Connection between metabolism and surviving accidents or other physical trauma?

[BobbyJackson]

I haven't heard anyone really talking about this but it's something I've been thinking about a bit lately, as I moved to the US and became aware of the car centric, high speeds and moderately more dangerous driving than is common in most of Europe. This isn't a hit piece on car centric life in the US btw, I'm a fan.

More so, it got me thinking about car accidents and your probability of surviving physical trauma based on your metabolic health. I'm assuming that the more metabolically healthy you are, the more likely you are to survive physical trauma. Is that a logical conclusion? It seems logical to me.

I remember watching high speed car chases in the US in the 90s and seeing SUVs collide head on with other SUVs and flip and roll like crazy, only to have the inhabitants walk out practically unscathed.

Now of course, there's a luck element to this, such as not getting pierced by pieces of steal or getting decapitated or something. But how does metabolism play into this? If we looked at probability of surviving an accident in equivalent situations, i.e same car, same speeds, etc on a mass scale over the last few decades, what would we see? It's kind of impossible to measure this, I think, due to the fact that safety in cars has been changing, etc. So it may appear as though survivability is up if you even tried to measure it, but there's so many confounding factors it'd make it practically impossible to determine.

There's other stuff that could be less difficult to determine I guess, more controlled, like people falling from heights and landing in similar ways, with similar body weights and dimensions, etc. And assessing their odds of survival throughout the years as we've become more metabolically dysfunctional.

Either way, what do you guys think? Have you read anything on this topic?

 

[Rinse & rePeat]

“Around 1985, a big study in Hungary showed that lowering cholesterol with drugs caused a huge increase in the cancer death rate. Hundreds of publications appeared in the U.S. saying that wasn't possible, because low cholesterol is good, the lower the better. The extreme increase in cancer mortality in the Hungarian study was probably the result of the drug that was commonly used at that time to lower cholesterol, but the pattern of mortality in that study was approximately the same pattern seen in any group with very low cholesterol. In the last 20 years, there have been many studies showing that lowering cholesterol increases mortality, especially from cancer and suicide, and that people with naturally low cholesterol are more likely to die from cancer, suicide, trauma, and infections than people with normal or higher than average cholesterol.” -Ray Peat

 

[BobbyJackson]

Interesting, just seems to be a minor point in his quote where it says trauma. I wonder if it has ever been expanded on somewhere.

 

[Rinse & rePeat]

Interesting, just seems to be a minor point in his quote where it says trauma. I wonder if it has ever been expanded on somewhere.

I think the healthier the person the more chance of surviving anything. As for those television car chases, they are not just sitting in a car, those stuntmen are buffered and strapped in good like astronauts being rocketed into space, and has nothing to do with luck or being healthy. I would think progesterone levels would count for surviving falls and such. Children are oozing with it and bounce back from nearly everything.

 

[BobbyJackson]

I think the healthier the person the more chance of surviving anything. As for those television car chases, they are not just sitting in a car, those stuntmen are buffered and strapped in good like astronauts being rocketed into space, and has nothing to do with luck or being healthy. I would think progesterone levels would count for surviving falls and such. Children are oozing with it and bounce back from nearly everything.

I'm not talking about car chase in movies. I'm talking about real life high speed chases with police where real people are actually getting into severe accidents. This is from footage from helicopters and whatnot.

 

[Rinse & rePeat]

I'm not talking about car chase in movies. I'm talking about real life high speed chases with police where real people are actually getting into severe accidents. This is from footage from helicopters and whatnot.

Sometimes being drunk saves people, because they are relaxed…

“If passengers are stiff or bracing themselves at the time of the accident, they’re more likely to suffer serious injuries because they are resisting incoming force. This is the cause of many broken bones in car accidents, especially in the arms and legs.

Answers​

An intoxicated person is limp; their muscles are relaxed, and their reaction times are slowed. Because of this, drunk drivers do not typically tense up during an accident. This means they’re creating less resistance. They don’t brace themselves or push against the cabin, which means they’re less likely to suffer serious injuries.”

https://www.falangalaw.com/blog/2020/july/why-drunk-drivers-don-t-get-hurt/#:~:text=Answers,they're%20creating%20less%20resistance.

 

[ChadGPT]

You’re more likely to survive if your body is relaxed. People with unhealthy metabolisms probably tend to have more tension due to the body feeling less safe.