Skip to main content

Exercise is Medicine - Judy Foreman ****

There's a certain class of book that can be described as 'it should have been an article'. This is where there are only a few significant points to be made, which would make an interesting magazine article, but the whole thing becomes intensely tedious when dragged out to book length. (A lot of business books fit into this category.) I was distinctly worried that this would apply to Exercise is Medicine - yet despite, in a way, it being true, Judy Foreman manages to make the book one that's packed full of information and an interesting read - even to someone who hates sport and doesn't like medical books.

Let's get that main point out of the way - exercise is really good for you. Even a relatively small amount - say 150 minutes per week of brisk walking - will have a significant impact on your health and potentially increase your lifespan. It helps all round from blood pressure to mental state. That's the article part. But what Foreman does is take a whole collection of areas where exercise can have an impact, gives us some scientific background to that particular area and shows how exercise can help.

So, for example, we've got chapters on ageing, why sitting down too long at a time is bad for you (interestingly, she says standing desks make little difference, so don't feel smug, desk standers), strengthening your bones (sadly one of the few areas where there's no benefit if you're middle aged or older), your mood, your gut biology, immunity (yes) and inflammation and more. Along the way we're introduced to everything from how muscles work to the role of mitochondria and the working of the immune system. It's surprisingly (for me) interesting.

A few little moans. I found the example stories of individuals living to great ages or whatever just irritating rather than helpful. It was too reminiscent of those people who smoke 40 cigarettes a day and live to 95 - individual examples don't tell us anything about the statistical impact. I also thought that Foreman went over the top on the wonders of running (seemingly her thing) - not that it's a bad form of exercise, but she didn't mention the impact issues compared with fast walking, she perhaps underplayed some other forms of exercise, and the last thing the world needs is more runners, as they are the rudest people on the pavements (especially as this review was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and runners seem to show less courtesy in moving away from other people than anyone else).

Exercise isn't a magic bullet. You can exercise at length and still die young. But there is no doubt that it has a really big statistical benefit - and this is a great book to encourage the reader to do more, while providing lots of scientific background.

Hardback:  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Wish They'd Taught Me That - Robin Pemantle and Julian Gould ***

Subtitled 'overlooked and omitted topics in mathematics', the obvious concern is that there is a good reason these topics are overlooked and omitted. Thankfully, this is not the case, but it's fair to say that despite attempts to dress it up that way, this isn't a recreational maths book. There's a fair description in the blurb: 'the topics which every undergraduate mathematics student "should" know, but has probably never encountered... magnificent secrets that are beautiful, useful and accessible.' As someone who many years ago did a degree with a fair amount of mathematics in it, I think it probably would have appealed back then - though to be honest a lot of it has disappeared from my memory, strongly reducing the entertainment value. Here's an example. The first real page contains the sentence:  'If you are handed a real number 𝓍 ∈  ⁠ ⁠,  one way to tell if 𝓍 is rational or irrational is to look at sequences of rational numbers q n ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more