One of the goals of exercise is to be healthier and live longer and both the fitness and healthcare industries try to help people achieve exactly that. However, neither industry can provide a formula that will guarantee success. They can only help people increase the likelihood that they will be healthy and live long. That may seem like nit-picking, but it is actually very important to understand so that we can all approach health and fitness with the right mindset.
Cause Vs. Risk
The key is in the difference between causes and risk factors. “In order to be causal,” says Maureen Miller, an infectious disease epidemiologist and founder of the Basics(sex), “an agent must precede the outcome and there must be strong scientific evidence of a biological, medical, social, or other relationship between the cause and the outcome. Short of this, they are considered risk factors.”
To truly understand what this means, consider two examples. Americans are vaccinated against polio. That is because polio is caused by a virus. Since people only become ill if the virus invades their body and can successfully spread in it, preventing that through the use of a vaccine has a direct effect. The polio vaccine stops the cause of the disease, the virus. Compare that with lung cancer. While it is common to say that smoking causes lung cancer, that is actually not true. The CDC states that smoking is “the number one risk factor” for lung cancer, not the number one cause. That is because being a smoker does not guarantee that you will get lung cancer. Further, being a non-smokers does not guarantee that you won’t. Smoking does, however, increase the likelihood of getting or dying from cancer 15 to 30 times, which is a very good reason not to smoke.
Stack The Deck In Your Favor
In fitness there is a common error in thinking based on this misunderstanding. Many who exercise or watch their diet expect these activities to cause them to live longer, remain disease and injury free, maintain a certain weight, and even stay more youthful. Diet and exercise does not cause good health and long life, it simply increases the chances of it (quite a bit, probably.)
Why does this matter? How often have we heard someone say “I gained five pounds on vacation, what is the point of all that exercise?” or “my knee hurts again, why did I bother with physical therapy?” We’ve also all heard people talk about their grandmother or grandfather, who never exercised, smoke and drank every day, and lived to be 102. Each of these thoughts is flawed. In both cases we are not talking about causes, we are talking about risk and risk factors.
So stick with your exercise and your good habits, no matter the ups and downs in your compliance or the ups and downs in your results. When you do, you are stacking the deck in your favor, and who doesn’t like better odds?