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.
Incident edges
Mendelian randomization · High confidence
25-hydroxyvitamin D→Employment status
Genetic instruments for 25(OH)D do not buy you a job. The observational D–success link was a marker.
Observational · High confidence
Vitamin / mineral supplementation→Employment status
The archetypal smoke. Control for education, parental SES, and baseline income and the supplement→career effect goes to zero.
Observational · High confidence
Omega-3 supplementation→Employment status
Fish-oil buyers are not a random sample of the labor force.
Observational · High confidence
Social capital→Employment status
Who you know is a hiring channel. It is also a backdoor in every supplement-and-success regression.
Cases
Sources
- 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
- W. H. Shrank et al. (2011). Healthy user and related biases in observational studies of preventive interventions: a primer for physicians
- M. S. Granovetter et al. (1973). The strength of weak ties