Obesity and Mortality in 130 years of Major League Baseball

Google Tech Talks
August 4, 2010

ABSTRACT

Presented by Dr. Eric Ding, Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health

Drawing on 130 years of data on 15,361 major league baseball players, Dr. Eric Ding observed a steady rise in BMI and increased death risk among the U.S.'s baseball players. Dr. Ding will talk about how he used collaborative databases and internet research to aggregate and analyze large scale longitudinal data from across 130+ years of Major League Baseball. His study was featured in CBS News, ABC News, and USA Today.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• health
• sports

[RizingBlackSun]

I searched "1920's all-decade team NFL" and this is all I got. -_____-

[fox19100]

Clearly, this can't really be confirmed until they eliminate other causes

[fox19100]

@11889music no, preaching to the choir means that they already understand the concept. So it would be preaching to the choir to tell auto mechanics what a catalytic converter is or to tell environmentalist that emissions are bad.

[11889music]

"Probably preaching to the choir." ????

Did he just call everyone in the audience fat! WIN

[lennyhome]

Fatties are fat.

[vishizs]

wow :)

[amopian]

@Malphar lol?

[Malphar]

@mjkaelbling BMI stand for Body mass Index and it takes height in consideration.

[zassounotsukushi]

for question at end:

I don't believe it does here, but people lying about their weight totally has the potential to bias the results. The bias can be systematically downward or upward completely due to cultural factors. His response is basically assumes that no cultural factors exist that would do that.

I think the real reason for the quality of the data is because the love of data the baseball itself has, and officials held themselves to a moral standard to record it correctly.

[mjkaelbling]

Presumably players got taller over time--this would screw with BMI given uneasiness about scaling effects in physical systems. What are the results when looking at players of given height?

If you assume stable mortality, what exponent do you get for an "MLB Index" = mass / height ** exponent?