How does growing your own tobacco improve your health?
This may seem like an odd question. But the labor of growing your own tobacco is not insignificant. It is meaningful exercise. It's better exercise than walking. In fact 1 hour of average gardening activity is the exercise equivalent of 1.67 hours (an hour and 40 minutes) of walking. That's nothing to sniff at.
A curious study (~142,000 people, over a span of 15 years) appeared recently in The Lancet. It seems that the benefit of exercise on cardio-vascular disease (CVD) has been studied almost entirely in wealthy countries, where exercise is most often regarded as recreational.
Nobody had studied it well in poorer countries, where exercise is usually in the form of required labor. So the questions were basically these:
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)31634-3.pdf
The above article is tedious to interpret. Here's what can be sifted from it.
Naturally, you could derive the same exercise benefit by growing carrots, quinoa or kale.
Bob
This may seem like an odd question. But the labor of growing your own tobacco is not insignificant. It is meaningful exercise. It's better exercise than walking. In fact 1 hour of average gardening activity is the exercise equivalent of 1.67 hours (an hour and 40 minutes) of walking. That's nothing to sniff at.
A curious study (~142,000 people, over a span of 15 years) appeared recently in The Lancet. It seems that the benefit of exercise on cardio-vascular disease (CVD) has been studied almost entirely in wealthy countries, where exercise is most often regarded as recreational.
Nobody had studied it well in poorer countries, where exercise is usually in the form of required labor. So the questions were basically these:
- does ordinary, non-recreational labor have the same CVD benefits as recreational exercise?
- Is the benefit that is seen in wealthy countries also seen in poorer countries?
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)31634-3.pdf
The above article is tedious to interpret. Here's what can be sifted from it.
- All sorts of things contribute to CVD deaths. Adequate exercise vs. inadequate exercise accounts for more or less 10% of the cause of CVD death. So if you are an athlete, rather than a couch potato (all other risk factors being equal), you reduce your chance of death from CVD by roughly 10%. [Of course, if you exercise, you are far less likely to be overweight, and far less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, etc. But the exercise part alone accounts for ~10% of the risk.]
- Gardening, in general, appears to be 1.67 times as effective as walking in reducing your risk of death by CVD.
- You can approach the maximum CVD benefit of gardening exercise at about 1.25 hours (75 minutes) of gardening per day.
Naturally, you could derive the same exercise benefit by growing carrots, quinoa or kale.
Bob