Health
HEALTH FEATURE
Dying Breaths
It is ironic that your pursuit of a healthy lifestyle can be counter-productive. But the explanation is simple: When you’re running, cycling, or shooting hoops, you breathe in more air. Bad air, included.
By Mike Diez, Additional Reporting by John Brant
Three times a week for the past two years, I have been unwittingly poisoning myself. Each morning I have been working out in a gym along EDSA, in Quezon City. Without air-conditioning, the ventilation comes from opened windows, facing one of the busiest streets of Metro Manila. I fancied myself a hardcore weightlifter, thinking this is how it should be done. No frills, man. The day comes when, after a relatively intense workout, it felt like my head was spinning. I was able to muster enough strength to make it home and, unable to cope with the vertigo, I took a nap. Later on my doctor would tell me that I might’ve had a mild heart attack.
I consider myself a relatively healthy guy. I quit smoking a long time ago. I watch my liquor intake. I eat all the right foods. I sleep at sensible hours.
I look outside my window.
It’s mid-afternoon and a thick black cloud hangs over the metro, filling a million lungs with a witch’s brew of ozone, carbon monoxide, microscopic particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, lead, and other pollutants. And, “although the lungs are the ones primarily affected by pollution, our whole system are interconnected,” says cardiologist Romeo Meriño, MD. “Once the particulates are in your blood, it starts to affect all the organs in your body, your heart included.” His words confirmed what my doctor told me then, that I could’ve suffered a mild stroke.
It all seems common-sensical; you see the polluted air, you stay indoors. And yet here’s another sensible thought: Vigorous outdoor exercises equals a healthy body. So how do you reconcile these schools of thought? We set out to find answers.
It is ironic that your pursuit of a healthy lifestyle can be counter-productive. But the explanation is simple: When you’re running, cycling, or shooting hoops, you breathe in more air. Bad air, included.
A sedentary person inhales approximately 15,000 liters of air per day, or 6-10 liters per minute. When you exercise, you draw in 60-150 liters per minute. That’s 10-15 times more pollution that’s being sucked deep into your lungs whenever you try to beat the clock at 8:30 AM when you go to work. The numbers grow more harrowing, because you breathe primarily through your mouth during exercise. As I prove my masculine mettle in that gym along the highway, I’m bypassing my body’s remarkably effective air-filtering system: the nasal passages. Mucus traps particulates, and tiny, waving, hairlike structures called cilia push the old mucus up and out of the body. The triple whammy of breathing fast, deeply, and through the mouth makes my regular workouts—and perhaps yours—an ozone/particulate/carbon monoxide orgy.
Eventually, our bodies defend themselves against air pollution by breathing less. Air passages tighten, and breathing becomes difficult. Our exercising bodies are ensnared in a dilemma: While working furiously to process more air to feed oxygen-hungry muscles, they simultaneously strive to protect us from that air. Our pulmonary and cardiovascular systems strain like air-conditioners in an extended heatwave and eventually, inevitably break down. Early symptoms often include wheezing, coughing, a scratchy throat, headache, chest pains and watery eyes. Other longer-term effects are considerably more dire, as my would-be heart attack.
In Scotland, for instance, researchers studied 30 healthy men cycling on exercise bikes while exposed to diluted diesel exhaust. After an hour’s exposure to the fumes, the cyclists developed constricted blood vessels and showed reduction in tPA, an enzyme that breaks down clots in the heart. In another study, 17 competitive cyclists were exposed to varying levels of ozone while exercising; their endurance decreased by approximately 30 percent, and their lung function by 22 percent.
Research conducted in Finland shows an even clearer connection between dirty air and heart attack risk. Every two weeks over a six-month period, scientists monitored 45 volunteers as they exercised in simulated dirty air conditions. Results linked both fine-particle pollution (the emissions out of smokestacks) and ultra-fine particles (the invisible emissions from motor vehicles) with a threefold increase in the risk of ischemia, a potentially lethal shortage of oxygen reaching the heart muscle.
» Health archive
Men's Health Philippines - October 2006 Issue
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