Survery of Construction Workers

     This past Summer I spent working on a local construction site in Queens. While doing so I noticed one very disturbing thing: most construction workers seemed out of shape and very unhealthy. Although  I am no doctor after seeing their meal portions, choices and weight my diagnosis didn't seem too inaccurate. So I decided to take a survey and find out if my prediction was an accurate one.

      First I figured out what I wanted to test and that is if construction workers are overweight. My hypothesis was that they will be overweight because they don't have access to the healthier foods and are predominately smokers.

      Next I came  up with the surveys. The questionnaire was very short consisting of four questions: age, height, weight and smoker or non-smoker. They were short because the longer the survey, the less the participants. With this information I could calculate their Body Mass Index (BMI).

According to the Center for Disease Control website cdc.gov:

"Body Mass Index (BMI) is a number calculated from a person's weight and height. BMI provides a reliable indicator of body fatness for most people and is used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems."

**Below is the BMI chart provided by the Center for Disease and Control website at http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/index.html

BMI	Weight Status
Below 18.5	Underweight
18.5 – 24.9	Normal
25.0 – 29.9	Overweight
30.0 and Above	Obese

     My next task consisted of getting participants. In order to encourage people to be honest and participate I made the survey anonymous. I decided to survey only men because they were not enough women. And I was ready to begin, the results are as follows:

Sample size: 150 Men

Underweight: 0%
Normal: 15%
Overweight: 52%
Obese: 33%
Smokers: 21%
Non-Smokers: 79%

The Average man was:
-42 years old
-5'10
- 202 lbs.
- BMI of 29= overweight

     The ages varied from 21 years old to 69 years old. Not only was the average man considered overweight, but one point away from being obese. This is a very scary statistic, considering that a combined 85% of the participants were overweight or obese.

    Although most of my hypothesis proved true, the one thing that I was wrong about was the smoking. Only 21% of the participants were smokers. This could be for a few reasons:

1) The job site was a non-smoking one that could have encouraged people to quit
2) They might have quit on their own because of how educated we are about tobacco and it's affects
3) They were lying

    Originally I thought that smoking would influence the average man to be overweight but after seeing the results realized that it might have had the opposite affect. Cigarettes are a known appetite suppressant and after quitting have a tendency to trigger weight gain. My theory is that some of the men in my survey were previous smokers and gained weight as an after affect. Either way I was satisfied with that statistic and hope it continues to decrease.
 
    One flaw I found in my study was that there were some exceptions to the BMI rules. There were a few participants who were very muscular and in shape but were categorized as overweight or obese. Although they are apart of those categories they are not considered to have the same health risks as someone who is not physically active.

   In conclusion I am very much concerned about construction workers weight, food portions, and choices and believe that their inaccessibility to healthier foods only promotes those choices. I even found myself giving into those bacon, egg and cheese cravings from time to time because of the convenience. So job related accidents are not the only concerns that the government should have for construction workers but their nutritional lifestyle at the workplace as well.

In my study the average man was :
- 42 years old
- 5'10
- 202 lbs.
- BMI of 29= overweight!

   
     The ages of participants varied from 21 years old to 69 years old. The average man in my study was not only overweight but 1 point away from being obese. This experiment confirmed most of what I had thought from the very beginning.

Contrary to my hypothesis I did find that only 21% were smokers, the other 79% were not. This could be for a few reasons:
1) It was a non-smoking site so that might have encouraged people to quit
2) They quit on their own because of how educated we are about smoking and its affects
or
3) They lied

    After collecting my data and going over the results I realized that cigarettes are known to suppress your appetite so this  may be the reason that some people were overweight. They might have been previous smokers who quit not too long ago or because of the job site and gained the weight as an after affect. Either way although my hypothesis proved true, smoking was not nearly as prevalent as I thought it to be.

     The only flaw that I found in the survey was that certain people who were very built and in shape were actually considered obese because it is a height to weight ratio. For those people because they are very physically active they are not considered to be at the same health risk as the other participants.