Imagine a place where you can be thinner, where your risk of heart and lung disease is less, where you'd be just all-around healthier. There is such a place.
Let's call it Colorado. Or Nepal. Or Peru. Anyplace with mountains.
Recent studies have indicated that there are definite health benefits to living at altitude.
Start with obesity.
"We've known since the 1920s (that) if you go to really high altitudes you will lose weight," says Robert Roach, director of the Altitude Research Center in Aurora, Colo., which studies how hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, affects health and performance. "It was one of the major concerns when the British were trying to figure out how to climb Mount Everest, how to get enough calories to survive. There's been no exception to this finding. Every expedition that's gone to high altitude, people have lost weight."
Even when test subjects were placed in an altitude chamber for 40 days and allowed to eat whatever they wanted, they lost significant weight.
Because obesity can lead to a host of other problems — diabetes, heart and lung issues — keeping the weight off can only help.
Colorado is a good example.
A report released in July by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on health issues, found that Colorado had the lowest obesity rate (19.8 percent) in the U.S. It was the only state under 20 percent. It's also a healthy state, with lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and some cancers.
Roach says there are two schools of thought. Perhaps, purely by chance, a lot of active, healthy people have settled in Colorado. But there are several other states — California, Oregon, Washington — where an outdoors lifestyle is prevalent and where people are active, and those states are losing ground in the battle of the bulge.
What Colorado has that those other states don't is altitude. With an average altitude of 6,800 feet above sea level, it's the highest state in the U.S.
A study published this year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that living at higher altitude may have a protective effect on ischaemic heart disease. Researchers note that Colorado has the nation's lowest death rate from heart disease and has lower rates of lung and colon cancer.
The findings echoed a study published in the journal in 2004. Researchers studied villages in Greece and found total and coronary mortality were lower for residents of a mountainous village in comparison with residents of two lowland villages.
"If you look at people who live at high altitude around the world, incidents of most types of heart disease and stroke are much less," Roach says.
Altitude is not a panacea, of course. The risk of skin cancer is higher because ultraviolet intensity is greater at higher elevations. And the lung disease statistics may be skewed by the fact that people with lung issues may leave the state because of the thin air, which makes breathing more difficult.
But there's something there, and ongoing research could benefit those even at sea level.
"By studying healthy people and how they adjust (to hypoxia), we might be able to come up with drugs that will help (people with heart, lung and blood diseases) use oxygen more efficiently, to use less of it," Roach says. "We learn about how people at high altitude live, but we may learn things that will help others in the future. It's very exciting."
7 of 10: Of the top 10 counties in the U.S. for longevity were high-altitude counties in Colorado, with an average life span of 81.3 years, according to a study.
bhageman@tribune.com
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