Officially, Timothy Church is the John S. McllHenny Endowed Chair in Health Wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. His own self-description is less grandiose: He’s an “exercise guy.” Church and his colleagues study the links between exercise [or lack of it] and various conditions, from depression to diabetes, hoping to improve how exercise is prescribed. The studies can involve dozens of researchers and budgets of $1 million or more.
Church often is cited by the national media; you might have seen his name in the controversial Time magazine cover story “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.” His complaints about the story have more to do with information that was left out, not glaring fact errors, but he’s alarmed that anyone might think exercise is useless.
Church is a former triathlete and high-school wrestler. These days, he’s the reigning state Brazilian jiujitsu champion in a “master” class, a category he’s quick to say is “an age thing, not a skills thing.”
“It’s a phenomenal all-body workout, and I just love it,” he says. “The kids think it’s funny; they want to do jiujitsu with me when I get home.”
1. Let’s talk about the infamous Time story.
If you read about him [writer John Cloud], he was once labeled the most hated man in the blogosphere [Note: “Most hated” might be a stretch, considering how many blogs are fueled by vitriol, but Cloud has been attacked over stories about gay teens and pundit Ann Coulter, to pick two examples]. He creates controversy; this is what Time magazine pays him to do. So I was a little worried even before it came out.
2. What are some of your problems with the piece?
His weird tangent about kids not needing physical activity. To me, that was both bizarre and unbelievably irresponsible. He talks about exercise being worthless for weight loss. No one in our business talks about weight loss per se. Keeping the weight off is the challenge. Exercise is absolutely critical for keeping weight off. Diet has more punch in the beginning, but over time, as you lose that weight, your metabolism decreases because you’re smaller. So your exercise calories burned become much more important. You can’t even find the words “weight maintenance” in that article. The whole thing was weird. My friend in the press nailed it. She said, “Tim, this really reads like a blog, not like a well-researched article.”
3. His main point seemed to be that if you eat junk food or get lazy after you exercise, you won’t lose weight, which seems like common sense.
People really miscalculate how many calories they’re burning. You’re on the treadmill for 45 minutes, and people are thinking they’ve just earned themselves a chocolate cake, when really they’ve earned about half a slice.
4. I wonder if the real issue isn’t the content of the story so much as the impression it might leave with people who didn’t actually read it, but maybe saw the cover or heard about it.
Having done a bazillion interviews related to it, the take-home message was “exercise is not good for you.” He will argue if you read the article, that’s not what it says. It doesn’t matter. You know damn well what people are going to take away from that cover.
5. So tell me about this big project you’re embarking on regarding exercise and the elderly.
It’s not really how long you live anymore, but how long you live well. The key is aging well, and that means avoiding disability, but we don’t have a whole lot of strategies to prevent disability.
So if you’ve got a sedentary 75-year-old, is it in their best interest to become physically active? So we’re part of the largest exercise-and-aging study ever undertaken. The total budget just for our center alone for the five years we’ll be conducting it is about $6 million. This thing would not have gotten funded without stimulus money. It’s not all stimulus funding, but it was enough to get it going. This means a lot of jobs we wouldn’t have had.
6. What do we know about the link between exercise and depression?
There’s a fair amount of studies that show people who exercise are less likely to get depression or anxiety. But it’s a whole different thing when you see if you can improve someone’s [existing] depression through exercise. We haven’t published that study yet, so I’ve got to be careful talking about that, but the bottom line is that it’s clear exercise can improve symptoms in people with clinical depression.
7. What about the work you’re doing with diabetes?
We’re going to be done with that study in about five months. We’re looking at how weightlifting compares to walking compares to both for blood-sugar control for people with diabetes. Right now, we tell individuals with diabetes to do both. There are people out there who argue they only need to be doing weightlifting, but their argument’s not based on science. When we started this, it was the first study ever to compare all three things directly.
8. At a minimum, how much exercise should a person get?
Most people appreciate that being physically active is good for you. What most people miss out on is it doesn’t take that much activity. You don’t have to train for a marathon. The goal is 30 minutes a day five days a week of walking. If you jog, you only need to get 70 minutes a week.
9. What’s more beneficial, aerobic exercise or weightlifting?
I’m a huge supporter of weightlifting, but more from a quality-of-life and healthy-aging perspective. It’s clear the aerobic stuff is where most of the bang for the buck comes from for, say, heart health or cancer risk.
10. Exercise can help ward off cancer?
It reduces the risk of breast cancer. It reduces the risk of colon cancer. It reduces the risk of dementia. It reduces the risk of pretty much anything you can name. There really is nothing out there that can improve your health and your quality of life like being physically active. And I didn’t come into this business an exercise zealot. The data kind of drove me there.
