Let’s also recognize the difference between life span and expectancy. Life span is how long people actually lived based on numbers after death. Life expectancy is how long experts think people will live. It’s an estimate based on gathering data and forming opinions. My research suggests the experts could be a tad off and perhaps are raising concern for the general good of focusing on better health (e.g. less obesity). I also think life span records of NFL players over recent decades should be taken into account when concluding life expectancy. Granted, my methods of research are far simpler and far cheaper than those of the NIOSH, for example. I’m not a doctor or even a nutrition expert, but check out some data and make your own decisions.

Actually, American football came out of rugby. This is probably the better comparison. It would be interesting to see comparisons of the life expectancies ot rugby players to their respective national averages.

With that said, there are a lot of selection bias issues going on here. First, football players are generally larger than your average man (even the smaller players); larger people are more prone to various health conditions. Secondly, many players are black, and black people are known to have lower life expectancies. All that granted, it should be pretty obvious football is a physically demanding and damaging sport, it would be no surprise that life expectancies are lower for football players than say a yoga instructor.

Pro-wrestling, though not a sport, has even uglier life expectancies.

In mice, dietary or genetic alterations that make the mice grow larger make their lives shorter. Genetic alterations, or caloric restriction, that makes them smaller, including making them produce fewer growth hormones, make them live longer.

Football linemen are gigantic, and probably ALL of them take growth hormones, making them larger still, and likely damaging their hearts.

You should write an OB post about attitudes towards steroids, btw. Football players and other athletes take a wide variety of performance enhancing drugs, several of which can easily kill them. Growth hormone enlarges the heart, disrupting its timing; and the increased body mass increases load on the heart. Vicoden, which football players and bodybuilders take for pain, kills people every year. Drugs routinely used for performance enhancement that can easily kill users, where the fatal dose for one person can be the same as the effective dose for another person, include EPO, insulin, and a thermogenic drug that I forget the name of. The most-dangerous sports drug is a diuretic that bodybuilders use to make them look lean, which I forget the name of, which continues to kill bodybuilders, yet is never demonized in the press.

Yet people always focus on steroids. The most dangerous aspect of steroids is that oral steroids are toxic to the kidney and liver, in the same way that aspirin is. Injectable steroids may be the only performance-enhancing drug that have not been demonstrated to be dangerous in reasonable doses. (Neither have they been demonstrated to be safe for long-term use. They just haven’t been studied much.)

One hundred stars died during the study, which showed slightly better life expectancy for rockers in the United States than Europe. The average age of death for Americans was 42, whereas their European cousins only made it to 35, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation.

CBS News correspondent Larry Miller reports a new study, which charted the lives of 1,050 American and European music artists between 1965 and 2005, has found they are more than twice as likely to die young than the general population.

I have a theory that for some people lots of money makes them die younger. IMO this even shows up in the fact that parts of Scotland have a lower male life expectancy than people in 3rd world countries. Make one wonder if a welfare state allows one to not work and drink oneself to death.

And have you recorded every death of a pro football player, or just some?