Jay Novella

And that was 100,000 of them.

Some of these people, a subset of the 100,000, had also done these stationary bike tests.

They weren't like maximal, like go until you can't do it anymore.

It was submaximal.

But they did these tests.

And they did that to get an estimate of the VO2 max.

And we actually discussed VO2 max.

max recently.

It's essentially, there's a lot of ways to describe this, but one way to describe it is a measure of how efficiently your body gets, transports, and uses oxygen for these sustained physical efforts.

So if you have a higher VO2 max, you can interpret that as being more fit, absolutely.

Apparently they use this also as a way to give an estimate on cardiorespiratory fitness.

So there was also, each person also had lots of other data, lots of other potentially confounding data as well, I might add, but smoking status, alcohol consumption, health and diet data, their body mass index, heart rate, blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera.

So they got all these people, when it was all said and done, they ended up with 17,088 people, a decent chunk of people.

Now, keep in mind, I want to reiterate this, this is an observational study.

This means that cause and effect are a lot harder to nail down because the researchers are essentially just sitting back, in a sense, and watching what the real-life behavior was, and they're not randomly assigning people to exercise groups and things like in a clinical trial.

So observational data, observational studies are limited in that way.

And then there was the follow-up.

These people...

were followed for up to like eight years.

And how did they fare over those eight years?