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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.
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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.
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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My sweet spot is on the couch.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Doh!
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We were talking about sweet spots, not wet spots.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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".
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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?
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
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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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.
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.
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