“I’ll show you where they’ll be in three to five years,” he told the outlet.
Brecka is now a wellness entrepreneur. He co-founded the Ultimate Longevity Center, a chain that offers hyperbaric sessions, red light beds and IV drips. He also said he’s spent a seven-figure sum on that kind of equipment for his own two homes.
Still, he said cheap, everyday habits do more for your health than any of it. His list is sleep, unprocessed food, exercise and time with other people — and moving is one he never skips. He schedules time for it every day.
According to the Centers for Disease and Control (CDC), only one in four U.S. adults get the cardio and strength training for which federal guidelines call. Falling short shows up in medical bills and in how long people live.
Here’s what the research says — and how to get moving without spending much.
What Brecka saw in the insurance data about sitting
As Brecka described it, his job was to look for patterns in customer records that predicted who would live longer. Inactivity was a big one, and he now goes as far as comparing sitting to smoking.
Brecka’s training is in biology, not medicine. He has a biology degree from Frostburg State University in Maryland and a human biology degree from the National College of Chiropractic. But Frostburg’s alumni profile mentions that critics have questioned his credentials.
Still, the government’s own numbers back him up. The CDC says “physical inactivity contributes to one in 10 premature deaths.”
On the flip side, a 2012 study led by the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, pooled data on more than 650,000 adults. People who got the minimum recommended amount of exercise in their free time could expect to live 3.4 years longer after age 40. That’s compared with people who got none. The gap held even after the researchers accounted for things like smoking, drinking and weight.
How much inactivity adds to healthcare costs each year
In a 2015 study, researchers from the CDC and Emory University in Atlanta compared people’s exercise habits with their medical spending. Healthcare spending on inactive adults ran $1,313 a year higher than on active adults, in 2012 dollars. That’s total spending on their care, not just what they paid themselves. It also already accounts for differences in body weight.
