The Miracle Pill with Peter Walker

If you could take a pill that makes you healthier and helped you live longer, would you? The good news is, you don’t need a prescription at all—you just need to move. Yet, so many of us don’t meet the minimum recommended levels of movement; in fact, 1.5 billion people around the world are so inactive they are at greater risk of everything from heart disease to cancer and even dementia. The problem? Our world—full of quick Uber trips and easy convenience with a click of the button from the couch—has been designed to discourage movement. We need major lifestyle changes, and fast. Today, journalist Peter Walker, author of The Miracle Pill, joins us to discuss how to bring activity back into our lives.

http://www.eatmovethinkpodcast.com/podcast/ep-72-the-miracle-pill-with-peter-walker 

Links 

You can find Peter Walker on Twitter, and read his reporting for the Guardian here. 

You can buy The Miracle Pill on Amazon and Indigo. Check out Walker’s previous book, How Cycling Can Save the World, over at Indigo. 

Read this recent feature by Walker, about how inactivity is an ongoing pandemic. 

Insights 

Inactivity is a major health issue that can leave you at a greater risk for all sorts of illnesses, like cardiovascular disease, arthritis, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. Even at the most basic level, inactivity is bad for our energy-intensive muscular system; the less we use it, the quicker it degrades. Science backs this up: Walker points to a study done in the ‘60s that put healthy university students on bed rest for weeks at a time. By the time the study ended, the students' hearts had shrunk by about 15 percent. (Of course, because they were young, this could easily be repaired with a fitness regime.) “There are all sorts of things that start to basically shut down within your body if you don’t stay reasonably active,” Walker says. But there is some good news: “The moment you start being active, the odds start to tip in your favour once more. ” [03:55]

So what is “the miracle pill” exactly? It’s simpler than you think: Being active. Walker is careful to make the distinction between exercise — a formal, structured version of activity that people may not do for a variety of reasons, like time, cost and stigma — and general, everyday activity. In the U.K., the journalist found that 55 percent of people actually never exercise, a stat that varies country-to-country, but is likely similar in places like Canada and the U.S. “Society has basically been constructed to make it harder to do everyday movements, so a lot of people basically barely exert their bodies at all.” [05:38] 

Here’s a shocking stat: Four in 10 British adults and 80 percent of children are so sedentary that they don’t even meet the recommended levels for movement. And this is on the rise in developed, rich countries around the world. “It’s not because people have suddenly become lazy, it’s just because the world has changed,” Walker argues. Whereas we once would have walked to a restaurant for dinner, and then strolled over to a nearby theatre for some evening entertainment, now we order delivery from an app and pull up our Netflix queue while we eat. “These things, in many ways, are great—I’m not saying people shouldn’t use them, but there hasn’t been [something] that takes their place, so it just gets built up over time.” [07:05] 

We may get to the point where inactivity becomes such a big health crisis that it overwhelms our healthcare systems, especially in countries with socialized medicine. People will develop greater chronic conditions that require medication and, often, hospitalization, which will put a strain on our resources. While doing research for his book, Walker spent some time at a local hospital and asked two doctors what the impact will be if we do nothing about our inactivity problem. The answer? “Within 20, 30, 40 years, we will not actually have a viable system because we will have too many people who are ill for too long.” [08:15] 

It’s important to remember that activity level and weight are two biological properties that are independent of each other. Often, people obsess over body-mass index or get discouraged working out if they don’t lose weight, but they are still getting the health benefits from that movement. In fact, one Canadian academic, professor Robert Ross, noted to Walker that people’s waist sizes will often go down the more active they are, even if they’re not necessarily losing a ton of weight—which is a better indicator of your overall health than your body body mass index. “The core message I really want to get across to people is that anything is better than nothing,” Walker says. “And the more you do is better than that.” [14:10]

Walker’s intention isn’t to place blame on any individual or shame people for how they live their lives. It can be difficult to follow a healthy, lower-calorie diet. The world values convenience and actively discourages regular exertion—pointing us toward the hover-cart future depicted in the Pixar movie, Wall-E. “Governments have spent 40 years trying to load this on individual responsibility, and it hasn’t worked,” he says. It’s time for public officials to step up and think about ways to address widespread inactivity—Walker points to Scandinavian countries that have prioritized cycling and walking in their city planning as an example for what more governments should be doing. [20:03]