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Scientists Find Physically Demanding Jobs Are Linked To Greater Risk of Early Death (metro.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Metro: Researchers in the Netherlands claim that a "physical activity paradox" exists, where exercise may only be good for you if it's done outside of your job. Manual laborers may be physically active all day but that doesn't actually help them. In fact, the research claims that it might actually increase their risk of dying early. "While we know leisure-time physical activity is good for you, we found that occupational physical activity has an 18% increased risk of early mortality for men," says Pieter Coenen, public health researcher at UV University medical centre in Amsterdam. "These men are dying earlier than those who are not physically active in their occupation."
He says that it's all down to the type of exercise you do in your spare time, versus occupational physical activity. When you choose to exercise, you can take rest periods when you want -- something that often may not be available to you if you're working on a building site (for example). The research combined results from 17 studies, dated between 1960 and 2010 -- looking at data on almost 200,000 people. The study has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
He says that it's all down to the type of exercise you do in your spare time, versus occupational physical activity. When you choose to exercise, you can take rest periods when you want -- something that often may not be available to you if you're working on a building site (for example). The research combined results from 17 studies, dated between 1960 and 2010 -- looking at data on almost 200,000 people. The study has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Correlation isn't causation. Many physically demanding jobs (fireman, mechanic, building trades) involve more exposure to toxic chemicals than other jobs.
Exactly.
Not to mention the fact that many outside/active jobs are held by lower socio-economic groups, who also tend to die earlier for a wide range of reasons.
I should check, but do they even adjust for people who die BECAUSE of the job? such jobs hold a much higher rate of job based death, which would
skew the figures significantly.
Plus, such people tend to be involved in more risky passtimes as well.
There would seem to be SO many other factors immediately available, that caliming some mystical difference in the value of the associated exercise
would be a little... odd perhaps?
But, ah, here we go.
Journal of Sports Medicine, basically claiming that sports exercise is good, and other exercise is bad.
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT.
Those who exercise heavily, such as lots of running and weight lifting, even as just a hobby, also tend to die early.
There's a sweet spot in the middle that is the ideal.
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It is not the job that places workers under threat, in is the work environment. You can do the same job in different environments and the threat of injury will be much greater in one than the other. So maintenance in an existing building, in a controlled environment with low risk from the activity of other employers versus similar work on a building site, with high risk from other employees. Plenty of ways to die on a building site, a slip or trip or stumble goes from being an ouch in the office to death and dismemberment on the building site because of exposed risks.
We all know the hardest work, produces the shittiest pay and only arseholes lie about it, the reason why, sheer unadulterated greed, government corruption, leaving those with lower IQs exposed to much greater risks for much less pay basically because the people who set it up that way are a pack of cunts.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I seem to remember him writing about this and how when he was a day laboring he drank hard to deal with the pain from getting beat up. Maybe I'm mixing up my American writers, but the point is this is hardly new information.
It's a problem now because:
a. We have the tech to keep these people alive past 55 if we want.
b. Except for a few genetic freaks they can't work much past 55 but our retirement age is 67.
c. We know we have the tech and if we don't use it we know we're letting them die 10-20 years younger.
Doctors have been giving these folks phony disability papers because while they can technically function enough to work they're so much less productive nobody wants to hire them and they quiet frankly shouldn't be working in the shape their in. Even if they get jobs they're likely to hurt themselves and/or the people around them. But America being a "If you don't work you don't eat" kind of country there's not a lot of options. Thing is that's not gonna last. Sooner or later folks'll notice them "cheating" the system and come down on them (and their doctors) like a ton of bricks.
The right thing to do is to recognize they've given 20-30 years of service to our civilization and take care of them, but try explaining that to the "Taxes are theft" wing of the right.
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Men do dangerous jobs. Men die doing dangerous jobs. Mining, construction, military. Men have higher rates of suicide, depression, alcoholism and smoking.
So lets talk about this disparity when women start doing dangerous jobs.
For now, lets file the whole "Exercise may only be beneficial when it’s done outside your job" into the "dubious" section and remember that when we were primates we moved around so much that we started walking on two legs.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Manual laborers will be classed as 1099'er now to get out the workers comp and under gop health bill will be the next pre existing condition
I note that, in this study, they did attempt to control for age, smoker or non and socio-economic factors, but there is no mention of controlling for level of risk inherent in those jobs. A better follow up study would take that same data set and control for established accident rates within each occupation. I believe that once you control for the accident rate the plumber/electrician/contractor fields have, the difference in life expectancy will shrink or even disappear altogether.
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It seems like an important detail missing from the article is what the causes of death are that increase for the more physically active jobs. Are they dying more from natural causes, or accidents or something else?
An obvious hypothesis for a potential cause of early death would be if the higher physical activity jobs had much higher accident rates, since a lot of the jobs that come to mind involving a lot of physical activity have more obvious workplace dangers than someone working at a desk job. For example, it seems a lot more likely for a construction worker or a roof cleaner to fall to their death than it would for a programmer, and the path of causation would be due to the particular type of physical activity rather than the job being more physically active.
This study seems to be really focused on the cardiovascular effects, but it seems like there could be lots of potentials for causation beyond the one they are focused on, and it's not obvious what their controls were. The generalized increased risk of mortality numbers seem like they may be less informative than focusing on more specific numbers for particular health risks and causes of death, though the overall numbers are useful for life insurance underwriters.
Correlation isn't causation.
Absolutely true but if you RTFA (I know that's not expected!) right at the end they suggest a reason which is that the jobs they looked at require 8 hours of continuous activity vs. the 0.5 hours or so of typical leisure activity. Apparently, "continuous activity works to actually inhibit our cardiovascular system, not improve it" according to the article. Of course, this possible cause will require more data to establish.
Doh!
A quote from Homer Simpson.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
might not be good for a worker who is "fit" and "outside" all day...
Wondering around all day fixing pipes that leak toxic chemicals might not be good all day.
Teaching wealthy people how to surf, climb a mountain, ride a horse would rank as?
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... are dangerous.
This scientific insight was brought to you by the Captain Obvious research institute.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Let us state this simple. Dealing with reality leads to real consequences. This is why violence works and why people who do physical jobs die earlier.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
The university in question is the "Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam" or "VU Amsterdam", so not "UV" as the summary now says. Specifically it's the "VU University Medical Center" (https://www.vumc.com/).
From the abstract :
They directly state that they have observed "association".
They are only suggesting that physical activity guideline should take into account leisure vs. occupation.
Plus, the hypothesis evoked here on /. (exposure to toxic chemimcals) and the hypothesis from the summary (more trivially, less rest whenever wanted) both boil down to "in occupation, the physical exercie cannot be done while removing negatively implacting factors, unlike when doing it as a leisure".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Correlation isn't causation.
Not always but it certainly can be. If two things correlate strongly enough in many cases there is a causal relationship there too. You never have a causal relationship without a correlation as well. Smoking both correlates with and causes cancer. Correlation CAN indicate causation - just not always and the correlation is typically the evidence we see first. It's an indicator that further study is possibly warranted to see if a causal relationship exists. We knew there was a correlation between smoking and cancer which led us to the research to determine that yes indeed there was a causal relationship there. Causation always is correlation but correlation isn't always causation.
Many physically demanding jobs (fireman, mechanic, building trades) involve more exposure to toxic chemicals than other jobs.
There also is a notably higher risk of accidents. Frankly it's not at all surprising that physically demanding jobs result in a lower life expectancy. That's merely a confirmation of what we generally already knew or suspected. The real question is why does this relationship exist? Is it as simple as some toxic exposure and accidents or is something more subtle in play here?
have you seen the lifestyle of most of these physically demanding job workers? it is hardly healty and even though they get a lot of excersize most of them also don't look very muscular or thin.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Ever heard of over-training? Imagine doing that every week for 20 years.
Having experienced over-training personally (I used to be a D1 college athlete) I can state with confidence that very few jobs even among physically demanding ones require the sort of output that would result in over-training symptoms. Stress injuries and wear and tear yes. Extreme fatigue even. But over training requires more output than most people ever will get to even in a physically demanding job. It requires exceeding your body's ability to recover. If you are able to do a job for 20 years you are not in an over-trained condition - you would be in the hospital LONG before then. I understand where you are going with your argument and you are quite right that some jobs can take a tremendous physical toll on the body so I can see what you mean. But rarely in the form of what might be called over-training if we are being technically correct. There are exceptions of course but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
About the only people who come close who aren't poorly paid laborers are pro athletes. How many pro athletes can you think of who don't retire well before they turn 60?
Terrible analogy. Pro athletes typically retire for one of two reasons. 1) Wear and tear on the body including injuries or 2) Declining physical abilities due to age. A pro athlete is one of the very best in the world at their chosen sport and even the best and most fortunate of them aren't going to be able to play at the highest levels much beyond age 40 in any sport and some sports retirement comes much earlier. The reason is that while they might still be very good compared to you or me, their bodies simply cannot perform at the high level necessary to be among the very best in the world. They slow down physically and simply get passed by younger fresher athletes. Age does that to all of us sooner or later. In a skilled trades or other physically demanding jobs you do not need to be among the peak physical performers in the world to still be economically valuable to your company.
Those who exercise heavily, such as lots of running and weight lifting, even as just a hobby, also tend to die early.
I'm sure you tell yourself that every time you need an excuse to not go to the gym too.
Here's another place men dominate in the workplace: on the job injuries and deaths. Where's the #metoo movement on equality there?
I don't know why men don't start a #metoo movement around injury and death prone jobs. And jobs that are migrant, outdoor, physically demanding, and other things that make them more grueling.
#injuredtoo
BTW, its not really a very good example you know, being in the US military is NOT a particularly dangerous job, the probability of death is WAY below quite a lot of other jobs.
That depends strongly on exactly what job you are doing in the military. Desk job at the pentagon? Yeah probably pretty safe. Combat engineer stationed in rural Afganistan? Not so much. If you think it is a safe job I recommend you spend a little time hanging around a VA hospital.
Just because some jobs are more dangerous on average doesn't mean serving in the military is safe compared to my current cushy desk job.
Lumberjack (forestry worker) and Fishermen (Fisherpeople? yes, I am taking the piss) are just about as bad as it gets for common jobs.
Both are much MUCH worse than being in the US military.
Not when the military is actually doing what they are hired to do. Combat has a funny way of upping the casualty count substantially in a very short time period.
Taubes uses a couple of well-studied populations of manual laborers (one group I think includes oil field workers) who have high levels of obesity in trying to disassociate physical activity from weight gain. Taubes primary thesis is that excessive carbohydrate consumption leads to obesity.
Since most physical labor is done by low-income people and carbohydrate foods are cheaper than meats and high-fat/protein sources, it seems to be pretty easy to connect the dots. Being poor leads to a diet which contributes to obesity and all its health problems and physical activity doesn't help.
If Taubes' carbohydrate/obesity thesis is right, then being poor and working hard might make health worse because it may promote a greater appetite which gets satisfied with food that makes obesity worse, not better.
Taubes' has other criticisms and examples of high levels of physical activity that doesn't involve starvation not really changing obesity, too, so he'd probably consider this a minor point or complicated by other factors -- like poor people who have to do hard work eating more carbs not out of hunger (since their labor doesn't burn that many calories) but out of boredom or frustration of a life filled with hard work and poverty.
There are probably examples of hard work/lean populations but these may be complicated by food scarcity. Starving a hard working population isn't really valuable to either the labor effort or method of weight loss that will gain many adherents.
Not being active is bad for your health.
But nobody has ever been able to prove that being MORE active than normal is somehow magically BETTER than just being active.
Same for everything - not having enough vitamins is bad (malnutrition). But eating more of them than a normal person requires doesn't turn you into Superman.
And it works in reverse. Eating too many fatty foods is bad. But it doesn't mean that cutting out fatty foods entirely is any better than just eating sensibly.
Moderation in everything.
Combat isn't a dangerous job these days with drones, body armor, and armored vehicles.
So says the anonymous coward who has never been anywhere near a real battlefield in his pathetic life. Probably played a lot of HALO though so he's bad ass and qualified to comment on how not dangerous combat is.
Pro-tip: Body armor won't save your ass from an artillery shell or a bomb. Most combat isn't done by drones. Armored vehicles aren't all that hard to kill along with their occupants.
Farmers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, and industrial workers are more likely to die on the job than an average military member.
You do realize that statement becomes wildly, ludicrously, (almost) humorously false during combat right? You know, the activity that the military is actually built and trained to do? Being in the military is mostly boring tedium but occasionally it becomes the most dangerous occupation imaginable.
1. It's a meta-study, so they grabbed data from a variety of other studies, ie the data had to be "massaged" to get it to line up properly
2. It only found a difference in men, not women, which is odd
3. There were studies they rejected that showed there was no difference, or an inverse correlation
4. It found an 18% difference, which...
5. Isn't clear if it's significant or not, since they list their confidence interval but not their p-value.
So, yeah, not a slam-dunk finding here.
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This graph demonstrates that as fewer people were subjected to the frustrations of Internet Explorer, murder rates fell significantly:
https://gizmodo.com/5977989/in...
Or it might just be that the rate of IE use fell, and completely separately, murder rate also fell at the time, with no relationship between the two. They are correlated (more murders happened when people used IE), but that doesn't prove that IE causes murder.
Frequently, two correlated facts are caused directly or indirectly, by some third fact that causes both. As a dumb example, driving to work is correlated with drinking coffee - when people drink coffee, they often drive to work. Coffee doesn't cause the commute, both are caused by morning.
Three games a week plus practice plus daily off ice workouts in Hockey at an older age and although it was work, I got to have a minute on, two minutes off to recover. It was a whole different world than if I stopped for a break while baling hay.
The physical demands of the activity at the level you participated obviously were not enough to surpass your ability to recover. When you over-train you literally experience a decline in your ability to perform. You might be more prone to injuries but what's really happening is that your body simply cannot rebuild from the stresses faster than you are piling them on. Do this for long enough and stuff starts to break. It's not just that an activity is hard - you have to do it for an extended period of time beyond your physical capacity to recover between sessions of that activity. Most people will quit an activity or slow down long before they get to the point where over-training becomes an issue.
It's not about having a minute or two to recover. It's about being able to recover before the next day's practice. That is dependent on the intensity, frequency, and duration of your workouts or work. Everyone has a limit though few people ever really get close to theirs.
There's a reason why us 18 year old's baled the loft while the farmer and the other older guys did the driving. It would kill you soon if you did that for too many years.
That's because the capacity of an 18yo to recover from physical stresses is (generally) measurably greater than that of someone who is significantly older. I'm approaching 50 and workouts that I used to recover from in a few hours now might take me two days to recover from. Normal aging effects. It would be possible for the older guys to experience over-training if they continued to do it at a pace beyond their capacity for an extended time but more likely they would just slow to a pace they could manage.
Of course I couldn't be bothered to Read The Fine Article, but did they consider the possibility that people who have to do manual labor for a living generally have a less healthy lifestyle than knowledge workers?
Hard physical labor can decrease your life span. Thanks, Defenders of the Obvious.
I agree. Sort of. Reasonable levels of physical activity tend to improve one's cardiovascular fitness and lifespan. But many of the jobs providing such activity also involve some level of danger. Linemen getting electrocuted or falling off poles. Roofers falling off roofs. Farmers getting pulled into combine harvesters. These sorts of things can mess with the statistics.
Have gnu, will travel.
* Don't try "patronize" me BOY when I can show you are less than ZERO fucker... easily.
You are exceptionally boring.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm sure everyone here has done some kind of physical work, such as moving furniture, and a lot of people have been involved in things like building a house. So it should be quite obvious how different the physical actions are compared to exercise for health and fitness. There are high static loads in uncomfortable positions, vs. smooth repetitions of smaller weights you might do at the gym. There's usually very little aerobic exercise, though you generally need some level of aerobic fitness to cope with the work.
With exercise, you can forget about getting $project done, and focus on your body. It's a very different goal so obviously you'll do things differently.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
squashes such things with the help of the same right wing government. Remember Occupy Wall street? Parts of the patriot act were used to quash it and the media didn't say a peep. Our media leans left on a few social issues but when it comes to money and the economy they're hard, hard right. Good luck getting any coverage of anti-union behavior out of them either while you're at it.
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i try to mod APK posts as funny, because they kind of are. but sadly i already posted in the thread, so missed out on this opportunity :( hopefully someone else can fill in though.
Um, is this obvious or just me? Of course people die early when they have physically demanding jobs - what did they think their aching bodies were telling them? Exercise really isn't all that great past a certain point.
Anyhow, yes, it can be funny, anlthough I keep trying to get him to up his game.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Fair enough, it is a bit like poking a mentally handicapped bear through the bars in his zoo cage.
Design your life to fit your goals for fitness (physical, emotional, mental, social). I designed my life so I have some periods of rest and some periods of intense physical activity and some periods of more gentle physical activity. Rinse and repeat each day, each week and around the seasons. It keeps me healthy and I suspect I'll be in the longer lived group.
But, there's another factor - ancestors. Pick them well.
Ahh, the old Urolagnia approach. I can only give it 2 stars (out of 10) Try again Sparkle. I'm only trying to help you improve yourself. So get creative!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.