a couple of quick things so far ...

(1) the primary literature is not published in "The BMJ" ... it's in BMJ Public Health ... these are both rigorous, but The BMJ along with JAMA are possibly the most-sought-after places to publish. If anyone states it's in "the BMJ" I would take anything after with a grain of salt. We had a Dean in an ancient university here (UK) that used to say "The BMJ" and it was BMJ Open and he didn't make it so long before being made redundant. Those small differences better when assessing competency.

(2) The raw data/variables employed can be accessed here: https://sls.lscs.ac.uk/variables/

(3) The 1991 Census ... which I believe is the starting data for the study has two interesting codes shown below:

been bust trying to motivate PhDs/MRes students to generate data in the lab today and to write a paper.

had a Quick Look on how the categories were decided and it seems to be the Scottish Census from 2001 and 2011.

the question and the data tabulation is below (so that's the basis for the categorisation of our study participants for pedestrians and cyclists). I am unsure what is non-active (all others????)

Interesting. From this info, I would assume that the typical BF "enthusiast" who rides a bicycle for recreational, competition, fitness, trail riding, group rides, etc., but not commuting purposes fits into the non-active (other) category.
The unanswered question arises then what is so special about bike commuting and by what mechanism it allegedly reduces the risks of diseases such as cancer and does it apply to all other types of "active" bicycling?

I speculate that no one unfit commutes to bicycle by work. The other "active category" is pedestrian. I see many unfit people commuting to work by walking (BMI glance). I assume that everyone else is a non-active commuter (train, bus, car, taxi, light rail, etc...).

I'd argue that the difference is that cycling to work requires a different skill set than every other commuting type, including pedestrian commuting, and that cohort is by default more healthy (which is nearly impossible to control for).

Thus, instead of phrasing that argument that those that bike commute have a "47% less chance of mortality," I'd argue that those with lower mortality are more likely to bike commute.

If the study broke all participants into deciles by VO2 max, we'd likely see more bicycle commuters in the more-fit deciles.

I guess that it's the classic correlation not causation argument based on the way the data was collected for the longitudinal study.

I also doubt if someone became a bike commuter that their mortality would significantly go down, but that's a different study entirely with an even smaller sample size.

Interestingly, there was an earlier 2017 study, from the 'proper' BMJ no less, which reached similar conclusions:

This study uses a different methodology -recruiting volunteers instead of combing through anonymous health records. I am guessing the latter would be the 'gold standard' but nonetheless this study also reaches very similar results.
40% reduction in cancer mortality, and 41% reduction in all-cause mortality. This finding is pretty well corroborated.

Agree 100%. It's just another "study" designed to produce a desired conclusion.

nice study. post the link to the article if you have a second.

again, very small sample sizes except for the cancer incidence.

nice to see the mixed mode commuting.

I guess it must be intensity.

Do you have no joggers to work, where you guys are? I probably see 20 walkers, 8 cyclists per 1 jogging commuter?

I wouldn't go that far.

I think it's an excellent longitudinal study that mines data well.

All the studies show a correlation with bike commuting to work and enhanced fitness. I'm OK with that. I don't think we should say that bike commuting makes one more resistant to disease as that isn't shown.

Correlations can be fun, but that's all they are, correlations.

https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j1456

Before Covid, I was 100% a couch potato. After Covid hit, I dragged my hand-me-down bike out of the garage and started cycling, just to get out of the house. A few months later when we started returning to the office, I just rode my bike to work instead of driving, and I haven't stopped since.
In the office where I work, there are two competitive triathletes that I know of. Neither of them bike to work. One of them kept telling me how she wishes she could bike to work but the distance and time doesn't allow it. My own brother is a very fit rock climber and lifelong cyclist and he doesn't bike to work because he lives too far away. I know a number of co-workers who are regularly do running, weight training or basketball, and none of them bike to work. Most of the bike commuters I see on the road on a daily basis, tend to look more 'dorky' than 'fitness/spandex'. No different than how it was in high school- the cool kids had cars (or had friends who had cars), while the dorky kids tied their pant cuffs with rubber bands and rode their ten-speeds. So I don't really buy the self-selection argument.

sure, but you're arguing with a personal anecdote and thus I don't think you could be more biased. I like ya, but it's all anecdotal and as speculative as my argument and somewhat self-congratulatory (you deserve congrats but it shouldn't bias your assumptions).

we could easily use the large datasets in the opposite way (like the one in the BMJ article, or the more recent UK one that I've participated in) and sort people by fitness decile (or a proxy such as the results of a lipid panel) and then see whether there was a positive correlation with bike commuting (more fit people commute at a higher percentage).

however, that analysis wouldn't get published in the BMJ and keep their jobs at a Russell Group uni.

I could do it in a few hours with R, but I've got two other papers to finish at the moment.

So it's tenuous at best. Oh well.

Is there any study whether it's better to cycle home from work instead of toward work?

The way that I read it was that the question was specifically about how people got to work, so the typical BF enthusiast would likely select "drive" not "other".

There are interesting geographic and demographic layers to this too, as in who is choosing to live in communities where biking to work is even possible? A common pattern in the US if for post-college worker to favor cities but then move out to the suburbs when they start families. I wonder what migration and housing patterns in the UK are?

Thanks for your expert contributions to this discussion.

What question do you want answered? Do you want to see if among equally fit people, those who cycle to maintain their fitness have any mortality advantages over those who do other forms of exercises to maintain their fitness? Or do you want to know if cycling is a good way to achieve physical fitness?
I think a better study would be to follow two populations who have matching fitness profile at the start of the study. One group started biking to work. The other group didn't. And then check their outcomes 10 year later.

There is very interesting raw data present ... like average commute distance and urban/suburban/rural classifications ... sadly, the authors went for the bang for the buck (which is understandable as that's how one builds a career in academia) but there's controllable underlying factors (like you and I mentioned.)

It remains important to note that the authors conclusions are correct, bike commuting does correlate with a reduction in mortality versus walking to work (which is the same as train/bus/car/etc...)

please remember that this is Europe with all it's caveats (better transport options, shorter distances, better fitness than North America).

my hunch/speculation, or rather hypothesis, would be that if people were sorted by fitness (they are sorted by job classification and wealth in the UK census(es)) I would hypothesise that the most fit groups would bike commute more than the less fit groups (people bike commuting to work are like 3% overall anyway) and that would also cancel any heath advantage correlated with bike commuting.

with this data, once could even control for the wealth difference/job ranking difference, but the bike commuting population that died/had issues is very small so it's very hard to draw any conclusion in my opinion other than correlation with a better lifestyle overall.

they could do this already. analyse fitness at the beginning of the study (they do this now in the UK). then break down death by fitness level.

I surmise that more fit people die less/get diseased less.

I also surmise that more fit people bicycle commute more.

Thus die less/get diseased less and bicycle commute more would be a higher percentage as the "health decile (10th percentages)" increases.

This was controlled for in these studies and "bike commuting" is proposed as an interesting link but it's a luxury of the well-fit people, in general across Europe. Poor people won't go to work by bike when excellent transport links already exist (bus/walk/train/etc...) Biking to work really is a luxury over here.

we'll see what happens with this generation that I have participated in ...

it's looking to track 5M ppl longitudinally (UK wide)


more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Future_Health

edit, I will say as an academic that uses ML/AI a lot, that a central repository of UK DNA does frighten me somewhat, but we're foraying into the unknown beyond our consciousness anyway might as well go "balls deep" if going at all.

The question was how people got to work, but then the respondents were placed into only 3 groups for comparison of their morbidity stats and onset of early health problems like cancer. Two categories (bicyclists and pedestrians) were considered "active" and all the rest (others) were considered "inactive."

I agree with you about what be a better study; night and day better.

I also would not assume that the only reason people why people commute to work by bicycle is to maintain fitness, though that may be more the case for a sample drawn from bicycle "enthusiasts."

But the big question that a lot of people have, is how do I become more fit?
You see- biking to work is not just another form of exercise. Every other form of exercise requires you to have the will power and commitment to continue doing it day after day, year after year. Whereas biking to work requires no self discipline. When your paycheck is on the line, you have no choice but to get on that bike and pedal to work!
Also- other forms of exercise typically require a dedicated time and place set aside for it. For example, you have make a special trip to get to the gym or swimming pool. Whereas for me, biking 6.5 - 7.5 mile to work takes me roughly the same time as driving (thanks to traffic jams here), so I am not spending any extra time exercising. The exercise is built into my commute to work.

You are 100% on the right track. Identifying the correlation between bike commuting and staying alive is interesting, but without the why, mostly useless. Someone pointed out earlier in the thread that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. These results we are looking at, as an example, might be explained by something different in the air you breathe on each type of commute. My point is that we just don't know. More research is needed.

Ah, ok. The frame of reference here is activity during commuting. The table is titled, "Risk of various adverse health outcomes for active (cyclist, pedestrian) commuters versus non-active commuters, 2001–2018".

One interesting point in the Berm Peak video is that bike commuters get regular exercise 5 days a week for years on end. That kind of fitness discipline is not common.

No doubt that the emphasis in this video is on the entertainment content as that is what gets the bill paying clicks that the YouTuber seeks.

I don't know. Wherever I've lived in Western Europe, people don't bike commute to "get fit," they usually do it get some more outdoor time (compared to subway, bus, train, light rail, car) and it's more fast/fun than walking.

I'd guess that in Scotland most people are urban (yes 71% are urban): https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/media/u3uptow2/report.pdf (Figure 2).

That classification is here:

Analysis and Classification

The first stage in creating the classification is to categorise the Settlements dataset using the population thresholds of 125,000, 10,000 and 3,000 to identify the Settlements from which drive times will be calculated. Settlements were grouped into the following categories:

(1) Large Urban Areas - populations of 125,000 or more

(2) Other Urban Areas - populations of 10,000 to 124,999

(3) Small Towns - populations of 3,000 to 9,999

(4) Rural Areas - populations less than 3,000

So, 71% of Scots in a town of 10K+. I would surmise that those areas would have decent bus service at a minimum.

I think it's important to realise that this data is drawn from Scotland (BMJ PH article) and the earlier study was UK biobank (The BMJ) and would likely have a higher urban/rural split than Scotland as shown below.


There are likely a lot of difference between the UK/Scotland data and the North American experience.

I can't think of a single person getting fit by bike commuting ... I do see students/less-affluent people cycling rather than spending £6/day on the bus as a decent used MTB can be had for £50 or a fully tuned/rebuilt for £100.

Also, the distances are much shorter here for commuting.

Thus, I think that the 40+% decrease in mortality is simply baked in from the fit people deciding to bike commute, rather than bike commuting being the cause. I'm not convinced you'd see the same decrease in mortality with a longitudinal North American dataset. It is however, excellent evidence to justify urban expenditure on bike infrastructure and the cost of a low-health-quality year will be very expensive for the public health service, so it can be used for adequate justification. (similar to recently built flood defences).