Krugman: Trump Believes Exercise 'Depletes Finite Reserves Of Precious Bodily Fluids'

...Trump reportedly disdains exercise of any kind except golf. He believes that raising a sweat depletes the finite reserves of precious bodily fluids, I mean energy, that a person is born with, and should therefore be avoided.

Many years of acting on this belief may or may not explain the weird and embarrassing scene at the G-7 summit in Taormina, in which six of the advanced world’s leaders strolled together a few hundred yards through the historic city, but Trump followed behind, driven in an electric golf cart.

Other than golf, [Trump] considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.

Vaanholt's study was designed to test the rate-of-living theory among individuals of one species—in this case, mice.

For their experiment, Vaanholt and her team followed two groups of mice through their entire lives. One group's environment was kept at 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), and the other group's at 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). The colder group had to expend more energy to maintain body temperature, and according to the rate-of-living theory, should therefore die sooner than the warm group.

But that's not what happened.

"Despite a 48 percent increase in overall daily energy expenditure and a 64 percent increase in mass-specific energy expenditure throughout adult life, mice in the cold lived just as long on average as mice in warm temperatures," the authors write. "These results strengthen existing doubts about the rate-or-living theory."

The finding is consistent with an experiment Vaanholt conducted previously. That experiment manipulated metabolism in mice through exercise rather than temperature. Mice that expended more energy over a lifetime through exercise had the same lifespan as those that did not exercise.