And couple the chair or sofa with TV, or work on the computer or telephone, for just a half dozen hours per day, and you have the long term equivalent of cyanide.
Employers should offer hazard pay for those who are sitting down a lot. It's more dangerous than working as a utility lineman, for example. What do you say? Double time for those who sit down at the job more than four hours a day? Tell your boss.
I was first alerted to "sitting disease" by an article in Bicycling Magazine by Selene Yeager like this one: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/sedentary-lifestyle-hazards
Enough of my rant. There's a NY Times mag article updating research in the area at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html
Some choice quotes with my own emphasis and comments added in:
'The conventional wisdom... is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. ... [This is the scariest part. We always tell ourselves that we can reform, change our evil ways, and undo the damage. These scientists are saying that we can't even go to the gym every couple of days and undo the damage of sitting. Maybe we can't even take a walk after work and undo the damage.]
'This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall. ... [In a word, instant metabolic syndrome. Ye ever helpful editor.]
'Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives. ... [And we wonder how it is that retirement kills...]
'“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”'
Did you read all that? Odds are, you're gonna die an hour sooner because you sat there and read it. If the sitting don't kill you, the worry will.
Wreck a chair, save a life.
If a super-sedentary office worker goes out and walks a mile during morning coffee break, walks another mile at noon, another in the afternoon, then nother after work, can't they offset the damage? Surely that can.
ReplyDeleteBut how many of us do that?
Also. Back in the late 1950s-early 1960s, there was an article in Reader's Digest about exercising at your desk. There is so much we can do while talking on the phone, for example. Tense muscles, do kegels, flex arm, leg and shoulder muscles. You can even do crunches against your desktop. Out of the chair and leaning against the desk, you can do push-ups.
Problem is, some regimented or extremely busy office workers can't even do these except on break.
I was reading the other day about chair designs that couple sitting with exercise. One for example is like sitting on a big bosu ball, making you constantly adjust to balance yourself. How practical is that? Not very, since it is so tiresome. Other chairs have bands attached for arm exercises--which misses the point, that when you sit still, the whole lower body goes into hibernation.
ReplyDeleteSimplest remedy is to move and flex your legs constantly while sitting "Still." When I work on the computer I jump up to do other things a lot, so much that my productivity suffers. That probably keeps me from suffering from "sitting disease."
Surely it is enough to not let your legs go dead for hours at a time by moving them around a little as you work.