Can Living At A Higher Altitude Help You To Lose Weight?

altitude lose weightWhen comparing ourselves to our ancestors we’ll always look advanced. It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming we know all there is to know. The stark reality is that we don’t and our knowledge, though constantly expanding and certainly more advanced now than ever before, is small in a vast universe. Even the things we know about medicine and ourselves are constantly being shown to be untrue or not quite so accurate. It’s through this constant learning curve that we advance as people.

We don’t fully understand weight gain and weight loss. There’s a good proportion of it that’s relatively simple and we’ve got that understanding fairly solid. What we don’t have quite as firm an understanding of are some of the reasons that certain people lose weight easier than others. Some parts of the world are statistically thinner than other parts. These places have the same level of wealth and amenities, so why does one have a fatter population than another?

A theory which is currently being examined by researchers in the USA is that altitude may have something to do with it. People who live their lives at a higher altitude relative to sea level are less likely to be overweight or obese than those who live closer to sea level. In terms of exercise this might be because certain areas are simply steeper but the researchers factored this in. People who lived in New York which is just 500m above sea level were five times as likely to be obese as those who lived in Denver (Colorado) which is over 3,000m above sea level. Obviously both of these places are in the USA so it’s not an issue of wealth or lifestyle. Researchers will look into this further in the coming months but it could well be that to lose weight easier, you should move somewhere higher up!

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