Employment status
In work or not. The outcome most often falsely credited to vitamins.
Unemployment is a health shock and a selection process. Observational papers that find supplement users 'less unemployed' are almost always looking at Healthy User Bias wearing a lab coat.
Also called job holding, occupational class.
Connected relationships
Observational · High confidence
Social capital→Employment status
Higher Social capital increases Employment status.
Weak ties carry jobs: Granovetter (1973) showed acquaintances bring novel job information, and Rajkumar (2022) tested that claim by randomizing LinkedIn's People You May Know among more than 20 million members over five years.
Observational · High confidence
Omega-3 supplementation→Employment status
A rise in Omega-3 supplementation does not identify a change in Employment status.
Fish-oil buyers are not a random sample of the labor force.
Observational · High confidence
Vitamin / mineral supplementation→Employment status
A rise in Vitamin / mineral supplementation does not identify a change in Employment status.
People who buy vitamins look more employed because they already differ in ways that keep jobs, not because the pill caused the job. Shrank (2011) named that healthy-user bias. Simpson (2006) measured the same selection as death, not employment: in 21 studies and 46,847 people, good adherence, including to placebo, had an odds ratio of 0.56 for mortality.
Mendelian randomization · High confidence
25-hydroxyvitamin D→Employment status
A rise in 25-hydroxyvitamin D does not identify a change in Employment status.
Genetic instruments for 25(OH)D do not buy you a job. The observational D–success link was a marker.
Cases
Sources
- M. S. Granovetter et al. (1973). The strength of weak ties
- K Rajkumar et al. (2022). A causal test of the strength of weak ties.
- W. H. Shrank et al. (2011). Healthy user and related biases in observational studies of preventive interventions: a primer for physicians
- SH Simpson et al. (2006). A meta-analysis of the association between adherence to drug therapy and mortality.
- X. Meng et al. (2019). Phenome-wide Mendelian-randomization study of genetically determined vitamin D on multiple health outcomes using the UK Biobank study
- X. Jiang et al. (2021). The causal role of circulating vitamin D concentrations in human complex traits and diseases: a large-scale Mendelian randomization study