Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I got curious about this once and looked up the life expectancy of sumo wrestlers. It anyone is “fit but fat” it would be them.

They have very high bmi’s, ~35. But they’re just barely obese by body fat, about 26%. Result is a life expectancy of 60-65, more than ten years shorter than the Japanese male.

“ The negative health effects of the sumo lifestyle can become apparent later in life. Sumo wrestlers have a life expectancy between 60 and 65, more than 10 years shorter than the average Japanese male, as the diet and sport take a toll on the wrestler's body. Many develop type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure, and they are prone to heart attacks due to the enormous amount of body mass and fat that they accumulate. The excessive intake of alcohol can lead to liver problems and the stress on their joints due to their excess weight can cause arthritis. Recently, the standards of weight gain are becoming less strict, in an effort to improve the overall health of the wrestlers.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo

Source on bmi: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10195655/

Note: wiki’s own quote is not well sourced, but there were some paper noting short lifespan. This is the main one cited, but it is in japanese. If anyone wants to track down the actual life expectancy, let me know.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjh1946/50/3/50_3_730/_...

This one in English discusses bmi as a risk factor for sumo but doesn’t give an age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3761530/#!po=50...

Of course BMI doesn't work for body builders. However only like 1% of the population work out enough to have muscle mass vs fat mass to actually make BMI "worthless" as so many people say. BMI is an "ok" way of determining if you're obese or not with 95-99% of the population. (at least in the USA). Lots of people just don't want to admit they're fat.

BMI works for body builders too, if you carrying 50kg> extra the body doesn’t care as much if it’s fat or muscle your heart still needs to support that body mass.

BMI for people with very high body mass and low fat percentage can be adjusted slightly usually within 10-15% but if you are morbidly obese it’s going to be a problem either way.

Going down from 96kg to 78kg while gaining some body fat from 9-10% to 12-13% reduced my RHR by about 10-15bpm.

And that initial mass gain was just with a decade of exercise not the gain and shred cycles that body builders are going through not to mention the extra “vitamins” they tend take...

I don’t think professional athletes are a good population sample to map onto the general population. Athletes are highly incentivized to burn bright and flare out.

Take NFL players. Yes, an obviously aggressive sport that lends itself to short careers…but even then, the average stint is 3.3 years. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/240102/average-player-ca...) You will do anything, no matter how deleterious, to keep yourself in the game, damn the consequences. And by anything, I mean a steady diet of uppers, downers, and steroids.

I replied to another comment to say that olympic athletes actually live longer than average.

NFl players aren’t a great example. That much traumatic brain injury is seriously harmful to health. Among olympic athletes, those in contact sports did less well.

You do have a point as sumo is grueling and involves contact, but you wouldn’t expect hard playing to take off that much life expectancy all on its own. Sumo wrestlers surely lose some from adiposity.

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...

If I recall correctly the same is not true for professional cyclists [1], a sport with a rich doping history. They seem to live longer than the general population. I believe this is related to the impact on the body versus steroids.

1. https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/cyclists-live-longer-a...

My personal trainer told me that first application of anabolic steroids was in endurance sports like cycling.

One effect of testosterone is to increase red blood cells count, enhancing the oxygen transfer and thus endurance.

(BTW, red wine's quercetin blocks testosterone's drainage by kidneys and indirectly elevates red blood cells count)

The weightlifting also has positive effect on the longevity: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190412085247.h...

To counter your article about cycling: https://www.dw.com/en/michael-goolaerts-death-raises-questio...

And obligatory reference to Marko Pantani: https://crushingiron.com/cycling-is-the-toughest-sport/

He was so fit, he has to cycle several times at night to make his heart go faster and not to die.

The article of yours was not about professional cyclists, more about "cycling fitness" approach. I love cycling - it improves deadlift immensely. But professional cycling is different. Very different. And dangerous.

Pantani was in an age where drug testing was not very good so they pushed the limit of hematocrit level to improve performance. Now the tests are much better and so the level of drugs and thus side affects seems to be lower.

You don’t hear of cyclists dying in their sleep really of coagulated blood from EPO.

There are some legal pain killers like tramadol and excessive caffeine that you might not do if you are optimizing for health but not sure how detrimental that is long term.

> He was so fit, he has to cycle several times at night to make his heart go faster and not to die.

That wasn’t because he was “so fit” was it, but rather from being in the middle of a powerful doping regimen (like all top cyclists were, you simply couldn’t compete otherwise) raising your hemocrit level to the point it could kill you?

Vid about it: https://youtu.be/hT8GZlBBv5k

unfortunately I can't get the full text of the cited study but it sounds like baloney to me based on the numbers. TDF cyclists live to 81 vs 73 for the general population. But to be a tdf cyclist you have to first live to (and be healthy in) your 20s. What is the life expectancy of a normal citizen who is in their 20s and healthy? Surely more than the "general population", which includes infant deaths, people with degenerative conditions, etc.

Cycling does have a rich history of doping, but it also has a rich history of critical coverage of its doping.

Does anyone honestly think that international soccer, which is also a sport where athletes would richly benefit from both EPO and steroids, actually has less doping (at least as covered by the press) than cycling, when there is 10x-100x as much money?

Isn’t doping in cycling mostly blood doping, ie. replacing «old» blood with blood collected prior to a competition? I doubt that has any real effect on your body beyond the immediate effect of the new blood binding oxygen better than the old blood.

NFL players have another major issue that greatly shortens lifespans: CTE [1]. I wonder how much sumo wrestlers are affected by it. I could imagine it also being a problem due to the powerful impacts from their heavy bodies slamming against each other.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-traum...

Yeah, for anyone who doesn’t know, everyone in the NFL is on HGH. Their tests are inadequate and they didn’t even test for it whatsoever until 2010.

Even better, if you know you’re going to be injured, you can just take PEDs and laugh right on through your suspension since you weren’t going to be playing anyway (see: Edelman, Branch, others).

yeah, but then again it's probably more deleterious to your health to try to survive in the nfl without juicing so can you blame them?

I'm a sumo fan, and when you think about the daily routine these guys endure it's really amazing that even then it can't overcome their diet. They wake up at 5am, train for 5 hours in the morning, perform the domestic chores that the stable needs them to do, then come back in the afternoon for more 4 hours of training. E-VE-RY day. Other than some rare off season oportunities only the top wrestlers can get, that is it. And they still become diabetic and develop heart disease. There's no escape, other than having amazing genetics, if you eat like a pig, you die like one.

I've also heard it phrased as: You'll never outrun your fork.

Sort of riffing on this subject, since rikishi are nearly all Asian: Asians are more vulnerable to diabetes than people of other ethnicities. Health authorities have recommended screening Asians with a BMI above 23 for diabetes. BMI, of course, is purely a function of weight and height.

> limiting screening at BMI ≥25 kg/m2 would miss 36% of Asian Americans with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes. In the same study, Araneta et al. (39) found that screening Asian Americans at a BMI cut point of ≥23.5 kg/m2 identified approximately 80% of those with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Among Japanese Americans, lowering the BMI screening cut point to ≥22.8 kg/m2 achieved 80% sensitivity.

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/38/1/150

https://aadi.joslin.org/en/am-i-at-risk/asian-bmi-calculator

How the fat is distributed is more important than how much there is. In sumo wrestlers almost all their excess fat is subcutaneous fat rather than visceral fat.

Subcutaneous fat is much less harmful than visceral fat.

There was a fair bit about this and sumo wrestlers on the excellent Nova episode "The Truth About Fat" last year [1]. Fat is much more complicated than most people realize, as is long term weight loss. It looks like the episode is available for free streaming [2] until the end of the month. It's worth it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/video/the-truth-about-fat-xnqm4i/

[2] PBS shows go in and out of free streaming. They can usually be streamed for free for about a month after they first air, then most of them become restricted to people who donate to their local PBS station. The restricted ones do pop back to free streaming for a while now and then, and certain episodes become free for years.

As a corralary has anyone researched the longevity of bodybuilders?

You’d think entering old age with a large surplus of muscle could be beneficial.

Powerlifters or weightlifters might be better because they don't cut to <5% body fat and steroid use is less common.

“steroid use is less common”

Ha. Hahaahahahaaa. Haha. Wow. No. That’s the entire point of untested powerlifing federations. Have you ever been to a powerlifting gym? Those sharps disposal bins aren’t just there for the diabetics.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-powerlifting-tells...

He said less common than in bodybuilders, not less common than the general population, which would be absurd.

I think their hearts are way more under stress - they lift a lot more weight..

Since it's not like their hearts are overworked the same was with an obese person, I'm not sure if this would be a good thing or a bad thing.

I think it is a bad thing.

At the same time I looked into life expectancy of olympic athletes. Iirc it was higher across the board, but powerlifters had a lower boost compared to runners.

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/articles/at...

Edit: Fixed typo thanks. Also note that bodybuilders on steroids may not fall into the same group. One report found higher mortality below 50 this group.

>Iirc correctly If I recall correctly correctly?

I thought the olympics would not entertain any sort of event with bodybuilders because they were extremely unhealthy.

(this is different than weightlifting)

Having your cardiovascular and endocrine system taxed by steroids is going to be shit for longevity.

I think from what I've seen in media restricting calories seems beneficial to longevity so bulking and packing muscle mass probably "burns you out" even without steroids.

Having said that I'd rather trade 10 years of the tail end of my life for being jacked and rested in my prime years (testosterone does wonders for energy and recovery), especially compared to being a fat slob.

A good example of why BMI is actually a good indicator. Its a bit of a meme that when you weightlift BMI is inaccurate, but all excess body mass is somewhat unhealthy. Even most people who lift weights are too fat.

These weightlifters below all-inclusive weight category are pretty much not too fat. Look at deadlift records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zxXQhSvGKY

Upwards 140 kg, there are fat people, but even Konstantinov (below 140kg)is not fat.

Take look at him doing 55 pullups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boLl8rGhJvE

The "most people who lift weights is fat" myth comes from watching too much competition in open-ended weight category (which, for weightlifting, starts at 109kg, I believe).

I’m confused how they have 26% body fat. That’s not all that much. Are you saying they are mostly muscle?

It's still overweight. For men the mid to high 10s is considered healthy.

The normal fat percentage range for men is 15..20%. 26% is overweight but not much. I once pulled up 27 times having 27-28% of fat being 38 years old, weighting 115 kg, which is about as much as I pulled up at my 18yo with 72 kg of body weight and god knows fat percentage (I had sixpack at the time, so it is 10% or less).

3% of fat is death low (thanks to Nazis to find that). To keep anything less than 10% for prolonged time takes very calculated effort or young age and high activity. It is very hard to go lower than 15% for normal men.

yeah it's surprising. But keep in mind they weigh at least twice a normal man, so they have about 4x the total fat of a healthy adult male (12% being close to what I consider ideal).

12% isn't really a sustainable bf% for most people.

Yep.

I remember someone telling me that as soon as sumo wrestlers stop wrestling, they immediately get diabetes.

my scales say i'm in the healthy rang for BMI, but unhealthy for fat and too much muscle mass...

i can tell you i have a desk job and do NOT have too much muscle :-P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com