New paper: exposure to industrialised environments reduces subsequent endurance performance in the lab

Our latest paper, "Outpaced by Industry: Industrial Environments Reduce Endurance, With Implications for Evolutionary Fitness", has been published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Physical function - the capacity to perform tasks requiring endurance or strength - has been a key determinant of survival and reproductive success throughout human evolutionary history. Yet, until now, the effect of environmental industrialisation on physical function had remained almost entirely unexplored.

In a randomised, counterbalanced crossover study at Loughborough University, 25 healthy adults completed a 90-minute exposure to either a forest or an urban environment, before undergoing a standardised laboratory cycling test to exhaustion. Time to exhaustion was significantly longer following exposure to the forest (14.6 minutes) compared with the industrialised environment (13.5 minutes), with urban exposure also worsening mood and lowering perceived exertion at the point of exhaustion.

These findings offer the first experimental evidence that brief exposure to nature can boost physical capacity, just as exposure to industrialised environments can impair it, lending further support to our Environmental Mismatch Hypothesis.

Huge thanks to former HEEP PhD student, Yvanna Todorova, who led the intensive data collection for this study, and to the full research team for their contributions.

You can read the full paper here.