'Survival of the Fittest!' Large-Scale Study Backs Classic Evolutionary Paradigm - Being Unfit Worse Than Smoking | Plus: Fit/Unfit - What are You + What Can You do About it?
Even the difference between having 'below ' vs. 'above average' fitness levels amounts to the same 1.4-fold increase in mortality risk the scientists calculated for smoking cigarettes. When I first read about the latest study from the Cleveland Clinic and that it would demonstrate that "not working out" was "worse than smoking", I expected that a press-release writer had compared the reduction in mortality risk and physical fitness, which has been observed by a new medium-scale observational study from his employer, to the hazard ratio (HR) other scientists calculated for smoking in a completely different study (or meta-analysis) for publicity reasons. However, upon closer scrutiny, it turned out that both, the hazard ratio for smoking vs. non-smoking, which is 1.41 (p < 0.001), and the hazard ratio for elite vs. low fitness, which is 5.05 (p < 0.01) and hence 3.6 times higher, were based on analyses of the same dataset - cool! Bicar...