Study on strength and mental illness.

[ChessGuy]

http://www.stonehearthnewsletters.co...mental-health/

[Dastardly]

Full Paper;

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti.../bmj.e7279.pdf

[spacediver]

just skimmed it - thx for the fulltext link dastardly.

there was a brief discussion on the possiblity of psychosocial factors, but they could have explored some more uninteresting possibilities, such as:

stronger kids may be more attractive and therefore have an extra degree of protection against "unhappiness".

I also found the stats a bit weird - they claim that risk of all causes of death was reduced monotonically from the 1st to 4th tenths of strength, but then plateaued. I don't see this - I see a monotonic reduction from 1st to 4th and then a lot of noise from 5th to 10th. And where exactly are the inferential statistics (I don't see a single p value)?

That said, assuming their stats and quantitative claims are sound, the link is very intriguing, regardless of the causal story, and the sample size is ridiculous (over 1 million subjects!!!!)

[tomskarda]

Considering the relationship between screwedup brain chemistry, hormone profiles and mental illness it doesn't surprise me.

I've read pieces of some articles that showed a paleo-type diet helping with reltively untreatable conditions like OCD, hording, etc.

Considering that most people who follow a paelo type diet also do resistance training, I think there may very well be some synergy here for the prevention/treatment of these type conditions.

[Mainstream]

Because it only looked at men. Lack of strength in men might hurt self esteem and have nothing to do with strength per se. In fact this study seems to confirm that with the few women it does test where they show no relationship between decreased strength and mortality.