Slashdot Mirror
Regular Exercise Not Enough To Make Up For Sitting All Day
An anonymous reader writes: Toronto researchers have found the amount of time a person sits during the day is associated with a higher risk of disease and death, regardless of regular exercise. The paper, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine (abstract), found that prolonged sedentary behavior was associated with a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of death from any cause; a 15 to 20 per cent higher risk of heart disease, death from heart disease, cancer, death from cancer; and as much as a 90 per cent increased risk of developing diabetes, said Alter. And that was after adjusting for the effects of regular exercise. ... Engaging in 30 to 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous daily exercise does not mean it's OK to then "sit on your rear" for the rest of the day.
If you expend less energy it needs to match down consumption too. Americans are so fat because they are used to eating more. You would never see a restaurant like Bucca Di Peppo in Europe. As an American just saying.
A sandwich is or small salad with no sugary soda is what people who are skinny and in Europe eat for lunch. No fries supersized, coffee with sugar, or a Coke on a daily basis.
http://saveie6.com/
You could mitigate the damage by taking small walking breaks while in work. Go to the gym couple times of week. Use a standing desk at home: the Ikea Björkudden is a relatively cheap option at $99.
You seem to have a very utopian idea of Europe. Don't worry, Europe is generally some ten years behind contemporary developments in the States but we are quickly catching up especially in rising obesity and directly linked diseases. The massive portion sizes in the States have not always been this huge and gradually grew. There are enough restaurants over here already offering ridiculously massive portions or all-you-can-eat buffets and they make it their main selling point. Oversize clothes stores can be found everywhere as well.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Take a 5 minute walk every hour if you can.
If you have standard cubes you could see about having the desk surfaces mounted at standing desk height. Then all you need is an adjustable chair/stool. You might be able to either arrange that outright, or for a future (and probably inevitable) move as companies are fond of swapping people around.
If you have any health issues or concerns you might talk to your doctor to see if a standing desk would help, and if so get a note. A company that wouldn't do it based on preference might be more inclined to accommodate it to address a health issue. (Of course it is better to avoid the issue to begin with.)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Actually it doesn't. What the article is trying to say is that exercise will not counteract the effect of prolonged sitting. The problem with that assertion is, it's not proven. The article simple correlates health outcomes with people who exercise and have prolonged sitting, through meta analysis.. Nothing more. IT DOES NOT PROVE CAUSATION. Therein lies the problem. Even the correlation is somewhat weak since it was not a single experiment designed to observe those outcomes but rather base those conclusions on other research.
So there is no proof here. But it does highlight an area for future research.
Only if you do your part: Regular expressions at least twice a day!
Delaying it is not going to make it any better or worse.
True enough. For death itself.
The thing to really fear is if sitting on your butt all the time increases the risk that you won't be able to enjoy sex for the last 10 years of your life because you'll be too sick to complete the sex act. Even when making love all by yourself. You won't have the heart for it any more. In a very literal way.
That's the true message here. Not that death will take the indolent sooner, but that if you develop one of the sedentary diseases, you will not be able to have much fun in the last, lingering, decades of your life.
Get off your keister and move around a bit. We've got the technology... take your coffee and lunch breaks with a walk with an audio book. Replace your computer desk with a treadmill equiped with a keyboard. Move your butt!
That might be a good rallying cry for all geeks: Move your butt.
Will
Do you know of any articles that back up your claim?
Read this brief on the perils of both sitting and standing, and then check the references at the bottom. Notably, standing all day leads to varicose veins and puts a strain on your circulatory system.
Just generally, the factory production line taught us long ago that holding the same pose or making the same motions all day long will have chronic repercussions. (If you ever have to work an assembly line, hope it's in a factory that practices job rotation so your tasks are varied over time.)
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction