Dr. Andy Galpin

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.

So we will have this paper in the show notes.

The actual title of the paper is Physical Fitness and All-Cause Mortality, A Prospective Study of Healthy Men and Women.

And again, first author, Stephen Blair from 1989.

So if you cruise onto table two of that paper, you're going to see that they actually ran the analysis and split up the men and women into quintiles.

So this would mean the lowest 20% of fitness, the next 20, next 20, next 20, next 20.

So take everyone across the spectrum, lowest to highest, and split them up, top 20%, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down.

And what I will read off to you is the relative risk.

And again, this is risk of dying as we go from the most fit 20 percentile to the next most fit to the middle kind of 20 percent to the second to last 20 percent all the way to the bottom 20 percent.

That's a way to view this.

So if you start at the highest level of fitness, and we put that as just a number of 1.0, right?

So this is saying, okay, you're at a 1.0.

If I go from the top 20 percentile to the next 20 percentile, so think of this as like 60 to 80th percent, if you will.

My risk goes from one to 1.7.