Maybe not. If 1,850 older Taiwanese are any indication, you could be improving your odds of a long life.

According to a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the 17 percent of study participants who said they shopped daily “were 27 percent less likely to die.” (Curiously, frequent male shoppers (28 percent) were less likely to die than frequent females (23 percent). According to the study’s authors, frequent shopping may have less to do with actually acquiring things than with being around people and getting out and exercising. Said the authors: “Shopping captures several dimensions of personal well-being, health and security, as well as contributing to the community’s cohesiveness and economy, and may represent or actually confer increased longevity.”

For the record, the majority of shopping being done by the 1,850 older Taiwanese studied wasn’t for $105 sneakers or $9,200 bikes — it was for food. But the point remains: If you think new shoes or wheels will make a difference, go for it. It won’t kill you.

Quite the contrary.

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A study of the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. finds the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area is among the 10 “youngest” places in the country. The study, released today, looked at 52 factors and ranked the Triangle No. 8 nationally, just below No. 7 San Diego and just above No. 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul, in terms of how old we really are.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our average annual age is 46.8. According to the study by RealAge.com, we’re more like 45.9.

The study was culled from questionnaires RealAge collects at its Web site. A thousand surveys for each of the 50 areas was randomly selected from questionnaires submitted over the past three years, according to RealAge’s chief medical officer, Dr. Keith Roach. RealAge says 27 million people have filled out the questionnaire since its introduction in 1999. The questionnaire is one of several tools offered by health Web site.

The Triangle’s ranking comes as a bit of a surprise, especially considering the five key health factors that accounted for 50 percent of a city’s “real age”: cholesterol, smoking, blood pressure, diabetes and weight. Located in a state that tips the scales when it comes to obesity (North Carolina ranked 10th in the nation in adult obesity according to a study last year) and is in the heart of tobacco country, Triangle residents nevertheless manage to live younger than their years.

Curiously, again considering the state’s obesity standing, the Triangle ranked as the nation’s youngest area in terms of cholesterol levels.

“Honestly, I was surprised at that,” Roach said Monday from New York. “But the ranking took into account good and bad cholesterol, and cholesterol can be affected by good genes and whether people are taking their medications for it.”

The Triangle also got good grades for drinking responsibly — at least among its men, who ranked sixth nationally. The Triangle’s women did not crack their gender’s top 10 list.

A curiosity on the subject of alcohol: Salt Lake City, which ranked as the nation’s youngest city overall, didn’t break the top 10 in responsible alcohol use.

“An average of one glass a day for men and a half a glass for women can lower your mortality rate,” Roach explained. It’s when you get to two drinks a day or more that alcohol negatively affects your lifespan. And four drinks or more at one time? “That’s considered binge drinking and your risk of accidental death goes sky high,” said Roach. Roach said Salt Lake City’s poor showing was based on the fact that people either drink too little or way too much.

We also sleep well in the Triangle In fact, only people who sleep better are in Austin and New York, the city that allegedly doesn’t sleep.

On smoking, another one of the study’s Big Five, the Triangle ranked 16th. “It was one of the few cities in the Southeast with a good score,” said Roach.

One area the Triangle needs to keep an eye on: hypertension. The Triangle ranked 31st nationally, prompting Roach to suggest our public health officials might want to step up free blood pressure tests.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, the Charlotte area ranked 34th, with residents there a tenth of a year younger than their calendar age, while the Triad — Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Highpoint — ranked as the nation’s second “oldest” area, with residents there exhibiting bodies a half year older than their calendar age.

Roach said he filtered through 300 medical journals and sources ranging from Harvard Medical School to the U.S. Census Bureau to determine criteria for the study. Some insight into four of the categories used.

• Aspirin use. We consume a ton of aspirin every year in this country — 16 tons, actually, according to Roach. It’s regular consumption by men over 45 and women over 55 is generally beneficial, he said. Regular consumption by younger users “can do more harm than good,” resulting in points off.
• Marital status. “This one’s complex,” said Roach. “Happily married is the best. Unhappily married is worse than divorced. Living alone is bad, especially for men.” Simply having more social interaction reduces the four forms of risk considered in the survey: cardiovascular (heart and stroke), cancers, accidents “and all others, including diabetes, infectious diseases and my favorite, getting hit by a meteor.”
• Income. This category gave the highest rankings to the cities where it’s costliest to live: 1. San Francisco bay area, 2. Washington-Baltimore, 3. New York. Roach conceded that the incomes there are obviously higher because of the cost of living, and that disposable income would have been a better tool, but they weren’t able to gather that information.
• Employment: Another complicated area, said Roach. “Fully employed or being a student is good, being unemployed is bad. Having two jobs is bad, and being part time when want to be full time is almost as bad as unemployed.”

For more information on the study, visit RealAge.com.

Photo: Jack Benny was forever 39. Can Trianglites stay forever 45.9?

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A study from San Diego State University has found that kids who play softball, baseball or soccer still don’t get their daily recommended allotment of exercise. The government says kids should get at least an hour of good, hard exercise a day; kids in these sports only get about 45 minutes, on average. Of the softball players studied only 2 percent — mostly pitchers and catchers (the only players involved in every play), I’m guessing — got in their 60 minutes.

Why aren’t organized sports cutting it?

Too much standing around waiting to do drills, for one. Channeling back to my days as a Titan in the Young American Football League, it drove us nuts all the standing around and waiting our turn at shoulder pad-smacking fun. Certainly, drills to hone skills are important. But do the drills once or twice, then practice them in a scrimmage. They’re kids: They came to play.

While this next finding is hardly revealing, it’s worth repeating. According to a study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, kids 6 to 11 get twice as much exercise as kids 12 to 15. Kids 16 to 19 are even less active. The reason? The 6- to 11-year-olds are in grade school, and while gym class has been relegated to once a week, elementary kids still have recess to get their yee-haws out. Once they get to middle school and high school, they’re chained to a desk.

Organized sports are great. They encourage activity and they’re fun, or should be. But they may not be enough. Especially for middle and high schoolers.

For more on the studies, go here.

And that hour a day is important because … People who exercise a lot when they’re young have a better chance of avoiding the dread middle-age spread. That according to a study of 3,554 men and women aged 18 to 30. The study followed the group over 20 years and found that the men who stayed more active — meaning they met the minimum 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise prescribed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — ended up gaining 5.7 pounds less than their couch-embracing counterparts, while the active women gained 13.4 fewer pounds. Much of that benefit was seen in the all-important mid-section, where the men’s waistbands expanded 1.2 inches less, the women’s 1.5 inches less.

Staying active at a younger age may be more important for women, who tend to gain weight during menopause. “My comment,” Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Big Apple told the online NIH news service MedlinePlus, “is to train for menopause like you’d train for a marathon. If you start exercising before menopause hits and do that for 20 years, you don’t have to gain weight.

“Health,” she adds, “isn’t about flipping a switch. It’s about maintaining a lifestyle.”

For more on the study, go here.

Another reason young women should be active … That lack of a middle-age pooch could spare them the agony of osteoporosis later on, according to a study presented at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting. This study analyzed 50 premenopausal women with a mean BMI of 30 (anyone with a BMI of 30 or greater is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control). The women underwent an MR spectroscopy exam to evaluate the bone marrow fat of the fourth vertebra. The bone mineral density of that vertebra was then determined via quantitative computed tomography. Finding: the women with more visceral fat — fat located deep under muscle tissue in the abdominal cavity — also exhibited decreased bone density.

“Our results show that having a lot of belly fat is more detrimental to bone health than having more superficial fat, or fat around the hips,” said Dr. Miriam A. Bredella, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

For more on the study, go here.

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Why, yes, it turns out. There is.

It may be no-duh research, but it demands repeating because so many people still, apparently, aren’t making the connection. According to a study of 47 of the largest U.S. cities, all 50 states, and 13 other countries, there is indeed a correlation between the amount of walking and cycling we do and how much we weigh. The study found the highest levels of walking and cycling in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain, which also happened to have the sveltest citizens. The most sedentary countries: Australia, Canada and, of course, us — as in the United States.

The study’s lead author, John Pucher, a professor studying transportation issues at Rutgers University, said in a release from the Center for Advancing Health: “As obvious as it is, it’s shocking that Americans don’t want to do anything about it. It’s amazing how unconcerned most Americans are about this.” (The study appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Read more about it here.)

Amazing and dangerous in new ways that we’re discovering daily. In addition to the staggering burden on our health care system — dealing with obesity-related issues costs the nation about $147 billion a year — our slovenly habits are weakening our armed forces as increasingly flabby recruits report for duty.

Now, some of you may point to your last family reunion — Aunt Edna in her mumu waddling about making sure everyone has peach cobbler, Uncle Ralph beached on his chaise lounge — and say, “But I’m genetically predisposed!”

Good news for you comes from another study that found that exercise can reduce a person’s genetic predisposition to obesity by 40 percent. Researchers in the epidemiology unit of Cambridge University’s Medical Research Council looked at 20,430 people, the majority of whom had inherited 10 to 13 genetic variants known to increase the risk of obesity (some had more than 15, some fewer than six). Each additional variant increased the risk of obesity by 1.1-fold. However, the risk was 40 percent lower among the more active members of the study. So yes, you may face additional challenges in keeping your weight down if your people tend to be big. But you can battle your genes by going for a walk or taking a spin.

Just ask the folks in Switzerland, the Netherlands and in Spain.

Photo: Move!

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Well … .

A curious finding comes out of a four-year study of 212 kids at 54 schools in the town of Plymouth, U.K. This latest finding from the 11-year-old EarlyBird Diabetes Study being conducted by the Peninsula Medical School finds that physical activity may not play much — or any — role in helping kids lose weight. The finding is based on a trial showing that when kids with weight issues were exposed to more physical activity, they only lost about 3 ounces each. The study did find that overweight kids tend to exercise less. Researchers were left to conclude that “early feeding errors” — hefty portions, calorie-dense snacks and sugary drinks — play a much more significant role in childhood obesity.

This finding was presaged by an earlier EarlyBird report that the one hour of moderate physical activity recommended each day for kids may not be enough to keep their weight down. Following that report, researchers were quick to note that while physical activity wasn’t found to reduce weight, “regular exercise improved metabolic health even without improving BMI.”

Kids in the study who met the recommended minimum — 42 percent of boys and just 11 percent of girls — did register better marks for blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides and insulin resistance, a precursor to type 2 diabetes later in life. Moral: staying active is good for you, kids, even it doesn’t necessarily help you lose weight.

(I’m especially interested in the relationship between physical activity and weight in childhood. As a kid, I was always moving — football, basketball, baseball, riding the bike to far off places that would have horrified my parents had they known. Yet until I got into what was then called junior high, I was what was politely referred to in the day as “stocky.” And I ate relatively well, save for a Pop Tart problem that continues to this day.)

So, as your kids face the end of a presumably active summer and a return to the sedentary ways of school, should you ease up on the fight to make your school a more active place?

Not hardly, according to another report, this one from Cochrane Researchers, which reviewed 26 studies of programs promoting physical activity at schools in Australia, South America, Europe and North America. Their findings concurred with the EarlyBird study, noting that the programs didn’t seem to have much impact on weight. But the studies did find that the programs improved the kids blood cholesterol levels as well as fitness as measured by lung capacity. Further, the programs likely will play a role in shaping more active, healthier lifestyles that should carry over into adulthood.

Another reason for kids to stay active, according to yet another study: Kids who are obese increase their risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and type 2 diabetes among adolescents has now been linked with brain abnormalities and diminished cognitive performance. This according to a just-published study by the New York University Langone Medical Center, which detected the aforementioned problems via MRI scans. Such problems were previously observed in adults with type 2 diabetes, but it was assumed the condition was a result of vascular disease. The MRI results detected an uptick in white matter in the brain, believed to be caused by type 2 diabetes.

Yet another recent study suggests that kids may not be the only ones for whom losing weight is a challenge despite being more physically active. An Indiana University study of 12,000 people ages 20 to 64 found that white women tended to lose more weight than men or women of other ethnic backgrounds when meeting minimum national guidelines for physical activity. Researchers say that people with more LTPA — leisure-time physical activity — have an easier time losing weight, and speculate that the white women in the study likely had more LTPA than the other groups.

Which I’m sure has a number of women in that demographic, especially the ones with children, gagging. And not because kids tend to gobble up whatever LTPA moms of any stripe might have. Rather, it’s because kids are bad for your health.

It’s true. I read it here.

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