Fitness versus Health: Marathons Test Not Just Endurance but Logic Too

Safer on the sidelines?

The mortality toll of the 2011 Philadelphia Marathon was two runners out of approximately 25,000, a death rate that proponents of the event might represent as less hazardous than the risk of commuting the distance by car. And probably much safer than couch-bound obesity. Even when we take into account the many people who require first aid for dehydration or suffer orthopedic injuries, the hazards of marathon participation might strike many as relatively low. Life is risky business, after all, and testing human limits -- for pleasure or heroism -- often comes at a price.

Nonetheless, it is curious to observe how sanguine health experts and the public have become about tests of endurance that can result in needless death, and how little discussion we hear in the aftermath about the wisdom or health value of marathon participation. That’s because marathons -- once considered an “extreme sport” for the very few -- are now an icon of our fitness culture, attracting virtual hordes of runners in cities across the country, more and more of whom run the full distance each year.

Marathons are a spectator sport and a badge of fitness honor -- not to mention a source of mood elevation for those addicted to long-distance running. And for the cities that host them, they are also very much a business that creates dollars, press, and caché. When endurance events like marathons and triathlons are promoted by health celebrities and fitness missionaries like CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, they gain more credibility and many more converts.

The Obesity Epidemic: When Biology and Culture Conspire Against Us

What We Eat or What We Are?

Tara Parker-Pope’s recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine, “The Fat Trap: Do You Have to be Superhuman to Lose Weight?” describes what is fast becoming canon: that modern culture has unmasked in our evolutionary biology a genetic propensity to defend against scarcity and starvation by retaining excess fat.

Research that documents weight plateaus for dieters, and biological differences between obese subjects and others is allowing us to assemble a picture of the human animal as metabolically hard-wired to conserve or regain weight -- especially after it has been reprogrammed by periods of obesity. Research also lends strong support to genetic differences in the degree to which individuals may be prone to obesity based on innate metabolism, food addictions, or other epigenetic factors.

Many frustrated dieters will find redemption in that thesis -- as, clearly, does Parker-Pope, whose article is unusually solipsistic for a card-carrying science writer. It is really a lamentation … which just goes to show how intractable and all-consuming this problem truly is for those of us who live in societies of plenty.

Dim Prospects for Cure

It turns out that when culture and biology team up, they have the potential to do great mischief together. Modern obesity and modern terrorism both demonstrate how aspects of our basic nature can be potentiated by forces of culture -- including both the Big Mac and the Internet -- to produce negative outcomes.

Soda and Teen Violence: Hazards of Correlational Analysis Can Put Truth in Harm’s Way

Statistical Ammo for the Twinkie Offense: Guns Don’t Kill People, Soda Kills People?

No one with an interest in public health and a zest for social engineering can go wrong by criticizing soda. That particular cup runneth over with empty calories and plausible links to obesity, as well as tooth decay. The carbonated beverage industry is fighting a pitched battle in municipalities across the US to avoid punitive taxation meant to price soda beyond the reach of citizens who seem most at risk of making poor nutritional choices -- choices that ultimately all of us must pay for. No matter what you think of coercive taxation, it’s really hard to defend soda.

Now, though, thanks to research published by two Harvard-trained researchers, Sara Solnick of University of Vermont and David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health, soda has come under another sort of fire.

An analysis performed on the Boston Youth Survey database shows a significant correlation between soda consumption and violence in teens, including a propensity to carry guns and exhibit violent behavior with partners. The paper, which appeared in the Journal of Injury Prevention, got a two-day flurry of press attention because it has a provocative thesis that keyed off the famous “Twinkie Defense.” It gives everyone even more reason to worry about what dangers may lurk in our refrigerators.

Or does it?