Worse lung function than a chain smoking 60 year old? Pretty bad!!!!
There're a lot of obese and sedentary people (office jobs) in the UK and the US.
I recommend 30 minutes per day of moderate physical actiivity and 30 minutes of intense exercise 3 times a week. It's hard at first and the sweat is not easy to cope with, but it's good for you in the long run. It helps your arteries to expand and stay that way and for your heart to build a vast network of capillaries (this is an example of safety in redundancy and finding the shortest path between two points). Ofcourse, overdoing it's not good either. The human heart has a finite number of times that it can beat in a lifetime. If you overuse it, you'll shorten your lifespan. Underuse can lead to a heart that's not efficient. Find the balance.
Ofcourse, there're other risk factors for heart disease. Exercise is not a silver bullet. Obesity is the number one factor and obese people tend to avoid physical activity. You need a healthy diet (lots of plant-based foods) and a good balanced lifestyle. Too much stress can easily ruin everything. And some people have a genetic disadvantage. Even air pollution can increase your risks of a heart attack. There're other risk factors. You have to know these things and work with your doctor to attack it where it counts.
Even modern jobs based on phyiscal activity aren't what they were 100 years ago. My grandpa worked probably twice as hard to cut trees down and transport them. He remembers using hand saws. That was brutal work! Nowadays, they don't even have to use chainsaws. They can use these big machines that cut the tree down single handedly, in addition to cutting all of its limbs. All of this reduces the physical activity of the worker and applies pressure on them to get their exercise away from work.
At the end of the day, we have to realize the human body has evolved to move. To move a lot! We have only lived in this modern lifestyle for a hundred years at most. Our body has not evolved to a lifestyle with less physical activity. This means our bodies are being pushed to their evolutionary limits. In fact, physical activity is not the only example where our evolutionary traits are being challenged. The rate of change in the past century is extraordinary. At some point, we will have to assume at least partial control of the evolutionary processes. What this means is using medicines, surgery and even genetic engineering to combat our evolutionary shortcomings. Natural evolution would easily require more time than we have.
One example of this need to combat nature is the prevalence of obesity in the modern world. In the past, we ate a lot of food and packed on the pounds to survive periods of famine. But now that we have a stable supply of food due to technology and greater knowledge, people overeat themselves to death. We're forced to turn to surgery and many other techniques to combat it. Genetic engineering is right around the corner.
And, if your heart goes out, you can always get an artificial one, but it's not as good as the original. The hope is to grow body parts from peoples own stem cells or dna, but this goal is years away.
The goal here is to keep the original whenever possible
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