implementation that are not sophisticated enough.

Also the little research coming from low income and middle-income

countries that account to 90% of the world's population.

So it's looking into the culture and to the context.

And that definitely matters in terms of education in terms of making

it viable for people to be able to exercise and so forth

existing research around these topics based on the

individual's behavior change and it doesn't scale up.

That's definitely a challenge where you're looking in behavior change.

It's not always as easy as it seems.

We're world

population scale strategies exist but have been minimally evaluated.

For example, open streets,

the bike share the pedestrian ized city centers,

free community physical activity classes, open air jeans, etcetera.

You can also see the continued focus on areas for which

there is little justification aside from convenience and feasibility of funding.

Most studies are descriptive and correlation oriented

policy analysis are in short supply

and without the policies and how to improve them.

It becomes difficult to scale as well.

And we also see the intervention in policy

research which is complicated and difficult to fund.

It always comes to priorities and to funding the priorities.

Also,

another

Reason Why perhaps it makes it really hard to implement

um the simple solution as as exercise is medicine.

It's because of this reason here that in

2012 there was a series of articles that were launched and published at the Lancet

and basically it was the series of articles they were

talking about the influence of big sponsors of the olympics.

So even though the olympics were being shown around the world to inspire

people to become more active to do sports and especially the kids well,

by watching the big sponsors like Mcdonald's Cadbury and coca cola.

The message seems to be ambiguous.

And so hallow and Pierrette did a big

criticism amongst others for these type of approach and

even the ability that the sponsors would have to

communicate their message of selling their Fetty foods.

They're highly saturated processed foods and drinks

that are full of sugar and caffeine.

And so I like what they say in terms of the criticism and I highlighted this part of it,

the promotion of physical activity globally has

largely been unsuccessful due to poor coordination,

ambiguous messaging and the general absence of recognition of physical

activity as a fundamental human right and public health priority.

And I think that's really, really key here.

It's got to be a human right and a public health priority if that's not a priority,

it's gonna be really,

really difficult to revert the trend that we're moving towards.

So as a summary,

in my view, I can see that we definitely need to together as a community,

as people to advocate for lifestyle,

as medicine and for people to advocate for exercise is medicine.

We need to engage with leadership.

We need to engage with policymakers and really to drive this to be a priority because

global initiatives are only going to be effective when their local partnerships.

We would love to see more initiatives like the exercise

is medicine that is being done around the world,

where

the effort,

there's an effort to educate professionals on

how to understand exercise is medicine and

how to prescribe to their patients as well as information to the public.

Basic information on how exercise, Even in the simplest way, like a walk,

30 minutes of vigorous walk can help to prevent it,

can help to manage it can help to arrest chronic diseases,

but it can also improve vitality, energy and zest for life.

Exercise is Medicine

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