How did Stephen Hawking live ~50 years with zero aerobic exercise?

[md2000]

@Broomstick

Well, sure, Hawking was at risk of a lot of things due to being immobile, but on the other hand he wasn’t obese, presumably wasn’t abusing drugs or alcohol, and wasn’t attempting to do things like shoveling snow which can precipitate heart attacks. And probably had some good genes, too. So, some good habits offsetting the effect of not being able to do aerobic exercise. Also good medical care.

@Colibri

I think the real issue in promoting strokes and heart attacks is obesity rather then sedentariness per se. Of course sedentariness and obesity are linked, but merely being sedentary without additional risk factors is less of a problem.

This is my thought too. He may not have been active, but he probably didn’t spend all his sessile time eating cheetohs and pizza until he was 300lb. (or 22 stone). I doubt his diet consisted of mainly sugar and high-cholesterol meat, either. (Isn’t his current wife a nurse, his nurse?) So Ok, he had one strike against him - but not the whole bundle that usually comes with a bad lifestyle.

[Surreal]

@Wesley_Clark

Yeah but again, people who exercise have a life expectancy 2-5 years longer than people who are sedentary.

Correlation is not causation. We say it over and over again here, but it never seems to sink in.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep18259

Observational studies report a strong inverse relationship between leisure-time physical activity and all-cause mortality. Despite suggestive evidence from population-based associations, scientists have not been able to show a beneficial effect of physical activity on the risk of death in controlled intervention studies among individuals who have been healthy at baseline. On the other hand, high cardiorespiratory fitness is known to be a strong predictor of reduced mortality, even more robust than physical activity level itself. Here, in both animals and/or human twins, we show that the same genetic factors influence physical activity levels, cardiorespiratory fitness, and risk of death. Previous observational follow-up studies in humans suggest that increasing fitness through physical activity levels could prolong life; however, our controlled interventional study with laboratory rats bred for low and high intrinsic fitness contrast with these findings. Also, we find no evidence for the suggested association using pairwise analysis among monozygotic twin pairs who are discordant in their physical activity levels. Based on both our animal and human findings, we propose that genetic pleiotropy might partly explain the frequently observed associations between high baseline physical activity and later reduced mortality in humans.