23 1/2 hours

December 9, 2011 8:36 PM

23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?
posted by garlic (54 comments total)

Awesome. Love the style, love the message.
posted by mediareport at 8:47 PM on December 9, 2011

spoiler: it's exercise.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:49 PM on December 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

not dying?
posted by jonmc at 8:51 PM on December 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

Pretty awesome. These "chalk talk" things are oddly mesmerizing, and this had great content that makes the barrier to entry for health improvement feel reasonably low.
posted by Miko at 8:54 PM on December 9, 2011

Being told that extended sitting is killing me is like being told that sugar is toxic. Its implications are so drastic as to be virtually meaningless. What can I honestly do with this information?

...or I just haven't tried a standing desk yet.
posted by stroke_count at 8:55 PM on December 9, 2011 [4 favorites]

The single best thing you can do for your health is eat vegetables.

Like pizza.
posted by quadog at 8:55 PM on December 9, 2011 [8 favorites]

What's that plug-in that skips ahead 30%? Geez, dude, get to the point.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:55 PM on December 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

Wonderful. I've been making 2 hour moderately-rough-terrain walks a regular thing and have anecdotally observed a great improvement in feeling rested after sleep and happiness generally.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:56 PM on December 9, 2011 [2 favorites]

What can I honestly do with this information?

Well, can you "limit your sitting and sleeping to 23 1/2 hours a day?"

I love that - it really frames it in a way that sounds possible.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:56 PM on December 9, 2011 [3 favorites]

Yeah, that's the neatest thing in a thing filled with neat things: it's a totally friendly, open, data-rich and utterly convincing encouragement to add just a bit of exercise to your week.

I liked the part about dog-walking.
posted by mediareport at 9:00 PM on December 9, 2011

That was fantastic! I truly enjoy this style of presentation. I recently watched a video on hair health that was presented in a similar way. I reminds me of the way I study something new. I like to lay out the notes with pictures and symbols. It is so much more interesting and fun to see ideas come to life this way.
posted by SheMulp AKA Plus 1 at 9:04 PM on December 9, 2011

I'm going to die.

/eats another rum ball
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:04 PM on December 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

What's that plug-in that skips ahead 30%? Geez, dude, get to the point.

Hit '3' on your keyboard. (You might have to click the video to make sure it has keyboard focus.)
posted by knave at 9:13 PM on December 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

it really frames it in a way that sounds possible

That's true. The video strikes a nice chord with me in that way.

Still, I don't know how the public is supposed to process these sensationalist health findings that sitting, independent of exercise, is largely responsible for our untimely demise.

Case in point: "Hamilton's take, which is supported by a growing body of research, is that the amount of time you exercise and the amount of time you spend on your butt are completely separate factors for heart-disease risk..."
posted by stroke_count at 9:18 PM on December 9, 2011

I think this is definitely valuable information and I agree that regular exercise (defined as not being sedentary, not necessarily intense workouts) is huge. But it's also important in understanding these studies to realize that there's no silver bullet. People who exercise more and eat less junk are overall healthier and happier, but not in some magical way. For example, a clinically depressed person who takes up regular exercise will get closer to a normal level of happiness, but probably not quite there. An obese person who exercises may have a heart attack at 60 instead of 52. So you have to calibrate your expectations a little bit or you might end up disappointed... and if you want the best health outcomes, you'll have to apply more than one technique. (Say SSRIs + talk therapy + exercise + diet... but if you have to pick one, exercise might be the best place to start.)
posted by knave at 9:23 PM on December 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Can anyone tell me the name of this type of presentation? Is there even a term for it?
posted by SheMulp AKA Plus 1 at 9:34 PM on December 9, 2011

What if you have 30 minutes of vigorous sex while sitting?

Probably helps somewhat, but you'd be better off with 30 minutes of vigorous sex while walking.
posted by Flunkie at 9:54 PM on December 9, 2011 [8 favorites]

Being told that extended sitting is killing me is like being told that sugar is toxic. -- stroke_count

DIE? You're more likely to have a stroke, the #1 cause of disability: brain damage.
posted by stbalbach at 9:55 PM on December 9, 2011

I'm 50 with high blood pressure. I threw the medicine for it away. Made me have to pee every ten minutes. I don't exercise. I eat bacon fried in lard sandwiches. I smoke like a chimney, and drink more than Henry Blake in re-runs. I have taken every drug I can find except for X because I cant find any more damned art majors. I sleep about three hours a day. What these goofy chalk talk health guru keep a food journal cheesedicks have never understood is, you don't live longer, it just seems longer. Yes, my habits are is going to take years off my life, and the years I lose are going to be the sitting in a nursing home in a pile of my own shit years, not the snorting crank off my best friends wife's tits in a nighclub bathroom years. Get busy living, or get busy dieting.
posted by timsteil at 10:24 PM on December 9, 2011 [4 favorites]

My brother says the same thing. The problem is, you're not going to miss the years of shitting your pants in a nursing home: they're just going to happen 20 years sooner than if you were healthier. Fact.
posted by Silentgoldfish at 10:29 PM on December 9, 2011 [33 favorites]

Yeah, you don't get to skip old age. You can get there sooner, but you can't skip it. The years you lose are going to be the relatively healthy, relatively happy middle age ones.
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:39 PM on December 9, 2011

>Get busy living, or get busy dieting.

If you can spend ~2% of your living (30 minutes a day), you'll enjoy that living more in addition to having more of it, without dieting.

A very small amount of exercise goes a long way to alleviating all sorts of unhappiness in life.
posted by Llama-Lime at 10:45 PM on December 9, 2011

Get busy living, or get busy dieting.

Dude if you have untreated hypertension you might blow out your kidneys. Then you will be unable to eat things like bacon.
posted by supercrayon at 11:11 PM on December 9, 2011

An obese person who exercises may have a heart attack at 60 instead of 52.

Great. Way to perpetuate our culture's excessive hand-wringing about obesity.

Even according to the most conventional of studies, obesity decreases life expectancy by 6-7 years. Your standard-issue boilerplate obese person will not be dying of obesity at 52 fercryingoutloud.
posted by parrot_person at 11:31 PM on December 9, 2011

One of the healthiest things you can do is to get a simple iPod or equivalent and spend a chunk of every day listening to music or audio books while you walk. Peel yourself away from the stationary screens.
posted by pracowity at 12:35 AM on December 10, 2011

Great. Way to perpetuate our culture's excessive hand-wringing about obesity.

Didn't mean to push anyone's buttons, but:

...obesity decreases life expectancy by 6-7 years.

That's an average figure, and only talks about morbitity - I mentioned when heart attack might occur (which people frequently survive). There are plenty of people (some I've known personally) who experience heart attacks in their 40's or 50's, primarily due to diet and lack of exercise (or smoking). Besides, it was just an example. An obese person with weight in the 400+ could do even worse than the example I gave. An "obese" woman who weighs 160 might not have any health issues until she's 80. So, give me a break, this wasn't even the point I was trying to make.
posted by knave at 1:07 AM on December 10, 2011

Great presentation, but I must agree to being somewhat distracted by the fact that the illustrator was unable to draw, of all things, a diamond-frame bike.
posted by primer_dimer at 1:24 AM on December 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

Can anyone tell me the name of this type of presentation? Is there even a term for it?

I don't know that the genre really has a formal name yet. It's been called "animated presentation" for one example. The foremost practitioners are Cognitive Media, who do these for the RSA, and those are called an RSA Animate. They seem to internally label it scribing, having evolved the process from sort of live-illustrating lectures.
posted by dhartung at 3:49 AM on December 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

Bias against obese people may not have been the point you were *trying* to make, but it was made nonetheless.But thanks for sharing your anecdata nonetheless.
posted by parrot_person at 4:06 AM on December 10, 2011

I liked this.
posted by OmieWise at 4:11 AM on December 10, 2011

Great! I'm going to the gym.
posted by alasdair at 5:23 AM on December 10, 2011

Can anyone tell me the name of this type of presentation? Is there even a term for it?

We always called this a chalk talk growing up, but dhartung has found some sexier terms.
posted by Miko at 5:29 AM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

I liked this and I am sending it to my mother. She knows that walking is good for her, but sometimes she needs a little push because she is 74 and sometimes her knees hurt or she feels tired or it is drizzly, etc. She has a dog to walk which helps.

Luckily for her she can walk, so many of her friends and family cannot. One sister just died. One sister requires a scooter because she is too fat. One sister has congestive heart failure and has to drag her oxygen tank everywhere. One friend has Alzheimer's and gets dizzy and falls down a lot. One friend smokes and doesn't have the lung power to walk more than 10 minutes. Her ex-husband had two hips replaced and walks with canes.

We all picture ourselves getting old with dignity and grace. Being able to walk where you want to, being able to stay in your own home, being able to get up from the bed and go to the toilet in the bathroom-- these are precious gifts that we should all treasure and do our best to secure.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:32 AM on December 10, 2011 [6 favorites]

The issue of pain is an important one. The doctor mentions it, but just briefly. I have been concerned lately watching my relatively young mom showing some signs of declining mobility. She doesn't enjoy walking and usually wants to cut it short. A lot of this is because has joint pain from a serious car accident 20 years ago which fractured many of her major bones. But once you slow down, you start to gain weight, and that stresses your frame even more, causing even more pain when you do move around. IT's quite a vicious cycle. I'm not sure how doctors address this issue - people know walking will help and want to do it, but it hurts, and to make it hurt less you first have to endure it hurting a lot more, and even then it will not stop hurting completely, ever.
posted by Miko at 5:37 AM on December 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

Logging off, going for a walk. :)
posted by Ochre,Hugh at 6:46 AM on December 10, 2011

Anecdata: my grandma is 88. She gives a Seniors Water Aerobics class MWF and does laps on TuTh. She looks, and is regularly mistaken for, 70. Her husband (my grandpa) had cancer surgery which left him cold all the time, so he couldn't handle the pool. He started fading almost immediately. (Up til the cancer surgery, he still did ten pullups a day, although toward the end it was sets of one spread throughout the day.)

My grandparents on the other side are 89 and 87. They played tennis well into their 80s, through knee replacements, minor strokes (at 75, my grandpa was stronger in arm-wrestling than me on his stroke-weakened side), and the like. They played with a guy who's 96 and still plays. They're slowing down, but they still manage to walk a couple laps around the neighborhood, and are both still very sharp.

Point being, duh.
posted by notsnot at 6:47 AM on December 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

"Hamilton's take, which is supported by a growing body of research, is that the amount of time you exercise and the amount of time you spend on your butt are completely separate factors for heart-disease risk..."

If sitting is the risk factor, then what is one to do that has a job that is sedentary. Taking breaks can only go so far if sitting is the core of the issue. I doubt most employers would spring for a treadmill desk. And since sitting itself seems to be the problem would things like under the desk pedaling devices help at all? Is it just a matter of finding a new way to position ones self if they have a computer job or other type work that requires being at a desk 8+ hours a day?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 6:56 AM on December 10, 2011

I like the part about not dying.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:00 AM on December 10, 2011

Good presentation. Not pushing everyone to be triathletes, just spend a half hour walking everyday, to make pretty much every part of your life better.

Of course, don't let it mess with your carefully crafted rationale for why you don't it.
posted by Argyle at 7:04 AM on December 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

parrot_person, I think this may be one of those situations where reality has a bias against obesity. This presentation does have good news though, when it says activity + obesity can extend ones life compared to inactivity + obesity.
posted by garlic at 7:18 AM on December 10, 2011

I doubt most employers would spring for a treadmill desk.

I doubt most people whose jobs require serious thinking could concentrate at one. There are studies showing that a lack of socializing is unhealthy, but we don't tell serious athletes that they need to start chatting while they practice. The way that we talk about these issues, and even sometimes the way that researchers study them, often reflects a real devaluation of intellectual labor -- you are either physically active or you're watching television.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 7:21 AM on December 10, 2011

We always called this a chalk talk growing up, but dhartung has found some sexier terms.

Whiteboard animation seems to be another variant.

The Story of Stuff project just calls their first one "a cartoon about trash", then more generally, "short, easily shareable online movies".
posted by dhartung at 7:37 AM on December 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

Ralston McTodd - That is an odd and irrelevant comparison. If sitting - the actual act, and posture/position, is as bad for your health as the article stroke_count linked claims, then it's a work place hazard issue for those that toll in the intellectual labor mine.

Its not the first time I've heard that about sitting either. No one is saying sitting at a computer isn't hard work, but that hard work is going to kill you as sure as or possibly more than a physically demanding job that destroys joints, etc . . .
posted by [insert clever name here] at 7:39 AM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm going to Florida next weekend to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday. She's still in excellent health, both physically and cognitively. The family credits that partly to her partner (hetero, they refuse to get married for various sound and unsound reasons, but they've been together for at least 20 years, and I can't bring myself to call him her boyfriend) who none of us really adore except her, but he adores her back and that's all we care about.

But most of it is that she played tennis every single day until she tweaked her back a couple years ago, and now she swims every single day, and she walks, too, in her pink windbreaker and jeans that have gone in and out of fashion so many times I can't keep track. Somewhere along the line she became convinced that she needed to stay active to stay healthy, and by God she's done it.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:09 AM on December 10, 2011 [4 favorites]

If sitting - the actual act, and posture/position, is as bad for your health as the article stroke_count linked claims, then it's a work place hazard issue for those that toll in the intellectual labor mine.

The problem is that many of the solutions proposed don't appear to have any relationship to how people think and work. I know that some people can concentrate just fine, or better, at a standing desk, but they seem to be decidedly in the minority. Pressure to stand or walk on a treadmill while working will only add more stress to the life of the average knowledge worker. And that article is a actually great example of the shaming language that permeates these debates: If only these couch potatoes in our fast food nation would stop making lame excuses. The problem is being framed as one of lazy people making excuses, rather than hard workers who need a solution that accommodates the inherent demands of their work.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 8:26 AM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

The thing that affected me the most was barely relevant to the rest of the presentation. It was his quote of Jerry Garcia. "Somebody has to do something. It is just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."
posted by Obscure Reference at 8:52 AM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

I am not sure I have ever read a health oriented post with more affirmative posts and less "skepticism" than this one. I find it thoroughly entertaining and, of course, validating. Thanks for the link
posted by rmhsinc at 9:22 AM on December 10, 2011

The problem is, you're not going to miss the years of shitting your pants in a nursing home: they're just going to happen 20 years sooner than if you were healthier. Fact.

Not as long as firearm ownership is legal. Fact.
posted by mullingitover at 10:48 AM on December 10, 2011

I'm 50 with high blood pressure. I threw the medicine for it away. Made me have to pee every ten minutes. I don't exercise. I eat bacon fried in lard sandwiches. I smoke like a chimney, and drink more than Henry Blake in re-runs. I have taken every drug I can find except for X because I cant find any more damned art majors. I sleep about three hours a day. What these goofy chalk talk health guru keep a food journal cheesedicks have never understood is, you don't live longer, it just seems longer. Yes, my habits are is going to take years off my life, and the years I lose are going to be the sitting in a nursing home in a pile of my own shit years, not the snorting crank off my best friends wife's tits in a nighclub bathroom years. Get busy living, or get busy dieting.

I can tell we're really going to miss you.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 10:55 AM on December 10, 2011

This is cool.

Also, reading the this thread, I can't believe anyone would bother to argue against people taking minimum responsibility for their health, but there it is.
posted by marimeko at 1:22 PM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

: What these goofy chalk talk health guru keep a food journal cheesedicks have never understood is, you don't live longer, it just seems longer.

The video says that not only do you live longer, but you feel better during that time.

I guess eating bacon every day and other uninhibited indulgences are a great time to some people, but-- no offense meant-- living like that sounds like hell to me. If I don't get enough vegetables and sunshine, can feel the difference in my energy and enjoyment of life inside a week. I don't need a health guru to tell me what common sense does, but I like having the supporting data.

: parrot_person, I think this may be one of those situations where reality has a bias against obesity. This presentation does have good news though, when it says activity + obesity can extend ones life compared to inactivity + obesity.

Yes, unfortunately there is growing evidence that too much excess fat can essentially break the body's hormonal feedback system, which was meant to handle starvation, not the opposite extreme. Of course the exact physiological situation is going to be different for each person, and BMI is a very rough indicator, and the epidemiologists can only point to vague statistical risks. But that doesn't make the consequences any less real for those affected.
posted by zennie at 1:54 PM on December 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Can anyone tell me the name of this type of presentation? Is there even a term for it?

The person who did the graphics, Liisa Sorsa, calls it graphic facilitation (or graphic recording or scribing). Another example, possibly also by Sorsa: Learning a language in 10 days.
posted by twoleftfeet at 1:57 PM on December 10, 2011 [2 favorites]

Not as long as firearm ownership is legal. Fact.

The suicide rate for North American white males steadily increases as he ages, and spikes after the age of 65. It is far higher than any other race or gender grouping. Fact.
posted by P.o.B. at 1:39 AM on December 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

restless_nomad could have just described my nearly 90 year old grandma (except the partner part.) She quit running 5 miles a day about 10 years ago, deciding that walking 3-4 miles a day was just as good. She won several medals at the senior olympics in tennis...

I'm convinced...
posted by schyler523 at 3:48 PM on December 11, 2011