A meta-analysis of over 50 studies found exercise, medication, and psychotherapy equally effective for mild-to-moderate depression. One trial showed a running program worked as well as antidepressants, but the runners also lost weight, lowered blood pressure, and improved heart health—benefits many psychiatric drugs actually worsen.
Well, so what is some of the evidence? You've kind of, I'd love you to go a little deep on a couple of the studies to show how important this is.
They brought together, I wanna say over 50 in a meta-analysis. And what they did was they compared exercise to medications and therapy. And they found in mild to moderate depression, there's really no difference amongst the different treatments for exercise. One of the more interesting individual trials they did was they compared running therapy to antidepressants. Again, they found a very similar antidepressant response. There were so many physical health benefits that antidepressants sometimes do the opposite to. So, in the running therapy groups, there was benefits to weight, there was benefits to blood pressure, there was benefits to waist circumference, there was benefits to your heart rate variability. And these are things that we often overlook in psychiatry, at least in our traditional sense of training. We monitor for some of these things, but we're not proactive enough because we know that antidepressants, we know that antipsychotics, they contain these metabolic side effects. And I think there is a responsibility to do something proactively to prevent these. But also if there's a treatment option like exercise that not only prevents them, but does the opposite of, of making some of these parameters better, I think it's so important.
