Dr. Andy Galpin

And within that, several hundred people actually died.

And so it's a bit morbid, I understand, but it makes the science incredibly compelling because we can look at a number of people, wait for several of them to die, and then come back and say, what actually was different between those people who died at baseline versus those who didn't die, you know, again, at baseline and after that.

And so we can get really strong insights about

what predicted death.

Now, what they found in this initial study, and this is directly from the paper itself, was after age adjustment, so again, they would kind of factor in their age and say, let's take that out of the equation.

So after age adjusted, all-cause mortality, meaning died for any reason, declined directly across fitness levels.

So as you reduce your fitness, you increased your all-cause mortality risk.

And it went from a number of what is referred to as 64, so 64 deaths per 10,000 people.

That was the highest rate there.

It reduced from that to about 18.6.

And so again, if you're looking at that saying, all right, if I go from the least fit category to the most fit, my risk goes from 64 deaths per 10,000 people down to 18 deaths per 10,000 people.

If that part is confusing, just run the 18 versus the 64.

So another way to think about that is if my risk of dying is 18 and now it all of a sudden goes up to 64, it's a huge increase in your risk of dying and nobody wants that.

Similar story for the women.

The numbers there actually went from the risk per 10,000 was 39.5 and reduced all the way to 8.5.

And so again, clear evidence that this thing was happening.

And what's also interesting here, just because someone will ask, I'm sure, this was true once they factored out things like, again, as I mentioned, age, but also smoking habits, cholesterol levels, systolic blood pressure, fasting blood glucose levels, parental history of coronary artery disease, and then follow up and other metrics.

So what they're basically saying is even if you take those things into account,

you still see this massive reduction in health when we have a reduction in cardiovascular fitness.

Now I realize following numbers like that is sometimes difficult if you're only listening to this in the audio version.