Truckers are some of the unhealthiest people out there and it's not usually by choice. You read any health advice article and they outline a list of things people should do to be healthy: eat right, exercise regularly, and get enough sleep. Truckers don't get to do any of those things. Some of it is the truckers' fault (no one makes them belly up to the all-you-can-eat buffets). Some of it is the way the entire system is geared.

I spent a year on a truck and I was completely horrified by the whole thing. Even forgoing obesity related diseases, look at the sleep truckers get!

Hours of service are designed to make sure truckers sleep, but they fail and do so spectacularly. Why? Because hours of service ignore a lot of the problems. There are several. First are the loading points. Truckers load/unload at warehouses. They spend hours of time in these places, usually not sleeping. They are supposed to log this time as "on duty not driving" because that's what they're doing. Waiting for loads, getting the paperwork settled, and in a lot of cases, loading the trucks themselves or arranging to pay someone else to do it. Warehouses do not permit truckers to sleep there (even though trucks come with their own sleeper berths and truckers have to sit there for hours waiting for the load to be ready anyway). Truckers do not get paid for this time. They only get paid for time spent driving or actual loading of the freight. So they log it as "sleeping" so they have more hours they are permitted to drive.

They not only do this for their own financial benefit, they are pretty much expected to do so by their employers. If you don't move freight, you don't keep the job.

Add to that the fact that, especially east of the Mississippi River, there's 1 parking place for every 3 trucks. It's getting worse because "travel plazas" prefer to cater to cars than truckers. Get rid of the huge parking lot and put in a minimall! More rest areas are needed. Truck stops are being replaced by more lucrative commercial development. Especially in the East. Where are these truckers supposed to sleep? Add in the fact that truckers never get a regular circadian rhythm going. Loads are picked up and delivered at different times every day. Truckers cross four time zones. Sleeping a full 8 hours at a time is a luxury. Truckers nap, drive, nap, drive, nap, unload, nap, drive, nap, drive.

Now, bring in obesity. Truckers are in a livelihood that practically enforces obesity. Many of them are obese. Some aren't, but you spend any time watching the folks climbing in and out of big rigs and you'll notice they're obese. Why is that? What kind of access do they have to healthy food choices? They spend an average of three weeks on the road and three days at home. When they're on the road, they can't get perishables easily and keep them fresh. It can be done sometimes, but when was the last time you went to a truck stop and found fresh produce for sale that wasn't on the salad bar? The healthy food for sale in truck stops isn't very cheap, isn't cooked very quickly, and doesn't come in much variety. The healthy food that you can stock up on in the grocery stores that doesn't take up too much storage space and doesn't require appliances the truck can't accomodate is also problematic in that it's not cheap and there's not a lot of variety. How much canned tuna and canned chicken can one person eat?

Exercise? Some truck stops are putting in gyms. Most don't bother. Most truckers are like most drivers. They circle the lot if they can't park within five or six spaces of the front door. Of course, in a lot of places, it's dangerous to park in the back of the lot and walk the distance to the building. Parking lots aren't always safe places to be, let alone have an exercise regimen.

Obesity related sleep apnea is probably more of a problem with truckers than we're aware of. Along with a host of other obesity related diseases. People who live in houses every day and have easy access to regular routines. We go to bed about the same time every day, get up about the same time every morning. We've got big refrigerators, not small plug in coolers. We have stoves and microwaves, not tiny microwaves and small 12-volt appliances. We have sinks, they don't. We have a bathroom. They don't. We can find safe places to exercise every day. They can't. We can always find a variety of healthy food, even if we don't want to eat our veggies. They can't.

It's easy to get horrified about the suffering people go through when a trucker's body fails and people die. That's when we scream at congress and demand laws. The problem is that the laws we demand don't fix the problems because they do nothing to get the system to fix itself. Warehouses aren't going to take any expense on themselves they don't have to. Trucking companies aren't going to adequately pay truckers for non-driving work performed unless forced to. Truckers aren't going to be able to have food, exercise, and sleep options unless those options are available. Of course, truckers also have their own culpability. It's the old saw, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. We have to have mandates to make these health preserving options available to a growing population that's currently trapped into a very limited health maintenance regimen by the tractor-trailer they drive. However, we also have to have mandates to make sure that truckers who don't maintain the already proscribed level of fitness are penalized along with the companies who knowingly employ them and the doctors who facilitate them.