"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study."<p>People are taking this garbage seriously?  Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks.  Ya don't say.  Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation?<p>The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention.  You can't simply survey runners.  You have to pick people and make them run.  I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this.<p>Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold.  Pro athletes are not long lived.