Thursday, May 17, 2018

Researchers discover the obvious

They have discovered a "paradox" where people employed in more physically-demanding occupations don't benefit from the exercise:

But new research claims that those who are in more physically demanding jobs aren’t in a vastly better position. 
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 labourers 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.
Researchers apparently don't know that 8 out of the top 10 riskiest professions involve tough, manual labor.  Actually, maybe they do:
Professor Kay-Tee Khaw, professor of clinical gerontology at the University of Cambridge says: ‘Sedentary work compared to work that requires heavy physical activity is hugely confounded by education, social class and all the other associated behaviours. 
‘It is quite possible that very heavy labour may be associated with adverse health. It may also be that these occupations lead to higher accident rates and early mortality without the physical activity itself being the relevant factor which the authors do discuss and I am sure that we need to understand this better.’
But if you re-ran the numbers taking into account occupational mortality, you might not get a Press Release worthy result, amirite?  Bah.  The one thing that we can conclude from this study is that there is too much public grant money flowing to "Researchers".  As the Researchers might say (in any study they would publish), p < 0.05.


3 comments:

  1. If only medical researchers were half, no, if only they were a tenth as interested in real "Science!" as they say they are, maybe there'd be some progress.

    I've got a friend who's a roofer. He's in his 50s and is just having a heck of a time staying with it. He can only work up on a roof a few hours a day, now. "Roofercise" is way too hard.

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  2. Sigh... It's all about publish or perish, to hell with REAL research...

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  3. When faced with the dismal prospect of losing tenure or a grant, these poindexters that live perpetually in the safe space of college campus and away from the scary "Real World" that demands results, you invariably see the dreaded return of the Lazy Science of Rediscovering the Completely Obvious.

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