Slashdot Mirror
Sit Longer, Die Sooner
mcgrew writes "Bad news for most of us here — The Chicago Tribune is reporting that even if you get plenty of exercize, sitting down all day reduces your lifespan. From the article: 'Even after adjusting for body mass index (BMI) and smoking, the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die.
People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying. Those who sat a lot and moved less than three and a half hours per day are the most likely to die early: researchers found a 94 percent increased risk for women and 48 percent increase for men, they announced recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology.'"
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
You know... I'm pretty sure everyone is 100% likely to die...
I've been meaning to build a laptop platform for my treadmill for ages now ... this is the weekend I'm getting it done.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I had a good run, too much effort to get up and go outside.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
I think "exersize" is what you call someone who doesn't exercise. :)
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
If I start to add up all the things I do that make me more likely to die it gets depressing fast. In fact, I'm now so depressed all I have the energy to do is sit here and eat ice cream. God damn it.
Does that mean I now qualify for hazard pay??
not trying to be a smart ass, but the wording here looks like you either will or wont. we all are a 100% chance of dying sometime in the future, are we not?
outrun death!
Anybody want to join me in Death Race 3000?
This is so cool, I always thought that we all had 100% chance to die. Is there anyway to guarantee that I will make it into the 63% who are less likely to die?
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die
Wow. There is ANY percentage of people that are not likely to die?
I shall never sit again!
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours
ORLY?
I thought the two groups were equally certain to die...
....scientists have identified that people who live eventually die.
Nobody is less likely to die. Death and taxes, you know the saying.
"women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die."
standing around lets you live forever?
*sigh*
Well, I just bought myself an elliptical machine. I guess now I should buy a standing computer desk for work.
What if i exercise sitting down? I bounce my legs up and down like a drummer for most of the day. Does that count as not sitting?
Hell, i sit down at home. If my wife is sitting on top of me, does that also not count as sitting? or do we have to be
completely tantric about it to count?
I mean, i'm just trying to figure it all out here....
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
It's interesting that women who sit more than 6 hours are 37% more likely to die. I'm curious to know the absolute percentage of women who die versus the women who don't die. I heard the Virgin Mary didn't die (but went to heaven directly). I'd be curious to about other women who have similar advantages.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die.
There has got to be more context to this than the summary is letting on. I'm pretty sure that regardless you've got a 100% chance of dieing. It's gotta qualify how much sooner or something.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'll have to admit, I didn't RTFA, but a few things from the summary are amusing.
1) "37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours" Oh no! I'm more likely to die!!
I would say that they are equally likely to die - eventually.
Just curious, I mean - surely laying down is as natural as standing and if the statistics added up - I'd present it to the boss at work and ask him to order a bed in.
So, according to the summary there are percentages of people who will never die... WOW
Totally anecdotal; I haven't done a scientific study, but I have noticed that Buddhist monks, you know, that guys that sit perfectly still 8 hours a day 7 days a week, tend to live much, much longer than the average person. I think that is a bit of a hole in their study.
The article doesn't cover correlation vs. causation at all. Does anyone have a link to an abstract or similar?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Living = 100% likely hood to die.
What do they do the remaining 21 hours? Lie down?
So if a perfectly healthy person has a 100% chance of death, then sitting for more than 6 hours a day you have a 37% chance to die twice... this can only mean one thing: zombies!
Interesting that women are roughly twice as likely to become zombies compared to men.
This is why old people die, not because they are old, its because they sit down all the time!
Get up Grandma!
Leave a good looking corpse and/or zombie husk!
You'll live longer if you ignore every stupid news story that's trying to get your attention by claiming you're going to die or live, depending on the content of said article. Not convincing enough. Sitting should just cause some interesting bowel cancer or some other less boring outcome. I want my 45 seconds back for reading that summary!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
and for how long the research was conducted ? what was the sample size ? get a load of that : 'likely to die'. gee. no relevant cause of death, stuff that can happen due to anything ranging from genetic heritage to smoking or traffic accidents.
yeah.
Read radical news here
"the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die. People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying" So we're talking about a finite probability of immortality if I never sit? I'll never sit again!
A stationary target is much easier to hit by a falling piano, but walk around a bit, and you'll only lose a kidney from the flying wood splinters.
"exersize?" Really? Do you guys actually read what you type before posting?
valiant effort at humor ...
Read radical news here
"To squeeze in some more exercise at the office, try a few of these tips:
Given the astonishingly poor wording in the article, I would speculate that this list is pure unsubstantiated arbitrary touchy-feely bullshit. They sound pretty ridiculous.
So if I don't sit for 6 hours a day I have a chance to not die?
It's sad to me that with such strange and interesting news, everyone is making jokes about a missing word: "... die [sooner]...". No wonder I haven't had a good discussion with anyone lately. Though, at least I've had a few good laughs. Sigh.
I'm just wondering what the cause of increased mortality was. Was it the increased sitting, or some third factor that was also the cause of these people sitting more?
I sit on one of those exercise balls while programming. It keeps you moving and discourages slouching.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Doesn't really bother me. I'd still rather sit here and play computer games. This world seems to only get worse every decade anyway. Even if given the ability, I still would not want to live forever.
I'm 27 now, and I've always said I would rather die early before my body starts falling apart due to old age. I've been careful not to get married or any of that crap, so I don't have anyone else to worry about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_who_have_ever_lived
Estimates of "the total number of people who have ever lived" published in the 2000s range approximately from 100 to 115 billion (1 E11).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
The world population is the population of humans on the planet Earth. In 2009, the United Nations estimated the population to reach 7,000,000,000 in 2011;[1] current estimates by the United States Census Bureau put the population at 6,864,700,000.[2]
Math
7/100 or 7/115
it's really only an 93-94% mortality rate so far.. who knows what tomorrow will bring
I'm currently beating the odds......
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This whiffs strongly of someone who's scrambling to find something before the submission date, so grabs the first crackpot study she finds, throws in some butt-tightening exercises (do this or you'll DIE) and throws it at the editor...
Seriously, the numbers are all statistical, but with no context, they are (as some of you have pointed out) completely useless. 37% more likely to die than what? an 80 year old grandmother? Does sitting shorten the average lifespan by 37%? get serious.
To be fair, the fault may lie in the write-up rather than the actual study, but since she doesn't link to anything to back up her scribbles, one would have to be interested enough to dig through the ACS studies to find the original (if it's even public). Sorry, I am not that interested.
Smacks of junk science to me...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
really, mcgrew? really?
Well, not everyone has died yet, you know...
I, for one, hope that immortality will be one of medical science's accomplishments during my lifetime.
First off, here is a link to the abstract of the paper itself (if anyone could find a non-locked version, I'd be interested in reading).
Secondly, this study seems to have left out a lot of time from the day. Primarily, the study looks at humans who have spent greater than 6 hours per day sitting, or less than 3 hours per day sitting. What it doesn't do is discuss relevant times that were spent doing other things. For instance, suppose you sit right on the threshold. Suppose someone sits for 6 hours a day, but stands for three hours a day. I am pretty sure that still leaves 15 hours in that day. If we generously compensate for a 12 hour sleep period (far more than most folk I know), that still leaves 3 hours unaccounted for. I would assume those three hours were spent doing some combination of sitting and standing, and that the 6/3 hour marks are simply dividers as noted within the data. What I am curious about, though, is what exactly is the 'healthiest' method for spending your day. If I spend less than three hours a day sitting, that means I am spending 21 hours doing other stuff. If I sleep 12 hours, that means I get 9 hours of standing/physical activity. Have there been any studies done that discuss the health effects of 9 hours of straight standing/activity? I know that I've spent 10 hours doing hard manual labor before, and I can promise you that I did not feel healthy afterwards.
Also, is there any discussion or research being done regarding the best ways to break up these time intervals? Is it best to stand for three hours, sit for one, stand for three, sit for one, stand for three, and go to bed? Is it best to stand for 9 hours? Does it matter at all? For those of us spending 8 hours sitting at work, and possibly 1 to 2 hours commuting, that is a grand total of 9 to 10 hours a day of sitting. However, if we get up and bugger around for a 10 - 15 minute break every hour, that adds up to 150 minutes max, which is 2.5 hours. So now, if I take a 15 minute activity break every hour at work, I still am sitting more than 6 hours a day and standing less than three hours a day. So I am still screwed. And even more importantly, that kind of activity would probably show up on my review as damaging productivity. Can this be used as justification for insisting that my employer guarantees me more activity in my job, or perhaps more breaks?
This study certainly seems interesting from a relevancy point of view (despite the asinine way of presenting the results: chance of dying? come on that's ridiculous). However, there is almost no useful information that can be extracted from it that relates to the average office worker. In other words, what could I actually do to fix this other than changing jobs? From what I can tell, there is not a whole hell of a lot. All in all, it's an interesting study, but the results seem inescapably damning for modern work environments.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
As George Carlin said, "Eat well, stay fit, and die anyway."
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Quote from Carl, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
The article doesn't, but the abstract of the actual paper says all participants (53,440 men and 69,776 women) were disease free at enrollment and the followup period was 14 years. Moreover they adjusted for smoking, body mass index, and "other factors." Too bad the full paper is behind a paywall. However the case for causation looks quite strong.
The ones that get up every hour to step outside for a smoke that is. Now if they can just solve the cancer thing.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Sitting here in my safe office cubicle, I think I am a lot less likely to die right now than someone not sitting and out there in the world doing any number of dangerous things, like driving while texting!
FYI - similar information was reported in BusinessWeek a few months ago, referencing studies from as far back as 2005
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177071221162.htm
One approach to avoiding these problems is the treadmill desk. Around five years ago I had a leg injury that made sitting very painful - driving was torture - so I spent about a year standing in front a raised desk each work day. It took about a week to get used to it (the alternative being constant pain from sitting down probably helped to speed my acclimation). Once I had adjusted, I found standing just as comfortable as sitting. I expect that using a treadmill to simply walk at a very leisurely pace would be just as easy and I am planning to furnish my home office with one once the new house is built.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The reverse statement is sort of true as well:
The faster you move around, the more you approach the speed of light. As a result, everyone around you sees you aging slower and you can see them aging faster.
Your body however, will age just as fast as anybody else to you as the observer.
Time travel ftw!
You increase your risk of Ninja star attack.
Those who sat a lot and moved less than three and a half hours per day are the most likely to die early
Dying from what , exactly? They never specify, not even in the article. This is FUD .
Of course with reposts of reposts the story can get a little inaccurate...
So the most obvious difference is that they're talking about leisure time spent sitting.
Also, it seems that the correlation is by means of "everything else being equal" (which is ok by itself, but the reporting is screwing about that). It doesn't mean that people with regular physical activity but sitting a lot have a higher mortality rate than people with lesser physical activity but sitting less, only that for the same level of activity, people sitting more in their leisure time have a higher mortality rate.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Wow. There is ANY percentage of people that are not likely to die?
I shall never sit again!
A highlander ? But since there can be only one it's probably well within the error bars. Now that I think of it I didn't see him do much sitting either.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Everyone is 100% likely to die. To record, there are no immortal humans. And since there is no accurate way to predict when someone is going to die (without scheduling executions) no figures can possibly approach accuracy as the life span of one human has little to do with the life span of another human... at least in the same sense of one coin toss has no relation to the outcome of another coin toss.
More like a junk summary. The original research article is published in the American Journal of Epidemiology (2010) volume 172(4): 419-424. "Leisure Time Spent Sitting In Relation To Total Mortality In A Prospective Cohort of US Adults."
Note that its leisure time spent sitting, based on answers to the following question "During the past year, on an average day (not counting time spent at your job), how many hours per day did you spend sitting (watching television, reading, etc.)?"
Lifting food of any weight burns calories, technically.
I'd like to come to terms with my skepticism towards the study and feel motivated to be more active by these statistics. But, the math geek in me says a 117% chance is not possible while the stoner in me is wondering if this means I've already lived 17% longer than the universe intended me to, or if I will live 17% longer than I should. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, maybe saying I have a 100% chance of dying is far too pessimistic. In reality, 9 out of 9 people die, so I'm actually only at a 99.99% chance of dying.
But if I don't accumulate that extra 17% risk... yeah... yeah... I think as long as I sit for less than 6 hours a day, I've got a real shot at immortality.
In reality, they went out of chairs...
read the fucking article
From the article:
I hope you didn't mean that only people who have paid for access to the article have the privilege of joining the discussion. Did you mean something different? But I will grant that the abstract mentions deaths "during the 14-year follow-up".
Heh, this sentiment has been explored before in comic form.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1968#comic
Damn, I'm 117% likely to die. It's not fair!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They don't put warning labels on their products.
Or sue employers, who pay me to work in the sitting position.
Or sue entertainers, who force me to sit while I'm watching them
Damnit, why isn't anyone looking out for my health?
Sitting just hurts.
I'm young and in good health, so I haven't given much thought to the long term health implications of too much sitting. What I can anecdotally report is that the more time I spend in a chair, the worse I feel. The relationship is almost linear. Not coincidentally, the realization didn't dawn on me until after I graduated from college and began working full time. Before graduation, I spent a lot of time on my feet walking to and from class and to work, since I had the good fortune to have an internship within walking distance of my college campus. This was only eight months ago, but the change in my energy level is very discernible. I can only imagine how pronounced the effect would be when magnified over the course of many years.
But that's just the job. I imagine that for most of the Slashdot audience, sitting at work is often unavoidable, unless you can afford a nice walkstation setup. What about when you're not actually at your desk, though? Usually, you're still sitting, even if you're going somewhere.
The biggest sitting problem (for Americans, at least) outside of work is that our cities, our jobs, and even our recreation is not really intended for pedestrians. I love to walk, but many places and jobs are not pedestrian-friendly. I have so grown to loathe driving that my long term plans include moving to a city where it's easier to get places by walking or riding a bike, possibly for this reason alone. Currently I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, which I feel is one of the least walkable areas on the planet (though there are notable neighborhoods that provide exceptions). The metropolitan area has suffered badly from the urban sprawl blight, so if you're lucky enough to live with your romantic partner, chances are, at least one of you is going to have to deal with a commute. The course of my day starts off with a thirty minute drive, followed by sitting on my tush for the subsequent eight hours. Then I drive another forty-five minutes home. Unless I then drive to the nearest gym, which, due to the sprawl here, is likely to be more than six miles away, I'm pretty much stuck indoors again. Side note: a 117 degree heat index does not a happy human make. I have seen Texans drive to their mail box.
The economic forces that drive sprawl really kill the cores of cities and make life miserable for commuters. My partner is burgeoning traffic engineer, and he's taught me some of the things that walkability projects can do to improve life for both residents and businesses in a city. Suburban Nation is an excellent read on the subject. You can also check out Walkscore to see how your neighborhood ranks. It's pretty neat stuff, and I wish more people would care about this issue.
You realize you used the wrong comic, right? If you'd used xkcd you would instantly be modded up to +5 insightful.
I hate to skewer this research quite so comprehensively, but if I was about to die I would certainly want to have a little sit-down. Did they control for that?
Being trapped all day in a small grey box while click click clicking on things displayed on a smaller box has adverse health effects? But its so natural, what we evolved for. Not at all like being an animal in a cramped, sterile, never changing zoo environment, endlessly trying to find the door out that never appears.
If this is true I should have been dead years ago.
Long term standing creates a list of potential health issues as well (including increased risk for atherosclerosis) :
http://www.cwhn.ca/en/node/40808
The message is likely moderation in all things.
if you eventually die anyway.
I aim to live forever, or die trying.
Wow. There is ANY percentage of people that are not likely to die?
I think that it's the same percentage as there are women on slashdot.
... and then they built the supercollider.
That would have helped, but what really killed it was not making it a hyperlink. What do you expect me to do? Select the text, click Ctrl+C, followed by Ctrl+T, follwed by Ctrl+V, and then press enter? Some of us have shit to do!
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Yes, but how likely are you to die prematurely if you NEVER SIT AT ALL?!
Standing - The ultimate secret in attaining immortality....
Other than sitting, standing, walking, and laying down, I can't really think of what else to do. Given 12 hours sleep and 3 hours sitting, that still leaves me with 9 hours of whatever. I can't really imagine why I'd need to stand or walk for more than 4 hours... Maybe I'll just go and lie down some more. That's still ok, right?
When, as a kid, she'd call me in from playing for a "sit-down" dinner. Now I know I was right... She wanted me to "Eat, Sit and Die".
So that's why Elvis died!
Shoulda learned to stand and shit.
School kids and college kids would be dropping like flies. They sit a lot.
In older folks with medical issues sitting is a forced situation as death and infirmities tighten their grip. Yes, if you go in a nursing home it is hard to find many inmates that walk more than 30 minutes a day. Then again college students, in order to attend classes and do their studies, often sit more than ten hours a day.
One wonders if these studies took age and illness into consideration? As a matter of fact young folks smart enough to go to college are not involved in active military service and spend less time on motorcycles and scuba diving etc.. I'll bet that non college young folks suffer far greater death rates and those who do not go to college probably stand a lot more hours each day. After all ditch digging offers little sitting time.
the researchers found that women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours; for men, long-sitters were 17 percent more likely to die.
They are X percent more likely to die (in what time frame), (than who), (than what)? These statistics are meaningless. You are 90 percent more likely to be dumber after reading this / . submission.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
If I added up all the things I do that make me more likely to die, I should already be dead. Guess I'm beating the odds! Time to play the lottery.
Worst case scenario: If you are a middle-aged man who spends all of your leisure time loafing, your chances of dying increase by half. That sounds awful, but the fact is that the average American 40-year-old male has about two or three-tenths of one percent chance of dying within the next year from any cause. So your chances of dying this year if you have been laying around a lot would increase to nearly half of one percent, or about 200 to 1.
You are equally as likely to roll an honest 18 using 3d6.
If you've played D&D, you know how many rolls that can take.
By the time you hit your eighties, though, I'd recommend wearing out that walker...could be the difference between snake eyes and a coin flip.
I finally understand why my dad was always telling my mom to sit down.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
"I plan to live forever. So far, so good." -Woody Allen
It's what I do while sitting that reduces my lifespan. Hint: I sit down for my job.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Perhaps people would sit more often are more likely to die sooner because when they do participate in activity they go all out and overdo it. Like everyone here, I work in IT (big surprise). I usually take two weeks off during the summer to hang out at the family camp on a lake. It usually takes me a week to get acclimatized to swimming a couple of times every day (I really need to get a house with a pool, but I digress), running around playing with my nephews, etc. I also find that, because there are few flat surfaces around the camp, that my balance is strengthened. By the end of the two weeks I am back to being able to run through the woods without tripping and to jump from rock to rock at full speed along the shore.
I guess the point that I am trying to make is that people who sit a lot are usually in a bubble. When they do participate in activiities, they get in over their heads. I'm curious if the researchers looked at the cause of death for groups with higher rates. I'm thinking that there may be a larger percentage related to accidents for those sitting for a long time vs those that are more active.
I do think that there are so many variables over and above those discussed in the article that a closer look would be required before drawing any life changing conclusions.
David
i would like to see this study comparing people sitting indoors vs outdoors,maybe it has to do with ppl being locked up in a basement somewhere with poor air quality, lack of sunlight, etc
I hate to bust his bubble, but everyone has a 100% risk of dying. Think he left out some important details there. Pam http://www.corporatehealthlink.com/
Here: http://pressroom.cancer.org/index.php?s=43&item=257 Saving lives by helping people stay well, get well, find cures, & fight back Study Links More Time Spent Sitting to Higher Risk of Death Risk Found to Be Independent of Physical Activity Level A new study from American Cancer Society researchers finds it’s not just how much physical activity you get, but how much time you spend sitting that can affect your risk of death. Researchers say time spent sitting was independently associated with total mortality, regardless of physical activity level. They conclude that public health messages should promote both being physically active and reducing time spent sitting. The study appears early online in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Increasing obesity levels in the United States are widely predicted to have major public health consequences. A growing epidemic of overweight and obesity has been attributed in part to reduced overall physical activity. And while several studies support a link between sitting time and obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease risk factors (11, 16, 17), and unhealthy dietary patterns in children and adults (18–20), very few studies have examined time spent sitting in relation to total mortality (21–23). Thus, public health guidelines focus largely on increasing physical activity with little or no reference to reducing time spent sitting. To explore the association between sitting time and mortality, researchers led by Alpa Patel, Ph.D. analyzed survey responses from 123,216 individuals (53,440 men and 69,776 women) who had no history of cancer, heart attack, stroke, or emphysema/other lung disease enrolled in the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention II study in 1992. They examined the amount of time spent sitting and physical activity in relation to mortality between 1993 and 2006. They found that more leisure time spent sitting was associated with higher risk of mortality, particularly in women. Women who reported more than six hours per day of sitting were 37 percent more likely to die during the time period studied than those who sat fewer than 3 hours a day. Men who sat more than 6 hours a day were 18 percent more likely to die than those who sat fewer than 3 hours per day. The association remained virtually unchanged after adjusting for physical activity level. Associations were stronger for cardiovascular disease mortality than for cancer mortality. When combined with a lack of physical activity, the association was even stronger. Women and men who both sat more and were less physically were 94% and 48% more likely, respectively, to die compared with those who reported sitting the least and being most active. “Several factors could explain the positive association between time spent sitting and higher all-cause death rates,” said Dr. Patel. “Prolonged time spent sitting, independent of physical activity, has been shown to have important metabolic consequences, and may influence things like triglycerides, high density lipoprotein, cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose, resting blood pressure, and leptin, which are biomarkers of obesity and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases.” The authors conclude that “public health messages and guidelines should be refined to include reducing time spent sitting in addition to promoting physical activity. Because a sizeable fraction of the population spends much of their time sitting, it is beneficial to encourage sedentary individuals to stand up and walk around as well as to reach optimal levels of physical activity.” Article: “Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults.” Alpa V. Patel, Leslie Bernstein, Anusila Deka, Heather Spencer Feigelson, Peter T. Campbell, 5 Susan M. Gapstur, Graham A. Colditz, and Michael J. Thun. Am J Epid Published online July 22, 2010 (DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwq155)
How on earth can you sit for less than six hours a day if you have a desk job?
Does this study count laying down as sitting? I just don't get it. Where are all these people who spend 7 out of their 13 to 14 waking hours on their feet?
What were our bodies designed to do? I think it's pretty obvious. We're hunter-gatherers.
Step 1, get rid of mouse and keyboard. For the guys, large pointing device. Enter data by stabbing wall with it. For women, enter data by pulling things out of the floor.
In both cases, we don't sit. We stand and throw, or stand and squat or bend over.
Come on now. Forget the foozball table. I want to work in an office with spears and women bending over and pulling strings on the floor all day. It'll be healthy. Productive? Who cares. Women bending over and pulling strings on the floor all day...
Alallalalalal
I once rode a stationary bicycle for about 3 hours a day but I noticed I started getting a rash from
sitting in my own sweaty clothes, so I switched to a treadmill with a desktop. Now I'm having issues
with veins around my ankles and some minor joint pain. I'm looking at the culprit of over-aging
to be more an issue of gravitational stressors. When an infant is in a mother's womb, the amniotic fluid
equally balances the infant in a comfortable pressure-less environment; what if the babe never was birthed
from the womb and stayed in such an environment all the life? That should be explored more, because
perhaps the key to balancing the body's stress would be more to one of those space-training devices where
you are strapped into the middle of three rings and you use your liening to gyroscopically rotate your
body to any orientation contrary to gravity; this is better than living in zero-gravity because it lets
you simply change the gravitational pull to another region of your body whereas asstronaughts simply lose
all the benefits of gravity.
This relates to an old study where it was proven, sitting for long periods of time creates blood clots.
So after the said clot gets stuck in the cardiovascular system, people die.
Not to mention, weight-gain is somehow related to whichever regions of your body are under pressure; I know
some people get more of their heavy-metal deposits on their ass when they are known to sit longer.
"Quit slobbering on me you old fossil" -Soon Yi
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...apparently just live forever. Likewise for men.
Here is the original report: Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults
Such large sample sizes scare me. When you've got 100,000 data points, almost anything seems statistically significant.
Having a look at the abstract of the page "Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults", I am not sure about some of this... After reading that, I got more interested in it and just got the original article, though that doesn't help much, it's missing a lot of summary data, none the less...
Additionally I would really need to get into their statistical method more, and get their original data, as it looks like there could be many more problems.
I would take this study, with a fuck load of salt.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"Statistics show that 90% of statistics are statisticaly wrong" Quoting someone who i cant remember who...
...build a standing desk: http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/03/28/how-to-build-a-standing-desk/
"I wasn't kissing her, I was whispering in her mouth." ~ Chico Marx
The question is if sitting causes problems or a sedentary positiin in general. Sitting is not natural while standing, walking and lying is (esp. when sleeping)
I sit at work then used to come home and sit, it sucked, I was beginning to feel crap.. So built a treadmill workstation at home...I wish I had done this years ago.
Bought a second hand tread mill from ebay, used a lifefitness st55 put a shelf behind it to hold the PC and monitors and a simple shelf across the handles for keyboard.
Typing gets a bit jittery over 5kph on a 4% incline but below that its fine. You get a reasonable amount of exercise or even a good workout and still do all the stuff you would have otherwise done sitting down.
Really if you have been thinking about doing this just do it...
Now I just have to persuade them to let me have one at work.
Rarely has the geek factor at Slashdot been so painfully evident. No matter how relevant the topic, a superficial stupidity in the summary text reduces this place to a tribe of impulse-challenged baboons trading shallow bon mots like a feces fight.
Quoted at Stress : The Frontal Cortex:
Troglodytes in the high art of back-stabbing, as Sapolsky humorously demonstrates with his own poison pen:
Bezos' grandfather had something useful to say about cleverness at the expense of what matters:
Bezos at Princeton
Almost every society mentioned in Buettner's study of longevity move around a lot:
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+
Here we are hunched over our keyboards having a feces fight about the semantics of immortality rather than thinking about major life choices. If a computer programmer's office chair was a protein complex, there would be a conjugate protein that binds the chair and expired occupant into a handy burial pod that can be rolled (rather than wheeled) out of the room.
With rare exceptions, you don't see death sitting down on the job all that often. Here's another obligatory Ted link:
Challenging Death
I had completely forgotten the cape wipe. Nice touch in the editing room.
This sad display leaves me contemplating an update to the video tombstone memorial from Atom Egoyan's "Speaking Parts" with the text of "last post" and "last tweet" added automatically to the rolling feed by the web-scrapers of omniscience. Even St Peter has an iPad these days to assist in the great summing up.
Can't wait to tell my wife - "You know, they found out sitting down all day makes you die sooner - I think I'll lie down for the rest of the day".
No, seriously (or rather a bit more serious, but not really), life is lethal. Nobody has ever survived life. Think about it...
If this is true, I must have a severe risk of dying. I sit around twelve hours a day, or so. Damn!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
There is, but it is a very very low percentage since "there can be only one".
It's incredible. If we look at the people who lived 200 years ago we find that all of them are dead. That means we have gone from a 100% mortality rate to only 93% in just 200 years. At this rate future generations will surely be immortal.
But now it's confirmed.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It is very unlikely that you would die by being sitted.
On the other hand if you are moving, there's much chances that something could happen to you like being run by a car or something similar
So I prefer to sit longer cause it's safer
good info friends! thanks 4 sharing! :) :D ^^ :P
Holy Crap! Who comes up with these estimates anyway? I mean, that's a swing of 114,999,999,900!!
Wonder what the odds are that the true number lies somewhere outside that range? ;-p
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
How else am I supposed to pee? And u say this will add to my sitting-down time? Rubbish, women outlive men anyway.
Let's all just sit here all day. We're gonna die anyway, so we might as well abuse it. Don't feel like living? Just sit here and play NetHack!
I just double-click on it. It works because I have Linkification installed.
"People who exercise regularly had a lower risk, but still significant, risk of dying"
I think the writer got scared about being sitting for so long and decided to write in a fucking hurry(to get out walking and standing asap)! Isn't the "Preview->Read-What-You-Have-Written->???->Profit" policy enforced for this guys?!
Or was he so emphatic on the "risk" itself that he decided to use that word way more then necessary!?
the more obese or otherwise unhealthy you already are, the more likely you'll sit as often and as long as possible.
women who sit more than 6 hours a day were 37 percent more likely to die than those who sit less than 3 hours;
"John, you bastard! I caught you sleeping with the women down the street! I saw you to together!"
"No honey! Its not what you think! Did you notice she was on her back? You see, she sits for long periods of time every day. Because I was exercising her, on her back without her sitting, I was saving her live, one stroke at a time."
"Oh John, why did I doubt you? You're so considerate and giving. Always thinking of others. You finally found a way to make your restless penis syndrome beneficial to others. Now come here and save me life!"
We are all at a 100% chance of dying, a simple fact of life.
Is it killing me or protecting me?
I agree, also there is something strange that happens to the body in this position, over the years of sitting in that way, not only does the bumb shape change and get more broad to flatten out over a wider area, as when you leave a balloon sitting in a corner, it does not keep its round shape, but also a curvature of the spine happens in such a way that matches the molding of the chair, fitting the form exactly, so that when you stand up, you still look like you are sitting down (recliners especially)....I have started to get up more often to move around for any excuses to get out of this habit...but we are limited as to how much of this we can do when we are supposed to be actively working away at our desk.
Look, your heart beats x amount of beats in a lifetime. The number is fixed but unknown. Increasing one's heart rate only lessens the time to that last heart beat, so we should work to SLOW our heart rate and not increase it....
That's it, no more sleeping for me! If sitting down is this disastrous, imagine how evil lying down is...
The New York Times had a good article about this very same subject back in January. Its title was: Too Much Sitting Shortens Lives, Study Suggests. This was done using a study of 8,800 adults for a period of six years. The risks were a lot lower in that study though.
In my opinion, more research is needed. Also, the other side of the argument has to be studied. How does remaining on your feet for 6 hours or more affect your health? I used to teach back in 2004 and it sometimes required me to stand for long periods of time lecturing. After a long day standing, pains all over your body start to surface. One of my coworkers developed back pains that needed surgery. My wife's work right now requires her to be on her feet for long periods of time. She was complaining of knee pains last weekend to the point that she was having trouble walking. Anything in excess if bad.
Man I am glad I was sitting down when I read this! Sheesh...
If it isn't broke, tinker with it till it is!
This news just in... reading too many studies in the "American Journal of Epidemiology" will give you stress and kill you.
Michael Coyne
http://turthalion.blogspot.com
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I'm pretty sure the true number doesn't lie *below* the range.
The tell that to Vladimir Horowitz and basically dozens of other classical pianists who spent most of their lives sleeping or sitting down and died on their 80s and 90s.
Fuckin' phony research for the sake of giving out paychecks to mediocre 'scientists'.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I haven't died.
You're not fooling anyone, you know.
It seems that whatever you do, you will end up dead anyway. In the immortal words of the great 'Fight Club' fighter Jack: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
http://nyewin.org http://nyexug.com http://nycsqlusergroup.com http://nylug.org
However, if you look back at the history of the numbers, it is converging to 100% at infinity. You may be beating the odds now, but the longer you live, the more likely you are to die.
If I have learned anything from television, it's that Drew Carey will be the first victim of sitting-around-doing-nothing related death.