Derek Thompson: Tell us a little bit about what you do.
Euan Ashley: I’m a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics and data science at Stanford University in California. I study a variety of things. I love the extremes of human behavior, including exercise, something we’re going to talk about today.
Thompson: I feel like it’s interesting, your work straddles two different buckets. On the one side, you’re looking into genetic mysteries that tell us things we don’t know about the world in our bodies.
And with your work in exercise, you’re helping us to more deeply understand the molecular basis of something we do know, or at least we should know or suspect to be true, which is exercise is pretty good for us. At the highest level, why is it important to understand how exercise is good for us and how exercise actually works at the molecular level?
Ashley: I think it’s because it’s just such a potent intervention. I mean, I think of it as an intervention as a doctor. Exercise is just the single most important intervention you can think of for your health.
There are plenty of other important ones. I’m sure we could talk about diet, we could talk about sleep, we could talk about other things …
You name the system in your body, and exercise improves it and makes your chance of disease in that system less:
“60 percent less likely to have [atrial fibrillation], 50 percent less likely to have diabetes, 70 percent less likely to fracture your hip, 50 percent less likely to have colon cancer, 25 percent less likely to have breast cancer, I think 25 percent less likely to get depression; 70 percent of people who are active in their daily lives report better sleep.
“And over many years, you’re much less likely to die. So, I mean, you pick your system. Exercise, it really is the magic pill … ”
