Person Wonders How People Unknowingly Altered Their Bodies For The Worse, Receives 31 Responses

The original thread, which appeared in the AskReddit community 10 days ago, already has 12K upvotes so far, and over 8.5K comments with folks giving their ideas on what permanently alters one's body without them even realizing. Among the listed factors are both very common ones, like stress, lack of sleep or poor nutrition, and quite unexpected ones - such that we would hardly have suspected them, at least before reading this selection.

For example, sports. Sports are traditionally considered an opportunity to improve your health, strengthen your body - but in the list of opinions given here, sports ranks high. So what’s the reason? Most likely, there are two factors. The first is that sports at a professional or semi-professional level are really fraught with serious health problems.

Let's take football, for example. A large-scale study conducted by American universities in 2024 showed that out of about 2 thousand former NFL players, about a third believe they have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), associated with repeated head trauma, and which in modern medicine can, unfortunately, only be confirmed through a postmortem exam of the brain.

And the entire evolution of football helmets, which today are real works of engineering art, still has not able to cope with this problem. And this is not to mention the countless injuries to other parts of the body that not only football players, but also representatives of other sports face.

The second factor associated with sports is that even people who are not professionally involved in physical activity often neglect the advice of doctors and trainers when drawing up a plan for their training. As a result, for example, a person with a chronically sore back or knees can do numerous barbell lifts. With all the ensuing consequences.

A detailed medical examination before starting to exercise could help - but not all people are ready to do this. Unfortunately...

By and large, each of the problems listed here could be discussed for hours, giving one evident example after another, but the main thing here is that a person should treat their health more responsibly from the very beginning. In the end, we can change almost anything in our lives, but the body in which we came into this world remains with us until the very end.

In fact, this is the only non-renewable resource that is at our disposal, so all we can do is try to use this resource as rationally as possible. Not to the detriment of all the joys of life, of course, but also not to waste our health thoughtlessly and on trifles.

In any case, we’re almost sure that this selection will be useful for you. So please feel free to scroll and read it to the very end, every word and every story cited here. Who knows, maybe this list will really help you avoid some serious health problems in the future? After all, learning from someone else's experience can be helpful and wholesome.