Minimal elevation needed for health benefit?

hei

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How high do you need to be to get some sort of health benefit from being there? Does being at 600m do anything? 1000m? Most places higher than that in my country are either unpleasantly cold and dry or national parks, and I'm not rich enough to move to some other continent.
 

CreakyJoints

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I think it might depend on your definition of "health benefit", but Ray Peat recently pointed to this study on lung cancer risk decreasing with elevation, which might be a good starting point for reading about this kind of thing. They noted a significant decrease in incidence every 1,000m.

I remember someone actually asking him a similar question directly and I believe he answered, but sadly I can't find the quotation I'm thinking of. I'm sorry, I hope that helps a little bit.
 

Perry Staltic

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That study that correlates increased elevation with decreased cancers... uh... the vast majority of people live at low altitudes, so yeah naturally there would be higher incidences in those places. And those highly populated places would have more environmental stressors than higher elevation, rural areas would have, which is a significant confounding factor.
 

CreakyJoints

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That study that correlates increased elevation with decreased cancers... uh... the vast majority of people live at low altitudes, so yeah naturally there would be higher incidences in those places. And those highly populated places would have more environmental stressors than higher elevation, rural areas would have, which is a significant confounding factor.

That might be true, but they do their best to account for at least some of those, they even mention it briefly in the abstract:

"as a predictor of lung cancer incidence, elevation was second only to smoking prevalence in terms of significance and effect size. Furthermore, no evidence of ecological fallacy or of confounding arising from evaluated factors was detected: the lung cancer association was robust to varying regression models, county stratification, and population subgrouping; additionally seven environmental correlates of elevation, such as exposure to sunlight and fine particulate matter, could not capture the association"

I think it's still worth looking through - it resounds with Ray Peat's general ideas about CO2 even though it doesn't make any mention of it directly. At any rate, it was referenced in one of the recent newsletters and I thought the author of this thread might be interested since it specifically discusses actual altitudes.
 

rr1

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How high do you need to be to get some sort of health benefit from being there? Does being at 600m do anything? 1000m? Most places higher than that in my country are either unpleasantly cold and dry or national parks, and I'm not rich enough to move to some other continent.
Ray has mentioned the number 10,000 a lot. But I've also heard him say 8,000, 9,000 or 10,000 ft. So I would say 8,000ft is minimum for these short term noticeable benefits.

I have a trip planned to Peru around the middle of this year, starting in Arequipa and moving to Cusco where my friend has an airbnb. Cusco is around 11,000 feet, home of machu picchu.

Having access to a good diet is just as important as the altitude if you want to see any benefits.
 
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Vajra

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Ray has mentioned the number 10,000 a lot. But I've also heard him say 8,000, 9,000 or 10,000 ft. So I would say 8,000ft is minimum for these short term noticeable benefits.
Really? I've been looking to see what the optimal or maximum elevation is.

View: https://youtu.be/78NLoF2lVEw?t=5742
Here haidut said that much over >6000 is probably excessive, but I think he only means that it would suggest you're probably in a cold climate that otherwise isn't very optimal
 

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