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> The lifestyle has a negative effect on their health, with sumo wrestlers having a much lower life expectancy than the average Japanese man.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sumo&oldid=136533...), so I'm not sure this is a counterexample.

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It's complicated. If you actually look at the citations, they were looking at - and kind of necessarily so, if you think about it - a cohort of wrestlers who were born more than a century ago, and not later than mid-century; so, not the current generation. The article puts an emphasis on retained weight after retirement, head injuries, and extensively cites a Discovery Channel article from 2005 for many of the most damning claims (https://web.archive.org/web/20050831220303/http://discoveryc...), including the one about the sumo diet and weight causing metabolic syndrome - even though, earlier in the Wikipedia article, it's mentioned that more recent scholarship shows the remarkable (relative) metabolic health of active wrestlers.

There's an enormous amount of wear-and-tear on their bodies, but the current cohort of wrestlers have access to much better knowledge about what's happening to them during their careers and afterwards, when compared to previous ones. During their prime years, they're objectively more metabolically healthy than the general population. Once retired, they're probably better able to manage their weight than earlier generations, and know to manage incidental issues like sleep apnea and alcohol consumption. I also wonder about the effects the tight-knit stables have on them, since we know positive and abundant social connection early in adulthood has ramifications later on.

>so I'm not sure this is a counterexample.

Yeah, don't just cite Wikipedia blindly. Some of the effects described seem strong, but there are caveats.

Average sumo wrestler bodyfat% is ~25–27%

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