Regular exercise? Few boomers get it

February 5, 2013, 6:57 PM ET

Baby boomers hike the Appalachian Trail. They bike 25 miles to the office, each way, uphill. They run marathons (until they get bored and start running ultra-marathons). And even those who don’t pursue such feats of fitness tend to assume, with a mixture of envy and guilt, that many of their peers are doing so. All of which led Dana King, a professor of medicine and family-practice doctor at the University of West Virginia, to ask a relatively obvious question: If today’s boomers are the most fitness-obsessed 40-, 50- and 60-somethings ever, how come so many of them are beset with chronic health problems?

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How your ancestors kept the weight off.

King and his colleagues dug into a database of federal health surveys that let them compare the current health status of people born between 1946 and 1964 with the health of people who were in that same age range 20 years ago. The team’s results appeared this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine (subscription required to view the full report), and they’re…deflating. Today’s middle-agers are less likely than their predecessors to have emphysema or heart disease, thanks in part to the declining popularity of smoking. But baby boomers have noticeably higher rates of diabetes, obesity and high-blood pressure, and they’re also more likely to need a cane or walker to get around. These health problems haven’t dented scientists’ projections of boomers’ life-expectancy, but they do bode ill for their quality of life—and their financial health—down the road.

King and his co-authors don’t explain what accounts for the boomer generation’s poorer health stats; it’s certainly possible that improvements in diagnostic techniques might account for some of the increase in hypertension and diabetes, for example. (It’s also possible that people are answering more honestly today than they did two decades ago.) But the team did notice one key intergenerational difference. “About half of people 20 years ago said they exercised regularly, which meant three times a week,” King explained to NPR’s Rob Stein this week, “and that rate now is only about 18 percent…That’s an astonishing change in just one generation.” Not to mention an affront to the self-image of a health-conscious demographic group.

Are you exercising as much as you think you should? What factors are encouraging you, or stopping you?

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