As weight-watching dieters eschew high-carbohydrate foods, workers at one Queens factory have found a rather starchy way to stay svelte: baking bread.

Bread-making, it turns out, can be an arduous test of strength and stamina, with bakers moving and lifting as much as 8,000 pounds in a day, according to the president of the Tom Cat Bakery of Long Island City, Noel Comess.

“Out of 150 people who work here, there are four or five whom we could call ‘overweight,'” Mr. Comess said. That is a statistical anomaly, considering that, according to 2000 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 64% of American adults are overweight or obese.

The fitness of the workforce at Tom Cat stands in sharp contrast to the status of bakers a century ago, when – according to a Supreme Court opinion by Justice John Harlan in the landmark 1905 case Lochner v. New York – bakers “seldom live over their 50th year.” If Mr. Comess, a former chef at a now-defunct five-star East Side restaurant, the Quilted Giraffe, had entered the baking business a century earlier, the 47-year-old’s days would now be numbered.

The Lochner ruling has re-entered the spotlight because President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, derided the 1905 decision as an example of judicial excess in an article that he drafted while serving as an attorney in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. In Lochner, the high court, on a 5-4 vote, struck down a New York law that barred bakers from working more than 10 hours a day. Mr. Roberts, ever wary of judicial usurpation of legislatures’ role, wrote: “In the era which has come to be epitomized by Lochner v. New York … it was conservatives who urged judicial activism under the banner of due process to strike down popular enactments.”

The renewed scrutiny of the Lochner ruling also brings to light the miserable conditions that prevailed in bakeries during the early 20th century. Harlan’s dissenting opinion warned that the intense heat inside bakeries “induces the workers to resort to cooling drinks” – and that those intoxicating refreshments were the “source of a number of diseases of various organs.”

In accordance with regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Mr. Comess prohibits his workers from imbibing alcohol on the job – and refrigerated water fountains have replaced the “cooling drinks” of yesteryear on the floors of bakeries. Occasionally, Mr. Comess will wheel a cart of “frio-frio,” or flavored ice, across the bakery floor to give his workers a respite from the intense heat – an employee perquisite that would have been rare at the time of Harlan’s dissent.

Although bakers today are living longer – and more sober – lives, Mr. Comess said: “To be perfectly honest, the industry hasn’t evolved that much since then.”

Bakers at the first step of the assembly line, the mixing stage, now enjoy air-conditioned environs, but Mr. Comess said it takes three to five years to rise through the ranks to the position of “mixer.”

While it may be the coolest post on the assembly line, the mixing stage can also be the most dangerous.

“The biggest threat of injury currently to bakers is with fermentation tanks,” Mr. Comess said. He noted that the fermentation process “produces a lot of alcohol and carbon dioxide … and this can create completely oxygen-free zones.”

“If there are volatile vapors, and if you inhale them, you can pass out and fall into the tank – and you can suffocate in three minutes,” Mr. Comess said. In January, a worker at a South Jersey bakery died when he fell into a 500-gallon stainless-steel vat.

The aperture atop the fermentation tanks at Tom Cat is small enough to shield against such a catastrophe, Mr. Comess said. He said the most serious injury at his factory came almost 10 years ago, when a worker’s arm got caught in a mechanical mixer.

“You need to stop the mixer to feel the dough, and some people are just too lazy to turn off the machine,” Mr. Comess said.

The worker escaped with a sprained arm – but he didn’t bleed, so the batch of bread was not sullied, Mr. Comess recalled.

Most of the heavy lifting falls to workers in the so-called “make-up” section, in which vast quantities of fermenting dough are cut into loaf-sized portions. But the toughest job may be in the oven room, where temperatures can hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

“When you open the oven and take the bread out, you’ve got 400 pounds of hot mass coming at you,” Mr. Comess said.

Once that “hot mass” cools, it is shipped off to one of the restaurants, the hotels, or the three-dozen retail stores – including Balducci’s and Dean & DeLuca – that buy Tom Cat’s 35 varieties of bread in bulk.

The bakery’s annual sales total about $20 million, Mr. Comess said. Despite Tom Cat’s impressive cash flow, however, when asked if he would counsel a young man half his age to enter the baking business, Mr. Comess said: “I’d recommend against it.”

The pay is thin. At the entry level, Mr. Comess’s employees work eight-hour shifts and earn $8.25 an hour, while his highest-paid factory workers earn about twice that wage.

And when Mr. Comess launched Tom Cat in 1987, with two employees in a 1,300-square-foot kitchen, he followed a regimen more suitable for an owl than a human. He worked from about 3 p.m. to 8 a.m.

Now, as Tom Cat’s 40,000-square-foot factory churns out tens of thousands of loaves a day, the bakery’s ovens run around-the-clock.

“It puts the ‘overnight’ into overnight success,” Mr. Comess said.