Enviro health concerns for urban athletes

The New York Times seems to have a lot of cool articles these days on public health. Maybe all papers do that, but the other two I read a lot (WaPo and Strib) don't really come close to the Times in this type of journalism. Anyhoo, I just read this NYT article on how athletes in urban areas are more adversely affected by an area's air pollution than sedentary urbanites. Not a surprise by any means, but it is becoming confirmed by science and medicine, and is yet another sign that our careless disregard for how our actions impact our environment is causing us harm. So get this, now we can work out in a warmer city AND kills our lungs and hearts in the process! Rad!

Kenneth Rundell, the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., said, “Athletes typically take in 10 to 20 times as much air,” and thus pollutants, with every breath as sedentary people do.

Here is the skinny on what is going on:

...Today most experts agree that, as Dr. Lippmann said, the “greatest overall public health impact” of air pollution comes from fine particulates, which can be seen only with an electron microscope.



They are ubiquitous. Cars, trucks, and diesel buses — the main culprits in the creation of particle pollution — spew untold millions of the microscopic pollutants into the air daily. Exercisers should take precautions against particles, experts said, by not exerting themselves near traffic, or, if they must use a path next to a highway, staying a few hundred yards away from vehicles.



Particles can sail past nasal hairs, the body’s first line of defense, and settle deep in athletes’ lungs. Some remain there, causing irritation and inflammation. Others, so tiny they can bypass various bodily defenses, migrate into the bloodstream. “Blood vessels do not like those particulates,” said David Newby, a cardiology professor at the University of Edinburgh.



Dr. Newby has seen, in action, the effects of those particles on active people. In 2005, he and his colleagues had 30 healthy volunteers ride exercise bikes inside a laboratory for 30 minutes, while breathing piped-in diesel exhaust at levels approximately those along a city highway at rush hour.



Afterward, the researchers did a “kind of stress test of the blood vessels” in the participants’ forearms, Dr. Newby said, and found that the vessels were abnormally dilated, meaning blood and oxygen could not flow easily to the muscles. At the same time, levels of tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, a naturally-occurring protein that dissolves blood clots, had fallen.

But of course, my dear Domestiques, the answer is not to stop working out just because you live in a city... the answer is that we should ALL BIKE TO WORK!

In the calculus of health concerns, “Breathing air pollution is not nearly as bad as smoking,” Dr. Lippmann said.



“The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart,” Dr. Newby said. With proper care, he said, outdoor exercise does not have to be harmful — and, done en masse, could even ease pollution.



“I ride my bike back and forth to work every day,” he said. “If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?”