Here's an urban legend I haven't seen at snopes.com. It usually takes the form of "studies have shown" and states that an NFL career will take twenty years off your life expectancy. Usually it is stated that the NFLer can expect to live until 55, and a lineman to 52 years of age. Or that every season played takes 3.5 years off your life.

In 1994, the New York Times reported that

A Federal agency announced today that its study showed the death rate for former professional football players was 46 percent less than the rate for American men of similar age and race in the general population.

So that's the opposite. Football players live longer. To believe that the average ex-jock is going to die at 55 strains credulity. That would mean that there would have to be a lot of players passing in their 40s, or even 30s, to balance out those who survived to their 60s and 70s, and make the average come to 55. There are players who die that young, but it can't be half of them.

The bad news?

The study also showed, however, that offensive and defensive linemen, who are heavier than other players, had a 52 percent greater risk than nonplayers of dying from heart disease. And it showed that heart disease killed linemen at a rate 3.7 times higher than the rate for other players

That's bad. But notice the points of comparison: heavy players vs. "non-players," and heavy players vs. "other players." There's no comparison here of 350 lb. linemen to 350 lb guys who don't play football, because I suspect that the two groups might have more or less the same mortality rates from heart disease. So it's not playing football that kills you, it's weighing 350 lbs. I'd even guess that the obese non-jocks would be more unhealthy.

Note, too, that the way the story expresses these two comparisons is not parallel, making these numbers harder to understand for the average sports fan. One is "52%, greater" the other "3.7 times higher." 52% is much smaller, it is equivalent to saying "1.52 times greater" (I think). So it's better to be another type of player (non lineman) than a guy in the general population.

This is not to say that playing football has no negative health effects apart from those related to being too big. Brain injuries, arthritis, and other things come to mind. And you also have to assume that linemen wouldn't weigh that much if they didn't have to so that they could collide effectively with other linemen. So this is extra, gratuitous obesity that these people would not have to carry if they weren't football players.

But I don't think that those 55 and 52 numbers are even close to being accurate. At least i haven't found the study that supposedly proved that.

On another note, I think they must have given me regular expresso rather than decaf in my decaf latte this evening, because otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about something that I have no interest in at all at 11:30 p.m.

I read in the NYT today that Americans spend "more than 50 billion dollars" on toiletry items a year. I guess that seemed to be a lot because any number in the billions seems huge. At least that was the implication of the particular review I was reading. But the US has a population of 300 million, so that is $166 dollars per person, per year. That's awfully low, less than 50 cents per diem on average, for something that almost everyone uses. Since I'm sure some people spend hundreds of dollars a month on hairspray, etc... the average has to be much more than that.

What does the average person think when reading about the XXX billion dollar a year YYYY industry? A billion dollars is 3.3 dollars per person, right? So an industry of that size is pretty insignificant to the size of the economy as a whole, though it would be highly significant to someone with a major stake in that particular sector.

No poet left behind

Reading Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson (a book I am really fond of) I came across this startling statistic:

"Between 1861 and 1870 only one British infant out of eight survived its first year of life, and as many again died between the ages of one and five."

This seemed wrong to me. That would mean that the average woman would have carry sixty-four pregnancies to term to have a single child survive to the age of six. (She would have to withstand an average of eight pregnancies to get one child past the first year, so she would need 64 to have eight survive the first year, one of which would then survive the fifth year.) I assume "as many again" means "as high a percentage" not "as many numerically," because you simply couldn't have that many deaths between 1 and 5: there wouldn't be enough surviving infants. Basically there would be no Englishmen today if this trend had continued for more than a few years.

I found some more plausible (though still horrific) numbers on the first website I found after a google search, for a somewhat later date: :

In the upper-class areas Liverpool England, 1899, 136 newborns out of 1000 would die before they reached the age of one. Working class districts maintained a rate of 274 infant deaths per 1000 births, and impoverished slums had a horrifying 509 infant deaths per 1000. Even as these rates improve towards the end of the Victorian Age, infant mortality remained at over ten times the current rates in industrialized nations. Alexander Finlaison reported that one half of all children of farmers, laborers, artisans, and servants dies before reaching their fifth birthday, compared to one in eleven children of the land owning gentry.".

So even the worst slums had slightly above a 50% infant mortality rate--horribly bad but not nearly the 77.5% for all of Britain that Howe gives us.

So possibly Howe is simply inverting a percentage she read somewhere--maybe one in eight died and she says that one in eight survived?