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Originally Posted by Marcellus
Well this may not be true. The reason why is some studies show mobility is the key to life span.
As you age past 65 years old when you become immobile your life span drops exponentially.
I believe the number I read was after the age of 60 it takes 6 weeks to recover from 1 week of immobility. And the number keeps climbing the older you get. So you could spend years staying in shape, fall break a hip and lose mobility for 8 weeks say, and it would take 48 weeks to get back to where you were. Who is going to do that?
I think its something like 70% of people who fall and break a hip after the age of 65 die within the next year, and its not from the fall or the hip. They cant move and exercise for an extended period of time and both their mind and body tank. This is according to Peter Attia in his book Outlive.
One of the biggest thing he would focus on with older patients to live a long and mobile (productive) life into their late years was mobility, balance, and muscle mass so you could handle a fall or event.
Maybe the difference we are discussing is lifespan vs quality lifespan as well though he claims once you become immobile you don't live long typically.
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Studies also show muscle mass is a pretty significant predictor of mortality across all reasons...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4035379/
It might not be THE key reason, but you could probably take out the riskiest habits that contribute to a shorter lifespan (and the main reasons women live a whole 5 years longer than men), like alcoholism, chronic smoking, drug use... and if you haven't abused such things for decades of your life (and that probably goes for food/obesity, too) and have bigger shit to deal with, muscle mass and related issues are probably up there on the list of being pretty damn important.