Tendency of professional athletes to die young?

I was reading a piece last night in “Ironman” magazine called “Radical Revenge - The Free Radical Dangers of Over-training and Over-eating” by Michael Chiccone discussing health and diet, and it noted that just because professional athletes (specifically discussing diet for bodybuilders and strength athletes in this case) are in shape and tend to be careful about what they eat, it does not mean they live longer, and it started ticking off a bunch of athletes in a wide variety of sports that have died young due to health problems. The article further claimed that the mean (non-accident related) death rate for professional athletes is actually worse than for the population at large!

It asked “Can you name any pro-bodybuilder who has lived to be 100 years old? For that matter any pro athlete who has lived to be 80 or 90 years old? On the contrary what you have is whole bunch of pro athletes who die young or develop serious health problems at a young age.” and it started listing a bunch of them.

It asked “If all this exercise is so good for you why are so many people who exercise dying young or coming down with “old people’s” diseases?”

He ascribes the health problems (mainly) to the physical damage caused by over-training, and to the over-production of free radicals as a result of the large caloric intake necessary to support high levels of strength & muscular body-weight while training intensively. He claims this generates a massive (free radical) “oxidative load” that the body has to deal with and which damages the body on a cellular level. He then says anti-oxidant supplements are the best way to combat this and discusses specific types.

I found this quite surprising. Is it possible the article is correct, and that the author has a point about intensive training and eating shortening lifespans?

I dont find it suprising although it doesn’t mean that lots of excercise is bad. First, body builders aren’t traditional athletes and they have to use vast amounts of steroids to compete in their field. That can destroy a body over time. Second, things like iron man are pushing the body beyond normal limits. There is no reason to believe that should be a good thing in the first place.

You have to look at it like a graph where the benefits of excercise peak after only moderate amounts and then drop off sharply at extreme levels. Joint induced injury is going to happen when someone runs, and bikes at extreme levels. Furthermore, the benefits of excercise drop off pretty quickly after the activity is stopped.

Moderate, sustained fitness is the goal for maximum life expectancy. Extreme athletic activity introduces risks of its own.

Professiomal athletics are a relatively recent phenomenon. We don’t have much of a database to work with. Interestingly, Jack LaLanne, the acknowledged founder of the “fitness” movement in the U.S., turns 92 this year.

I’ve always wondered the same thing.

The one thing correlated with longer life span, in animal models and in studies of long-lived human populations, it low caloric intake or utilization. Remember that village of 100 year olds in the mountains of Columbia or the one in the mountains of Japan? Was it due to pure water, pure food, and outdoor living? No, they don’t think so. It was because they ate 800 calories of boiled meat and rice a day. Same with long-lived mice, same with long-lived flies.

It makes sense that people like Lance Armstrong, who go through 4000 calories a day or more, would then put twice as much wear on their bodies as someone only using 2000. I would think that the risks of doing this more than outweigh the benefits of having a finely tuned cardiovascular and respiratory system.

That is not to say that all of death comes from free radicals. Cancer, primarily a disease of aging, can be due to lots of things, including genetics and environmental exposure as well as free radicals. Exercise increases HDL (good cholesterol) and decreases LDL (bad cholesterol) and there is nothing that says you can’t have high cholesterol and be skinny (although it usually is correlated with weight, there is a primary genetic component as well). There are probably hundreds of extra benefits to moderate exercise, including bone and muscle strength to control to tone which prevent injury later to keeping your metabolic rate constant and lots of other stuff. But I’d bet, the hardcore exercisers probably aren’t doing themselves any benefits over the 3-times-a-week jogger and are probably causing at least some harm.

I don’t know if this counts as expert opinion, but here’s something on the subject.

From Levels of the Game, by John McPhee. Johnson is discussing why he took up tennis, and he later founded the academy where Arthur Ashe (the book’s subject) learned the game. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true, though the book is from 1969, so who knows what else may have been discovered since then. Since professional athletes in general are getting larger and larger, they may increasingly be at risk to dying young.

http://www.jacklalanne.com/

Another counterexample comes to mind: boxer Max Schmeling (1905-2005).

If it’s true that serious athletes live shorter lives, it’s probably more true about bodybuilding than a lot of other sports.

When I first got into it 25 years ago, bodybuilders had a lot in common with wheat-germ eating, health-nut types (the aforementioned Jack LaLanne comes to mind). Older bodybuilders tended to look younger and healthier than others their age.

But more recently, the sport has become less and less about long-term health, and more focused on extreme training and diet (and of course the drugs). The win-at-all-costs mentality brought on by increased financial rewards probably contributed to this some: when ‘Pumping Iron’ was written, nobody really made a living as a professional bodybuilder (Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbo had day jobs).

Sadly, if the sport stays like it is, in a few decades, there may not be a lot of older bodybuilders.

Dr. Roy Walford, a leading life extension and free radical expert, leans in the same direction:

Exercise and increased caloric uptake increases free radical damage.

Roy and his cronies know more than anyone else about such topics, yet it is a big azz leap of faith to go as far as the author of the article goes.

There are so many variables that it is hard to draw a cause and effect relationship. Michael Chiccone, you have way too many variables yet to be controlled, so hardly a scientific analysis at all.

If you get your curiosity piqued by chat of life extension and preventing free radical damage, you’d be wise to search on Roy Walford, calorie restriction and life extension. He and his colleagues are actually performing double blind controlled studies with fascinating results.

Heck, apart from Ah-nold, how many professional bodybuilders can most people name, period?

More seriously, I do think there’s genuine cause for alarm in certain sports. When you look at the offensive and defensive linemen in the NFL today, and see a bunch of 340 pounders, you have to worry about them. I mean, Tony Siragusa was about 390 pounds when he was a tackle for the Ravens. God knows how big he’s going to get now that he’s no longer working out and training regularly. We certainly COULD start seeing a lot of well-known football players having heart attacks and strokes over the next decade or so.

But overall, I don’t believe most athletes in most sports are dying younger than other men in their age and demographic groups.

And every baseball fan who goes to an occasional Old Timer’s Day Game can name you loads of ballplayers in their 80s and 90s.

I really think you have to consider steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. Steroids accelerate cardiovascular disease, in part by increasing cholesterol levels. They also seem to increase cancer rates, and can do bad things to the liver and kidneys that are struggling to deal with the chemicals/hormone overloads.

Dietary supplements can be damaging, either through megadoses the body is trying to flush, or side effects at megadoses. Even something healthy like protein can cause kidney damage if the quantities consumed are too high.

Several long distance cyclists have, apparently, dropped dead from overdosing on erythropoetin - a natural hormone that boosts red cell production, but if overdosed on causes overproduction that vastly increases the risk of blood clots, heart attack, or stroke from blocked blood vessels. Red cell packing can have similar effects - extracting red bloods cells, then reinfusing them into the body just prior to competition.

Then there are the intrinsic hazards of sports themselves. Joint and tendon damage or stress fractures from overuse, for one thing. Heatstroke and, perversely, water overdose in marathons. Ironman competitions involving ocean swimming expose participants to drowning and shark attack, not to mention getting run over by a boat (we had a Chicago Ironman athlete lose a foot to a boat propeller a few years ago). Professional football NFL style can do terrible damage to the human body.

Then we have the lifestyle that can accompanying succesful professional atheletes - partying all night, excessive alcohol, recreational drug use, promiscuous sex leading to STD’s…

Amateurs performing moderate exercise are far less likely to use performance enhancers, recreactional drugs, are more likely to rest and heal after an over-use injury, less likely to eat wacky diets or excessive vitamins/supplements… Jack Lalane is one of the original professional exercise gurus, but his level of activity would be considered moderate amateur to lightweight professional these days, and much of it low-impact, emphasizing flexibility rather than power. Which might be why he’s a healthy 92 and a bunch of other guys have dropped dead at much younger ages.

A little quick research:

Among Hall of Famers, the oldest living football star I could find was Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, who’s still alive at 92.

Among Baseball Hall of Famers, the Yankees’ old shortstop and broadcaster Phil Rizzuto will be 89 this year.

But Al Lopez lived well into his 90s before he died last year. IIRC, MLB players in general have had an longer life expectancy than the general public.