Objectives: Improving the lifestyle of occupational workers is essential for extending healthy life expectancy. We investigated various lifestyle-related items in a rural Japanese population and compared them between agricultural and non-agricultural workers.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted as a part of the "Iwaki Health Promotion Project." Lifestyle-related items such as sleep, work hours, nutrition, health-related quality of life, and proportion of time spent performing each daily activity were compared between agricultural and non-agricultural workers in the ≥60 years (n = 251) and <60 years (n = 560) age groups.
Results: Agricultural workers had significantly lower Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index total scores than non-agricultural workers in the <60 years group. The proportion of participants with more than 5 weekly working days was high among agricultural workers in both groups. Additionally, the proportion of people who worked more than 8 h per day was high among agricultural workers in both age groups. Energy intake per day was high among agricultural workers in the <60 years group. In both age groups, agricultural workers slept and woke up approximately 40 min earlier than did non-agricultural workers.
Conclusions: Agricultural workers have better sleep habits but work longer than non-agricultural workers, with some differences in energy intake and proportion of time spent on each daily activity. These differences should be considered when planning lifestyle intervention programs for agricultural workers.
Copyright: © 2023 Kinoshita et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.