Access to a health club had a comparatively puny influence

Saturday, July 24th, 2021

All sixteen human studies conducted as of the writing of The Sports Gene had found a large contribution of heredity to the amount of voluntary physical activity that people undertake, David Epstein reports:

A 2006 Swedish study of 13,000 pairs of fraternal and identical twins — fraternal twins share half their genes on average, while identical twins essentially share them all — reported that the physical activity levels of identical twins were twice as likely to be similar as those of fraternal twins.

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But another, smaller study of twin pairs that used accelerometers to measure physical activity directly found the same difference between fraternal and identical twin pairs.

The largest study, of 37,051 twin pairs from six European countries and Australia, concluded that about half to three quarters of the variation in the amount of exercise people undertook was attributable to their genetic inheritance, while unique environmental factors, like access to a health club, had a comparatively puny influence.

It is entirely clear that the dopamine system responds to physical activity. This is one reason that exercise can be used as part of treatment for depression and as a method to slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease, an illness that involves the destruction of brain cells that make dopamine. And there is evidence that the reverse is true as well, that physical activity levels respond to the dopamine system.

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