High air pollution could diminish exercise benefits by half – study

I want to pull two quotes from the article.

> “Our findings emphasise that exercise remains beneficial even in polluted environments,” lead researcher Professor Po-Wen Ku said in a statement. [...] “We don’t want to discourage people from exercising outdoors,” said Co-author Professor Paola Zaninotto.

The health effects of exercise outdoors are combined from two effects:

- Positive effects due to exercise. These start out strong but level off after a while.

- Negative effects due to pollution. These increase almost linearly with time spent outside.

One might ask, is there an amount of daily exercise at which the negative effects overpower the positive ones? Yes, in a handful of cities around the world, after a few hours of exercise, the pollution makes additional outdoors exercise actually harmful.

But almost everywhere a marginal minute of exercise provides a positive effect on health regardless of time already spent exercising, and there is nowhere in the world where something like an hour of exercise a day is a net negative. Get out there. Pick an active means of commuting (cycling, running, walking, skiing, rollerblading, skateboarding, unicycling) and don't worry so much about pollution unless you live in one of those single-digit cities which I forget where they are, but probably concentrated in Asia.

(I feel bad about typing this out without linking to the source. I'm looking for it in my notes!)

If you have ever been to a city that has banned fossil fuels then you can absolutely tell the difference, to most of the overpopulated European cities that I have visited. It’s astonishing how peaceful and comfortable it is to run or even stroll when every breath is just 100% refreshing; you feel 10 pounds lighter. Meanwhile the blackened filter of our home HVAC needs replacement again… and allergies.

Before people freak out about their morning run, I’m very hard pressed to find 25 PM2.5 on this map of the US. (Note these numbers are AQI, you have to zoom into the bad AQI numbers and look at their PM2.5). Albeit it’s a Saturday morning, not rush hour.

China and India look rough though.

https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map

Cities have mostly only gotten cleaner with time. This is way, way, way down the list of things that I'm worried about killing me.

And all the while, nothing is done to get old 2-stroke mopeds of the road in Europe. It’s such a low hanging fruit to get those hyper polluters out of cities but in an individualistic society, personal cult status seems more important than common health.

If only you could see it. In the big cities the air quality has improved, however, I am not sure if it really has, or if we are now just burning hydrocarbons more efficiently so that the particle sizes have become invisible.

Put it this way, although cars are allegedly better than they were, fuel consumption hasn't dropped considerably. The cars are more numerous than ever, and, although there are EVs, there are still more ICE cars than there were in the good old days when petrol came with lead in it.

I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like. I take a canal path through lush countryside, far from any cars for most of the way. This canal has an aqueduct (or is it a viaduct?) over a motorway and the contrast is incredible. You go from basically smelling flowers to air pollution and back to clean air again quite quickly, so the filth is totally noticeable. Note the cars on the motorway are going at speed, so they should be working efficiently (until a few decades ago 56 mph was what engines were optimised for regarding efficiency in the UK).

If just living in a major city then you don't get this instant switch from bad to good air. So you just don't notice it. If you could see the filth, you would prefer a swimming pool that was pissed in, it is that toxic.

If you do have to live in a city, my top tip is to find out if there are any meteorologists in town. If there are, buy a house next to where they are living. Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.

Again anecdotal, however, due to the canal and motorway experience described above, in post-industrial countries such as the UK, it is definitely the vehicles rather than any other source. Given the choice of microparticles that just get in your blood or clumps of big particles that you can eventually cough up and spit out, I would much prefer the latter. My hunch is that the legislation to improve vehicle emissions has optimised the exhaust for nanoparticles. Please prove me wrong!

It sounds terrible . What will happend in the future?! The research doesn't differentiate between seasons , and every one knows how polluted the air is in the winter when everyone is heating their home and apartament.

I look at the PM2.5 data for my city every day, and at this point (Nov) in the winter season, the only acceptable time to exercise is between 2PM-4PM after vertical mixing kicked in. Outside that duration, particulates are elevated after morning rush our, after evening rush hour, or during overnight inversion trapping evening rush hour + wood burning smoke until the next morning rush hour.

This is one the main reasons why I would prefer working remote, it is hard to utilize this time well (for exercise) if you are in the office.

At least with PM you can wear a mask, although I am still searching for the best one that works during intense exercise.

Also wanted to point out "Trump EPA moves to abandon rule that sets tough standards for deadly soot pollution"

https://apnews.com/article/epa-soot-air-pollution-trump-zeld...

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