by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
A daily walk isn’t sexy in terms of attracting eyeballs in a hyper-competitive culture, but it works.
Our culture glorifies competition and extremes in every sphere. This plays out in fitness, which has been folded into extreme sports, as if fitness is by its very nature a competition in which the “winner” is more fit than everyone else.
Fitness is just fitness. Yes, we can improve or backslide, but it isn’t a competition. Two recent articles in Scientific American (June 2025 issue) add to the already-immense pile of studies revealing the benefits of daily moderate exercise.
Before we consider the studies, we must first run them through a junk science filter.
The proliferation of junk science is problematic, but fortunately it’s not that difficult to discern red flags. Junk science presents a superficial envelope of science that’s been gamed to reach a conclusion that serves specific financial / career interests. Junk science has a number of shared markers: