Sitting Down Too Long Is Bad Even If You Exercise

Ant tips the week-old news that sitting down too much is not good for you, even if you are otherwise fit. A blog at the LA Times reports a followup from Swedish exercise experts: they propose "establishing a new way of thinking about sedentary behavior. They suggest abolishing 'sedentary behavior' as a synonym for not exercising. Instead, sedentary time should be defined as 'muscular inactivity' to distinguish it from not doing any exercise at all." These experts warn that the excessively sedentary are running serious health risks, irrespective of how much exercise they get when they're not plonked behind a desk or lying on a sofa.

Comments

junk science

[bcrowell]

If you take a look at the paper, which is online and not paywalled, it's obvious junk science. They claim a correlation between mortality and sitting, and the abstract states that the variables they controlled for were "age, sex, waist circumference, and exercise." Well, watching eight hours a day of TV is probably negatively correlated with a lot of other variables, including general health, education, income, intelligence, and employment. And I would guess that mortality is probably also strongly negatively correlated with general health (duh), education, income, intelligence, and employment. On the second page of the paper, they say that they surveyed the participants for "demographic attributes" including education, but note that education is *not* listed in the abstract as one of the variables they controlled for. Look at table 1, and they show a clear anticorrelation between education and television viewing. On p. 387 they talk about how they tried to minimize the effect of the anticorrelations involving general health, but their method is pretty crude.